Standing at the water's edge until the sound and motion take over everything else, that is where Rushing In begins. Not with the view. With what happens when your mind shifts from everyday thinking, your senses heightened, the moment focused and stored in memory. The sand coming alive at your feet. The winter light breaking through. Serenity Symphony is what you hear when you stop looking at the horizon and start listening to the rocks tumbling back in the surf.
That kind of closeness runs through all the work, in ways I did not fully recognize until recently.
Up started with looking into the eucalyptus trees behind the studio until I did not want to come down. Close enough that the canopy becomes electric, the filtered light almost alive. You stop seeing a tree and start feeling what it is to be up there, in the trees. The Between the Lines series takes it further, past the point where you see the whole plant, the whole flower, the whole leaf, and into the space where shape and color are all that is left. Where the gaps between things hold as much presence as the things themselves.
The teapot in I'm a Little Teapot has that same quality, but the closeness is memory rather than physical space. Being four years old and close enough to something small and particular that it becomes enormous, magical, entirely its own world.
More and Pops work the same way from the inside out. Getting close enough to a photograph, a bowl of cranes, flying sparks and welding masks, that the surface opens up and the whole life behind it presses through. Pops is not a barber shop photograph. It is what you see when you look through the glass with memory and story.
The portraits are the most direct version of this, a face seen close enough that the expression carries everything without needing explanation. My mother at the coast in Beach Portrait Study, happily lost in the moment. My grandmother in Portrait in Blue, cobalt jacket, looking directly back at you with that grin. Staisha, one tiny fist near her cheek, newly in the world.
Close to the water. Close to the people I love. Close to memory, to objects, to the ordinary things that turn out to be anything but.
Not a style, not a theme. A way of looking.
The closer you get, the more there is.
