The Monet Experience
The Thinking
I love these paintings, and I noticed something that bothered me. The work rewards slow looking, and the way we usually meet it is quick. You glance, you read the label, you move to the next room. The paintings are patient. We are not.
Seen in sequence, a body of work becomes something more than a collection of artwork, it turns into a record of a life unfolding over years. But that arc is almost impossible to catch, because the paintings hang as separate stills in separate cities. So I set myself a goal: give the work back its slow time, using a medium built for speed.
The Structure
Three chapters.
Three ways to experience.
Each arc has a distinct interaction, designed to match how the story needs to be told. There is no single right way to relate to a body of work like this. The reason I built it in three modes, witness, discover, judge, is because I think those are actually the three ways anyone learns to love a painting. You sit with it. You find out where it came from. And eventually, you have an opinion about it.
Chapter 01 · Witness
See how the pond changed
Monet painted the same pond from 1897 until he died in 1926. This chapter follows those three decades through ten paintings. Each canvas holds a different moment of his life. His wife died. His eyesight failed. The war came close. You can read all of it in the brushwork once you can see the paintings in sequence.
So I made them move. The chapter is a vertical timeline, and each painting dissolves into the next as you scroll. The controls stay minimal on purpose. The change between canvases is the content. Nothing else competes with it.
How the morph actually works
The rule: AI fills the gaps, never fakes a Monet
The image morphs between ten real paintings, and the label on the right gives each one its moment, title, date, and what was happening when Monet painted it.
Chapter 02 · Discover
When Japan opened to the West in the 1850s, woodblock prints flooded into Paris. Monet collected 231 of them. The flat planes, the cropped views, the close-up water surfaces, all of it shows up in the water lilies. Most visitors never know that connection exists.
So I turned it into something you uncover. Pink lilies hide in the pond, flanked by prints from Monet's own collection. You find each one, and each reveals a specific technique he borrowed and the painting it shaped. A fact you uncover stays with you. A fact you are handed slides off.
Chapter 03 · Judge
Decide what he started
In 1957 the critic Clement Greenberg argued that late Monet pointed straight at American painters like Pollock and Rothko. People have been arguing about it ever since. Some historians agree. Others say critics built that story decades later to make the timeline neat.
So I put the works side by side and let you referee. Monet's pond sits at the center. 20th-century paintings orbit it. I graded every connection honestly, some artists said it themselves, some is documented through archives, some is only critics drawing the line after the fact. You get the evidence and how strong it is, then you decide.
I designed this in Figma, and I also built the working version on React. Vercel hosts it. The morph in Chapter 1 plays back frames an AI video model generated in advance, rendered out with Claude Code so the sequence is smooth and instant rather than computed on the fly.
Building it changed the design. I could feel when a transition ran a half-beat too slow, when a reveal needed more forgiveness, when a hover state did nothing. The loop between a decision and the test of whether it felt right shrank to minutes. Doing the design and the build myself meant the interaction ideas and the code never drifted apart.
What's Next
I built a working prototype and presented it to teams at MoMA, including Digital Product Design. The response was strong. The next step is putting it in front of real visitors.
I would test it with the two ends of MoMA's audience. Casual visitors first, since they are the ones who normally glance and move on. Art enthusiasts second. I am looking for one signal above all others: does anyone slow down?
Do casual visitors finish all three chapters, or drop after the first? Does the discover mechanic in Chapter 2 read as a game or as a chore? Does Chapter 3 actually leave people with an opinion, or does the open ending frustrate them? I would be curious to learn these from the user testing.
What I'd take to the next role
