Frozen Reverie: The Memory of Ice

Claude Monet’s  Houses in the Snow (1895) is a meditation on winter’s hush, a world suspended in cold light where time slows beneath layers of frost. In the original work, Monet painted a landscape softened by snow, where houses nestled into their surroundings as if cradled by the season itself. The painting was not just about winter but about the way light refracts through the cold, turning the ordinary into something ethereal, something untouchable yet deeply felt.  

This surreal reinterpretation stretches that vision further, reimagining the snowy landscape as something more monumental, more impossible—a frozen world where reality fractures like ice, reflecting pieces of different times and places. The humble houses Monet once painted remain, but they are now perched upon the edges of massive ice formations, suspended over a sea of mirrors. Their warmth is distant, fragile against the towering presence of icebergs that rise like cathedrals, their forms both sheltering and consuming.  

A colossal ice arch dominates the composition, its translucent walls shimmering with light that feels neither solid nor fluid, but something in between. Within its frozen corridors, a sailboat drifts—its red sails catching a wind that does not seem to exist. The vessel is impossibly placed, gliding through an ice-locked passage, a traveler between worlds. Its reflection is imperfect, distorted, as if time itself is bending within the ice.  

The landscape is not a single place but a collection of impressions, shifting between stillness and movement. Icebergs fracture and reform, their crystalline edges glowing with the soft iridescence of twilight. Mountains rise in the distance, their peaks touched with light that seems to come from within rather than from above. The sky, painted in a dreamlike gradient of blush pinks and pale blues, offers no clear source of illumination, as if this world is lit by memory rather than by the sun.  

Color plays an essential role in defining the emotional depth of this piece. Monet’s original palette of cool blues and muted whites has been transformed into something more spectral—shimmering pastels that evoke the unreality of a place that exists on the edge of consciousness. The warm red of the sailboat is the only break from this frozen reverie, a reminder that movement, life, and warmth can still exist even in a landscape dominated by ice.  

As an artist, my intention with this piece was to explore the fragility of memory, the way places can exist both as they are and as they are remembered. Monet painted snow-covered houses that belonged to a real landscape, yet here they have been transported to a place that feels more like a dream. The ice, massive and sculptural, represents the weight of time—frozen, layered, impossible to fully comprehend. The sailboat is the traveler, the dreamer, the part of us that moves through memories, searching for passage even when the way forward seems impossible.  

The reflection beneath the ice is more than a simple mirror—it is a distortion, a reminder that what we see is never quite what is. The houses, the boat, the icebergs all shift when viewed through the water’s surface, becoming something other than what they are. This is the essence of memory itself—never fixed, always shifting, shaped by light, time, and perception.  

This piece is not just about winter; it is about the way we inhabit landscapes in our minds, how places transform with the passage of time. The snow-covered houses remain, but they are no longer part of a simple countryside—they are relics of something larger, something suspended in the vast, frozen echoes of time.