“The sea is an immense piano on which the waves play fugues of timelessness.”
— Victor Hugo (paraphrased from his writings on the ocean)
Symphony of the Ocean, Asilomar Beach, Pacific Grove, CA, 2015
"After Robinson Jeffers: Photography from Poetry" Exhibition, Carl Cherry Center for the Arts, Carmel, CA, 2016
I have always suspected that the Pacific Ocean has an ego.
Not the destructive kind, but the artistic kind, an ego with flair, with attitude, with just enough drama to keep things interesting. The kind of ego you’d find in the second violin section right before a competition. Or, to be precise, in the swell of a wave at Asilomar Beach on a windy afternoon, rehearsing for a performance no one asked for, but everyone secretly appreciates.
On this particular day, the sea was practicing its arpeggios. Long, deep, rumbling notes rolled in like warm-up exercises from a pianist who doesn’t trust the instrument yet. I stood there on the sand, pretending not to take the whole thing personally, when one wave—this wave—cleared its throat, gathered its entire watery diaphragm, and rose with the unmistakable confidence of a performer about to attempt something wildly unnecessary.
And that is when Symphony of the Ocean began.
The wave curled toward itself, a shimmering bronze arc capturing the precise moment inspiration becomes inevitable. The sepia tones, which seem to seep into the air itself, compress time like a long-held pedal in a Liszt ballade, suspending everything, elongating the breath between gesture and consequence.
In that moment, the wave wasn’t just a wave.
It was a conductor.
A soloist.
A slightly deranged composer intent on rewriting the laws of acoustics.
The spray burst upward like a crescendo, the foam flew off in tiny staccato notes, and the body of the wave bowed forward in a grand sweeping legato line. Even the wind seemed to hush, as though afraid to miss the downbeat.
I realized, watching it, why the ocean has always felt like an accomplice in my creative life. We share the same artistic flaw: we cannot help but dramatize things. A wave never merely collapses; it performs an exit. I never simply make an image; I score a scene. The ocean smashes itself into rocks for no reason other than emotional emphasis. I layer textures because plain realism feels like showing up to a recital without polishing my shoes.
We are both, in our own ways, hopeless romantics with a taste for the theatrical.
But what I love most is the ambiguity. If you study the wave in this image long enough, it becomes impossible to tell whether it’s rising or falling. Beginning or ending. Exhaling or inhaling. That is the beauty I chase in my work, the moment where certainty dissolves and interpretation takes over. Like a half-remembered piece of music drifting in and out of consciousness, the photograph allows each viewer to become the co-composer of the experience.
My art, like this wave, is simply trying to communicate something wordless. Something shaped by sound and memory. Something made of all the years I spent at the piano, convincing myself I was playing Liszt when, realistically, Liszt would have politely taken his music back and asked me never to speak of it again.
But that’s the charm of it. Creation is always a conversation between artist and medium, between wave and wind, between listener and music. And sometimes, if the timing is right, the sea will raise its voice in perfect harmony with your own inner world.
On that day at Asilomar, I felt the ocean whisper,
“You and I, we’re in the same business. We tell stories without words.”
And for once, I believed it.
Artist Statement
Symphony of the Ocean is a reflection of the way I navigate the creative world—through intuition, emotion, and a deep connection to rhythm. The sea becomes a metaphor for my own inner landscape: moody, expressive, unpredictable, and endlessly performing. My work seeks to hold that fleeting moment where nature becomes narrative, where the viewer becomes a co-author, and where silence resonates like music long after the final note fades.