Water

2022-2026

In this evolving series, I return again and again to the surface of water—something that resists stillness even as I try to hold it in place. My relationship to water is rooted in observation and memory: watching tides shift, light fracture across the surface, and horizons blur into sky. Each attempt to represent it becomes both an act of looking and an acknowledgment of limitation.

I study artists who have grappled with this same challenge—Vija Celmins, N.C. Wyeth, Tacita Dean, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Katsushika Hokusai, David Hockney, and Hiroshi Sugimoto—not to situate myself within a lineage, but to learn from their persistence. Each approaches water differently: through precision, repetition, atmosphere, abstraction, or gesture. Their work reminds me that water cannot be captured, only translated.

When I attempt to represent water on the page, I am aware that the effort is inherently incomplete. The surface shifts. The light changes. The horizon dissolves. The practice is, in many ways, futile—and it is within that futility that the work finds its meaning. I am drawn to the tension between interpretation and abstraction, between what I see and what I remember.

In trying to pause what is always in motion, I am less interested in accuracy than in presence. The work becomes a meditation on perception itself—on how we look, how we hold fleeting experiences, and how memory reshapes what we believe we have seen. Water remains unstillable, but in the act of tracing it, I find a space to reflect on movement, impermanence, and the limits of what can be fixed in place.