Artist’s Statement: An Ocean of Calm (from the 2009 Water Series)

Encaustic, oil & mixed media on wood panel

The mind dissolves into the rhythm of endless sea:

drinking in limitless space, flooding with shimmering calm.

This year’s work continues to focus upon the sea. As the perception of our world around us has shifted from stability to instability, from order to disorder, from equilibrium to non-equilibrium, it has also shifted from being to becoming. Yet change itself is the only true constant. The stability of structure, much like the sea that surrounds our continents, depends upon the fluidity of change. The ocean-–massive, powerful and with a permanence undeniable–gently responds to the smallest shift of a breeze.

An Ocean of Calm quietly focuses our view on the endlessly shifting sea.  Each photograph is suspended in layers of what was once molten wax; the undulating surfaces of both the subject and the medium capture the dualities of stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing, stability and change. The technique blurs the distinctions between photography and painting as graphite and pigment are added to the thin layers of beeswax atop each photograph. Together, this body of work reflects upon the dual nature of photography and painting, solidity and fluidity, permanence and impermanence. An Ocean of Calm is my tribute to the changing world around us, to both the known and unknown.