I imagine the ocean, in all her moods and forms, as a place both familiar and alien. 

 

This series calls upon my Southern Californian, surf-culture-inundated childhood. Drawing waves in notebooks, and memorizing every page, and every drop of water in surf magazines, was a kind of right of passage. Wielding our pens, we depicted conditions that far exceeded our skill or bravado. When drawing, we were the greatest surfers to ever live. We were heroes, champions, warrior poets.

 

I plunged into the ocean of my dreams. I imagined seas breaking far away on distant planets under flaming skies in brilliant oceans. Sometimes, I imagine myself in the universes of my youth, charging across a bumpy sea to fight the Empire. Or I reimagined the most influential image of my adult life — Hokusai's 'The Great Wave' — and mused on what those mariners trapped in the fray in their longboats must have been feeling.

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I want the colors in this series to be bright and beautiful, but also, severe and extreme. I want the viewer to be trapped somewhere between awe and fright, exhilarated to be amongst the violence, but relieved when they're back on dry land.