Visiting Monet’s Water Lilies in Paris: How It Inspired My Painting “A Soft Place to Land”
Updated: Sep 26
How Claude Monet’s water lilies inspired my painting and a journey back to inner peace
There are places we don’t simply visit once. We return to them across years, across versions of ourselves, as if something in us keeps remembering.
For me, the world of Claude Monet is one of those places. His home in Giverny, l'Orangerie in Paris and the Marmottan Monet museum that holds its largest collection in the world.
After six years of painting, I found myself returning again to his Nymphéas in Paris, first in the summer of 2025 at the Musée de l'Orangerie with a friend, and then in April 2026 at the Musée Marmottan Monet. These two visits became a turning point in my artistic journey, deeply influencing my painting A Soft Place to Land.
Returning to Monet’s Nymphéas at Musée de l’Orangerie (Summer 2025)
In the summer of 2025, I returned to Paris and stepped once again into the immersive oval rooms of the Nymphéas at the Musée de l’Orangerie.
This time, I wasn’t the same person who had first encountered Monet’s water lilies years before. I had been painting for six years. I understood oil paint differently. But seeing the nympheas up close again, I saw how amazing Claude Monet used the colors how it blends perfectly... a true inspiration.
I also experienced again how seeing Original art can have a huge impact on our well being, our inner peace. It encourages me even more to keep painting and bring beauty to this world. We need it so much, you and me.
A Solo Return to Musée Marmottan Monet (April 2026)
In April 2026, I returned to Paris alone to visit the Musée Marmottan Monet. The experience was completely different.
Standing in front of Monet’s works in silence felt like entering a deeper layer of memory, one that is not only about art history, but about personal history.
I found myself thinking about my childhood visits to Monet’s gardens in Normandy, my return in 2020 as an adult, and now this new chapter of revisiting his world through the lens of my own artistic path.
It felt like time folding in on itself.
As if Monet’s paintings were not something I was looking at, but something I was returning to within myself.
How Monet’s Water Lilies Inspired “A Soft Place to Land”
These experiences became the emotional foundation of my painting A Soft Place to Land.
This artwork is inspired by Monet’s Nymphéas, featuring a soft water landscape, a bridge crossing the composition, and at the very top, a small reference to Monet’s home in Argenteuil.
A threshold between memory and healing. Between what has been carried and what is ready to be released.
A quiet tribute to Monet, to his gardens, but also a return to the self. To our emotions, our dreams ...
“Inner peace comes when you release what was never yours to hold.”— Naïma
I created A Soft Place to Land while reflecting on my visits to Claude Monet’s house, and on my own childhood in Normandy. I thought about how deeply healing it has always been for me to be in nature...walking through gardens and meadows, sitting by a lake, watching the sky soften as it reflects on the water.
In those moments, I remembered my dream of becoming an artist, but also the struggles that shaped my path.
Nature has always felt like a doorway for me, a place where I can return to myself, feel safe again, and be accepted exactly as I am. It reminds me that we are not separate from it. We belong to it, and in many ways, it is what gently brings us back to life.
The time spent in Giverny ans Monet's home reawakened something in me. Not really nostalgia, but recognition.
A remembering of the dreams I carried in childhood, and this gently understanding that those dreams never disappeared...they were simply waiting to be lived...
This painting became a space of emotional release. A soft place where the mind can exhale.
An Invitation to Pause, Heal, and Return to Yourself
With A Soft Place to Land, I wanted to create more than a landscape painting. I wanted to create a feeling. A doorway into stillness.
An invitation to pause long enough to hear yourself again.
A gentle reminder that healing is not about becoming someone new, but about making space for who you already are.
Because sometimes, what we are truly searching for is not outside of us…but a place inside us where we finally feel safe to land.
Thank you for reading.
Naïma
Stay Wild! Naïma
About the Artist
Naima Namaste is a French contemporary artist whose original paintings explore the profound relationship between women, nature and the wild. Inspired by symbolism, intuition and the beauty of the natural world, she creates soulful, collectible artworks that invite moments of reflection, connection and wonder. Every painting is created by hand in her atelier in the south of France.
