“What we see is not what is there, but what we are.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Lake Estero, Before the Thought Forms, Monterey, CA, 2010
Pinhole Photography
I return to this place the way a sentence returns to its opening clause.
Lake Estero appears here not as geography, but as a pause. A held breath. The trees hover like remembered thoughts rather than objects, their reflections softened into something less obedient than mirrors. Everything feels slightly out of register, as if the world has leaned back in its chair and decided not to explain itself today.
This image behaves like memory behaves. It does not insist. It drifts.
The water carries the trees the way the mind carries old ideas into a new year, blurred at the edges, stripped of certainty, but heavier with meaning. The shoreline refuses sharpness. The sky offers no drama. And yet the mood is unmistakable: quiet expectancy. That rare emotional weather where nothing has happened yet, but everything could.
I’m drawn to places like this because they don’t perform. They don’t ask to be admired. They simply exist, which feels radical now. The composition spreads horizontally, unhurried, allowing the eye to wander without instruction. The trees are spaced like notes in a slow piano étude. Not melody. Atmosphere. You don’t hum it later, but it stays with you.
There is humor here, too, though it’s the dry kind collectors appreciate. The trees look like they’re rehearsing for a meeting they may or may not attend. Their reflections are slightly smug, convinced they’re the real subject. The lake itself plays referee, absorbing everything without commentary. It’s a reminder that nature often has better timing than we do.
This image marks a beginning, not because it announces one, but because it doesn’t. New years tend to arrive with slogans and resolutions, fireworks, and fonts shouting optimism. This scene does the opposite. It suggests that beginnings can be quiet agreements made in solitude. That you don’t need clarity to start again. Just presence.
My work has always lived in that space between seeing and remembering. I’m not interested in the moment as it happened, but as it lingers. As it becomes something else inside us. This photograph carries my painting instincts, its layered textures and softened edges refusing precision in favor of feeling. It’s an act of trust. Trust that ambiguity can be generous. Not explaining everything can invite more.
Lake Estero, here, becomes a threshold. A place where the old year dissolves gently into water and the new one waits, patient and unsharp, on the far shore.
And maybe that’s the joke and the comfort. The world doesn’t reset in January. It simply continues, slightly rearranged, asking us to look again.
Artist Statement
My work explores the emotional residue of place rather than its description. Drawing from a background in painting, I create images that favor atmosphere over precision, allowing ambiguity to function as an invitation rather than a barrier. These pinhole photographs live in the space between memory and observation, where meaning remains fluid, and stories are never fully resolved. I believe images should breathe, linger, and trust the viewer to complete them.