“Great art picks up where nature ends.”
— Marc Chagall
Studies in Standing Still, Fort Ord, Monterey County, CA, 2012
I met these trees the way one meets an old acquaintance at a quiet café. No introductions, no small talk. Just recognition.
They stand in Fort Ord, a place that once trained bodies for conflict and now seems devoted to rehearsing stillness. The trees have outlived commands and uniforms. They learned early that patience is the most subversive posture. Their branches twist like unfinished sentences, each one refusing closure. They do not reach upward in triumph. They reach sideways, inward, occasionally backward as if memory itself had grown bark.
The image carries a weathered hush. The layered textures feel less like surfaces and more like accumulated years. Time appears brushed on rather than passing through. The trees emerge from a stained, sepia-toned atmosphere that feels borrowed from a half-remembered dream or an old book left open in the rain. The land doesn’t recede into the distance. It presses forward, insisting on intimacy. You are not looking at a forest. You are standing inside a thought.
What moves me most is their posture. These trees do not pose. They endure with style. Their silhouettes lean and curve with a quiet theatricality, like seasoned performers who no longer need applause. There is humor here, too, dry and observant. One branch lifts like an eyebrow. Another seems mid-gesture, as if making a point that you might miss. They remind me that dignity can coexist with eccentricity. That elegance is often a byproduct of survival, not intention.
This is how I make art. Not to document what is there, but to translate what lingers. I am less interested in what the land looks like than in how it remembers itself. These trees become stand-ins for my own inner architecture. Bent, layered, stubbornly expressive. I arrange fragments of myself the way they arrange their limbs. Nothing symmetrical. Nothing explained. Everything essential.
Collectors often ask what the image is about. I usually tell them it’s a portrait. I don’t always say of whom. The truth is slippery and generous at the same time. The trees carry my temperament. My reluctance to move in straight lines. My fondness for silence that hums. My belief that art, like these trees, should feel lived-in rather than perfected.
Hanging on a wall in Santa Cruz, the image continues its quiet work. It doesn’t shout. It waits. It lets the room come to it. That is its wit. That is its power. Like all good art, it refuses to behave like décor. It behaves like a presence.
If you listen carefully, the trees are laughing. Not loudly. Just enough to remind us that seriousness, when left unattended, becomes brittle.
Artist Statement
I create images as a form of translation. Rather than describing the world, I listen to it. My work draws from memory, emotion, and intuition, allowing ambiguity to remain intact. These photographs function as self-portraits disguised as landscapes, inviting viewers to bring their own histories into the frame. I believe art should not resolve itself too quickly. It should linger, ask, and occasionally smile at its own seriousness.