“To be alive is to be unfinished.”
— Gaston Bachelard
Emerald Pause, Carmel, CA, 2010
I have always trusted waves more than clocks.
They do not pretend to move forward in a straight line. They arrive, hesitate, collapse, return, and come back wearing a slightly different face. That feels honest.
This wave came to me on a February morning when the beach was nearly empty, and the world seemed undecided about itself. The air carried that muted hush that only exists between seasons, when winter loosens its grip, but spring has not yet committed. I remember standing there, watching the ocean rehearse the same sentence over and over, never repeating it the same way twice.
The wave rose like a thought I almost didn’t want to finish.
There is a thin line where the water turns luminous, where green deepens into something ancient and interior. It reminds me of the moment just before a confession, when the truth gathers weight but hasn’t yet broken the surface. Above it, the foam drifted like a breath exhaled too slowly, dissolving into mist and light. Below it, darkness waited patiently, unbothered by what was about to happen.
I was thinking about how memory works.
How it doesn’t crash all at once, but arrives in layers. A childhood afternoon. A sound from another room. A piece of music that once meant everything and now means something quieter, heavier. This wave felt like that. A memory mid-formation, not yet nostalgia, not yet loss.
What I love about the ocean is its refusal to explain itself. It does not offer conclusions, only gestures. This wave does not perform for the shore. It turns inward, folding into itself, as if keeping a secret. The horizon dissolves. There is no sky, no land, no reference point. Just motion suspended in thought.
In moments like this, I realize my work has never been about capturing nature. It has been about recognizing myself inside it. The way I gather pieces of feeling, fragments of time, half-remembered emotions, and let them hover without resolution. I don’t want answers in my images. I want tension. I want that held breath before something becomes irreversible.
The wave breaks, of course. They always do. But what stays with me is the instant before impact, when everything is still possible. That narrow, glowing interval where beauty has not yet decided whether it will become destruction or release.
That is where I try to live when I make art.
Right there.
Between the rise and the fall.
Artist Statement
My work lives in the spaces just before resolution. I am drawn to moments that hesitate, where form, memory, and emotion hover without committing to an ending. By removing context and allowing ambiguity to lead, I invite viewers to encounter their own interior landscapes within the image. Each piece is less a document of the world and more a reflection of how it feels to exist inside it.