AN ATTRACTION TO BLUE SPACES

In trying to understand why the ocean keeps tugging at me—and why it so decisively shapes my work—I ended up learning about chromatic neuroscience. There is science behind the spell. Water’s reflected wavelengths hit the human brain with the subtlety of a mood-altering substance. In fact, vibrant blue water is about as close as mere mortals get to perceiving ultraviolet light. We’re biologically wired to seek water and our survival instincts and our aesthetic impulses, crave the same thing.

Wallace J. Nichols writes in Blue Mind that being near water “improves performance, increases calm, diminishes anxiety, and increases professional success.” Not a bad résumé for a natural resource. More research backs it—apparently, standing in front of the ocean is one of the few times humans unanimously benefit from doing absolutely nothing.

COAST began as a personal recalibration—an urgent search for balance and clarity. Time spent at the shore has always been my internal ballast—the air, the salt, the weather, the history soaked into the land, all of it heightens my senses and recenters me. Childhood summers at our Cape house set the template. Happiness, equilibrium, belonging—they all smelled faintly of salt and seaweed.

My work emerges from the subconscious, that inconveniently honest place where the wild bits of us are stored. Painting this series became a way of letting those interior tides rise to the surface. Blue spaces are my magnets—whether I’m unraveling, celebrating, or simply attempting to exist. The ocean is both medicine and mystery: a place of peace and a place deserving deep reverence. The immensity of it humbles me; its beauty compels me; its danger keeps me honest.

Unplugging by the water is not an indulgence—it is, for me, a spiritual realignment.

A CALL TO ACTION

My hope is that COAST and the rest of my body of work doesn’t simply evoke your own memories of shorelines—it activates something, an action to think and to act.

The climate is changing faster than our collective response. The reef systems I’ve visited, once electric and alive, are bleaching at a pace that feels like a countdown. Each year I return to the water with more urgency, more anxiety, and more determination. Preserving our oceans is no longer a poetic sentiment, it’s a directive that we must face head on.

If these paintings can prompt even one viewer—friend, stranger, art collector, or accidental gallery wanderer—to rethink their relationship to water and take even a small step toward conservation, then the work is doing what it needs to do.

Because the coastline holds so many family memories for many, the question now is whether our human planet is willing to protect the place that shaped us.