I have always loved Monet’s lyrical and luscious waterlily paintings. I would spend hours as a teenager sitting in the Water Lilies room at the “old” MoMA in New York basking in the sublime beauty of its three long enveloping panels in the room that was dedicated just to it.

When I was researching the microscopic sea dwellers phytoplankton (whose fossils become the raw material for crude oil) for the series Crude which traces the natural history of oil from its chemical inception in nebulae to its modern extraction from the earth, I was struck by how their forms reminded me so much of those paintings. Simple shapes based on phytoplankton structures became the base imagery of this work and it seemed only fitting to relate the micro water creatures and the macro water lilies, so I recasted Monet’s Water Lily paintings as the compositional and chromic structures in the Crude paintings and drawings.

Not only linked by their aquatic nature and their basic forms, historically Monet’s Water Lily paintings were created at the moment when due to technological advancements in WW1 oil was about to explode in usage in a way that has defined our relationship to it over the last hundred years. As we near the transition to a new age of energy, looking back to the start of that journey seemed a fitting bookend.

Kysa Johnson, November 2020