Estuary of Memory

The image should make the viewer feel the ache of looking backward through decades — not grief, but the tender bruise of realizing how much time has passed since one was small and the world was enormous. Whistler's Tonalist riverscapes — his Nocturnes along the Thames — inform this direction: paintings where atmosphere swallows detail, where the world dissolves into mood and memory rather than fact. The viewer should feel they are seeing not a place but the memory of a place, soft at the edges, more felt than seen, with the same musical quality Whistler sought when he titled paintings like symphonies.