Reflections of Stillness: The Inversion of Time

Claude Monet’s  Church at Jeufosse, Snowy Weather (1893) is a quiet yet powerful study of winter’s hush—a landscape veiled in cold light, where nature and architecture merge into a soft, impressionistic stillness. The original work captures the essence of a rural French village blanketed in snow, its church steeple rising solemnly against the muted sky. Monet’s brushwork, expressive yet restrained, transforms the ordinary into the ethereal, making the viewer feel the weight of silence that snowfall brings. 

This conceptual reinterpretation dismantles and reconfigures that tranquility, turning it into a surreal meditation on duality, transformation, and the instability of perception. The serene, snow-covered village above is mirrored below—but not as a perfect reflection. Instead, the world beneath the surface is crisp, artificial, almost clinical in its minimalism. The church, inverted and pristine, contrasts starkly with the textured impressionism of Monet’s scene, as if the past and present are colliding, their realities overlapping in an uneasy balance. 

The most striking divergence from the original is the presence of water—splashing, chaotic, alive. In Monet’s work, snow softens the landscape, muffling sound and movement. Here, water becomes a force of disruption, subverting the calm with dynamic motion. Fish, half-emerged from the liquid threshold, seem caught between two worlds—symbolizing a state of flux, a struggle between stability and change. Their presence hints at a deeper narrative: a world where nature and civilization no longer exist in harmony, where what was once solid is now fragile, sinking, unstable. 

The inverted church, its spire descending rather than reaching skyward, is a statement in itself. It represents the duality of faith and uncertainty, of permanence and impermanence. Churches are meant to be anchors in a landscape—symbols of endurance, of something that remains unchanged through time. But here, that stability is questioned. Is the church drowning? Or is it being reborn, re-emerging into a different era, a different existence? 

Color plays an essential role in reinforcing this contrast. Monet’s palette of cool grays, muted blues, and soft whites reflects the subdued light of winter—an impressionist’s translation of cold air and distant sky. The lower half of the composition, in contrast, is stark and minimal, dominated by a modernist white that feels almost unnatural in its precision. This deliberate separation of textures and tones creates a dissonance—an unsettling feeling that something about this world is not as it should be. 

As an artist, my intention with this reinterpretation was to explore the fragile boundary between past and present, between tradition and transformation. Monet painted the world as he saw it—fleeting, always changing, but still rooted in a quiet sense of place. In contrast, this artwork questions whether that sense of place can still exist in a world increasingly defined by artificiality, by displacement, by the breaking down of natural cycles. 

The water, dynamic and unpredictable, symbolizes disruption—climate change, industrialization, the loss of the landscapes that Monet once immortalized. The fish, their bodies arching above and below the dividing line, represent life caught in transition, creatures of both water and air, unable to exist fully in either. They are metaphors for our own displacement, for the way history is rewritten, landscapes reshaped, meaning altered over time. 

The mirrored church is not simply an aesthetic choice—it is a commentary on memory, on how we reconstruct the past in ways that suit the present. Is this a reflection, or an illusion? Is history truly mirrored, or have we distorted it beyond recognition? By inverting the structure, the artwork forces the viewer to reconsider the role of permanence in an impermanent world. 

In the end,  Reflections of Stillness is not about winter, nor is it about a church in Jeufosse. It is about time—about the way we stand between what was and what will be, about how the world beneath us is shifting, whether we acknowledge it or not. The quiet, impressionistic snowfall of Monet’s time has given way to the turbulence of an uncertain present. The question remains: what will rise, and what will sink?