The painting depicts the Normandy coast, where Monet supposedly spent his childhood. I selected this piece because I was immediately drawn to the symmetry between the sky and water. It’s divided almost exactly in half by the horizon, and Monet uses similar colors and brush strokes to create parallel textures so that the sea echoes the sky. 

- He captures the motion of both sea and sky, thus portraying the fleeting and ever changing quality of nature in time.

- He also demonstrates the vastness of physical space through the expansiveness of the water and sky and how they seem to stretch forever before meeting at the horizon.

- Monet also shows the various states of the sea. He uses different brush strokes, colors, and thickness of paint to capture the water as it sits in the body of the ocean, as the wave breaks, and as the current flows back. In doing so, he demonstrates the transient nature of different states and the inevitable shift between them.