“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.”
— Alberto Giacometti
Chorus in Monochrome, Pacific Grove, CA, 2024
I remember the day this image resisted me.
Not gently, not poetically. No, it refused like a closed door that knows you too well.
The hillside in Pacific Grove was alive in color when I first stood before it. Aloe blooms flared like quiet fireworks, their reds and oranges rising into the marine sky as if they had something urgent to confess. It should have been easy. Beauty usually offers itself with a certain generosity.
But that day, something in me distrusted it.
Color felt… persuasive. Almost too willing to please.
And I have learned, over time, that what pleases immediately often conceals more than it reveals.
So I stood there longer than necessary, listening. Not to the wind, not to the ocean just beyond, but to a quieter disturbance inside me. A disagreement, perhaps. A small civil war between what I saw and what I felt.
The aloes became characters in that argument.
They were no longer plants. They were witnesses. A congregation of slender figures, each holding a candle of memory above their heads, as if waiting for a verdict that would never arrive.
And then, without quite deciding to, I removed their voices.
I stripped them of color.
It was an act of suspicion.
What remained was not absence. It was confrontation.
In monochrome, the hillside stopped performing. The softness dissolved. The warmth retreated. What emerged instead was a kind of quiet severity. The blooms, once celebratory, now felt like signals, perhaps warnings, perhaps remnants. The sky thickened into something more internal than atmospheric, like a thought you cannot finish.
This is where conflict lives.
Because part of me still believes in beauty as it first appears—immediate, luminous, generous. The other part does not trust it at all. It insists on peeling things back, reducing them, questioning them until only something essential, or unsettling, remains.
The image is the result of that tension.
A negotiation between surrender and control.
Between the artist who wants to be moved… and the one who wants to understand why.
I often think of music when I reach this point. Not the melody, but the hesitation before it, the breath a pianist takes before pressing the first key. That fragile moment where everything could still go in another direction.
This photograph exists inside that hesitation.
The aloes lean, not toward the sun, but toward something unseen, perhaps the past, perhaps the self I was when color still felt sufficient. They do not resolve. They do not explain themselves.
And neither do I.
Because the truth is, I did not transform the image to make it stronger.
I transformed it because I could not reconcile what I felt with what I saw.
And sometimes, the only honest thing an artist can do…
is to let the conflict remain visible.
Artist Statement
I create images as a way of negotiating what I feel and what I perceive. This work emerged from a quiet conflict, an inability to accept beauty at face value. By removing color, I sought not to simplify the scene, but to confront it more honestly. The result is an image that does not resolve, but instead lingers in the space between trust and doubt, where meaning remains fluid and deeply personal.