“The photograph is not only an image… it is also a trace of reality.” — Susan Sontag
The Quiet Ones of Marina, Marina, CA, 2015
There’s a particular hour in Marina, CA, when the sky turns the color of oversteeped tea, warm, earthy, and just dramatic enough to believe it has a secret it might share if you stand still long enough. That’s usually when the cows wander out, pretending not to notice me. They graze with the seasoned indifference of old Hollywood extras, the kind who’ve seen everything and refuse to be impressed by yet another artist trying to capture their best angle.
This diptych is a story of that hour. On the left side is the world as it begins: sparse, contemplative, stretching like a long inhale before a thought. A lone cow stands in the vast open field like the introverted protagonist of a Western that never got funded. On the right panel, as if someone whispered action, the supporting cast arrives: a little bovine family shuffling forward, their silhouettes striking quiet poses under the milk-glass sun.
The trees form a kind of chorus line, on one side, perfectly round and plush; on the other, pruned as though keeping secrets. Together they echo the twin personalities I carry when creating: one grounded, the other drifting toward some dream I haven’t fully named. The warm glow softens everything, even the cows’ philosophical dilemmas. And in that narrow seam dividing the two panels, that sliver of ambiguity, I find the familiar space where my stories like to dwell.
This is the moment when, if you truly want to feel what I felt standing there, I invite you to listen to O magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen. Yes, really. Let the motet rise softly, its angelic voices spreading like golden mist over the land. Something magical happens when that music enters the scene. The cows transform into contemplative monks. The rising sun becomes a gentle oracle. The fields hum with luminous reverence.
Lauridsen composed that piece in 1994, yet it feels older, as though it was borrowed from a realm where everything is light and breath and awe. When those harmonies float above this landscape, Marina becomes a cathedral, quiet, glowing, and sacred in its ordinariness. It is here, in this strange pairing of rural California and celestial polyphony, that I find the mood that defines so much of my work: mystical, cinematic, and tenderly absurd.
I’ve always created from fragments, a fleeting vision, a whisper of memory, a piece of music that drifts through my mind like a visitor. I don’t build perfect stories; I build dream-things, ambiguous and open-ended, where cows can contemplate eternity, and trees can gossip across the horizon line. Because for me, art is not about explaining the world. It’s about breathing through it. And in that oversteeped hour in Marina, while Lauridsen’s angelic voices linger in the air, the world finally feels willing to breathe back.
Artist Statement
My work emerges from fragments, glimpses of memories, a sliver of music in my mind, or the pull of a landscape that seems to be whispering. I build images as one builds dreams: layered, atmospheric, and intentionally ambiguous. This diptych from Marina, CA, is part meditation, part narrative. It captures not just a country scene, but the dualities within me, my fascination with stillness and motion, solitude and community, reality and the cinematic dreamworld I often inhabit. Each panel is a conversation, both with the land and with myself, and together they form a quiet story that invites viewers to add their own endings.
VOCES8: O Magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ-nuU-hda8&list=RDtZ-nuU-hda8