Reflections in Time: The River Remembers

Claude Monet’s  Floating Ice (1880), painted during a bitter winter in Vétheuil, captures the delicate balance between stillness and motion, where ice drifts slowly along the Seine, reflecting the pale winter sky. Monet was fascinated by how light transformed water, how the river became a mirror of the sky, and how fleeting moments of transition—between seasons, between solid and liquid, between past and present—could be preserved through paint. His brushstrokes rendered the ice not as something rigid but as something dissolving, in flux, caught in the river’s quiet yet unstoppable current. 

This landscape collage expands upon Monet’s vision, taking the frozen river beyond the confines of time and into an abstract dimension where memory and reality blur. The familiar Impressionist river remains, its icy surface still reflecting the skeletal trees of winter, but now, it is fractured—warped through a circular lens that bends the landscape into something surreal, something fragmented yet whole. 

At the heart of the composition is a glowing sphere—a translucent portal where the scene is both magnified and distorted. A figure peers through it, caught between perspectives, observing the river not as it is, but as it was, as it could be, as it exists in the mind’s eye. This sphere is not just a window—it is a memory, a moment encapsulated, like ice trapping the past beneath its frozen surface. It bends light, bends space, and bends time, creating a dual reality where Monet’s world meets something more fluid, more uncertain. 

The right side of the image dissolves into a wash of blue and teal, as if the ice is no longer bound to water but suspended in air, becoming something ethereal, something intangible. The trees, half-dissolved into mist, seem to extend into infinity, their reflections stretching beyond the river’s edge, suggesting that the boundary between reality and memory is never quite clear. The land, solid and certain on the left, gives way to abstraction on the right, mirroring the way time erodes the sharpness of what we remember, blending details into emotions, into impressions. 

Color plays a central role in this transformation. Monet’s cool winter palette remains, but it is infused with modern luminescence—a soft electric glow that radiates from the sphere, as if history itself is illuminated from within. The blues are deeper, more surreal, while golden tones emerge faintly, like warmth trying to break through the cold. The ice, no longer merely reflecting the sky, now reflects something unseen—something beneath the surface, something waiting to be uncovered. 

As an artist, my intention with this piece was to explore the nature of reflection—not just in water, but in time, in memory, in the way we perceive the past. Monet painted  Floating Ice as a study of change, of the river’s quiet transformation as winter began to loosen its grip. Here, that transformation becomes something larger, something cosmic. What if the ice does not simply drift, but carries with it echoes of everything it has seen? What if the river remembers? 

The sphere, the portal within the landscape, represents that question. It is both a lens and a container, holding within it the past, bending it, reframing it, asking us to see the familiar in new ways. The figure within it is an observer, perhaps Monet himself, or perhaps us—the viewer—trapped in the act of looking, trying to make sense of what is frozen in time and what is slipping away. 

This artwork is not just about a winter river; it is about the nature of impermanence. Ice melts, water flows, time moves forward. But within those fleeting moments, something remains—a reflection on the surface, a glimmer of what once was, a frozen instant that, if we look closely enough, might reveal more than just the past. 

Through this landscape collage, I wanted to capture that paradox—the way things both disappear and remain, the way a single river can hold an entire history within its quiet currents. Monet’s ice drifts forward, but the reflections linger, waiting for those who dare to look beyond the surface.