The Deep Calling - Why Submerged Began
Some paintings begin with an image. Others with a question.
Submerged began with a sensation—like being pulled under by something ancient, beautiful, and wild.
Oceans, lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, creeks—all water calls to me. It compels and soothes, terrifies and awakens. Water is not just a setting or subject in my paintings. It’s an energy. A force. A teacher. A mirror. Its presence lives in my bones, like an echo from the beginning of everything. Its movement is full-body, full-soul. There are days when I want to disappear into it completely—to let it claim me, carry me, strip me down to only what is essential.
In water, I feel both held and undone.
I think that's why I paint it—not literally, but energetically.
Waves Weave Memories Into The Sky, 36 × 48. mixed media on canvas
The quiet swirl of tidepools, the soft waving of seaweed along the shore, the rush of creeks threading through stone—these are the gentle invitations. Then there’s the raw side: crashing waves, boats colliding, trees cracking as they fall, docks splintering apart. Water doesn’t just offer beauty. It offers surrender. It holds the full spectrum of feeling. Grief and grace. Resistance and release.
The sensation of drowning used to haunt me—not just physically, but emotionally. That disorienting space where you can’t take in air, where everything becomes blurred and muffled. But as I leaned into that fear, something shifted. I imagined gills forming. A strange kind of becoming. And that became the heart of Submerged: what happens when we stop fighting, when we let ourselves be transformed by immersion.
I didn’t set out to paint water. I set out to paint what water knows.
The marks came first. Scratches, smudges, soft pulls of color. Then textures emerged—spindly lines like reeds, loops like whirlpools or shells. Circles became symbols: stones, suns, moons, memory. Black lines gave structure, like cliff edges or traces of land remembered through fog. What was abstract began to feel inevitable. Like a map of something internal, something instinctual.
And the colors—oh, the colors.
Deep blues and stormlight grays whispered of depths, of quiet truths submerged beneath the surface.
Mossy greens and murky golds carried the richness of marshes and shadowy places.
Coral pinks spoke to the sacred feminine—sensual, generative, binding.
Lavenders called to memory, dream, and bloom—like larkspur drifting in moonlit water.
Crimson reds appeared like flashes—life-blood given and taken, moments of rupture and rawness.
There’s a line I return to again and again: I am water and water is me. It’s where life begins—floating, suspended, safe. The womb. The ocean. The rain. Water is our origin and our end. It sustains us. It can also undo us. It gives, and it takes. It doesn't negotiate. It just is.
Water teaches us to trust the process. To let go of the need to control what unfolds. It carves canyons over time, moves mountains grain by grain. It doesn’t force—it persists. That’s how I approached this series. Layer by layer. With patience, surrender, and attention. Allowing space for the unexpected to surface.
Submerged is about that space beneath the noise. The place where we finally stop performing and just are. Where we feel the full weight and wonder of being alive. Where we remember what we’ve hidden. Where we let it rise.
There is structure in these works—hints of landforms, cliffs, grounding places. But they are always softened, always shaped by the water around them. That’s the paradox: solidity inside fluidity. Identity within transformation. The marks and colors are the language of emotional weather—storms that pass through, tides that return, moments that pool and reflect.
And what I discovered in the painting process was this: the more I let go of trying to name what I was painting, the more truthful it became. I didn’t need to explain the feeling. I just needed to honor it.
Somewhere in the making, a kind of reverence took hold. For the way water connects all things. For the histories it carries. For the fact that, without it, we return to dust.
And there is something sacred about that return.
Water mingles with dust, and life breathes again.
We don’t get to choose the tides. We don’t get to control the storm. But we can choose to meet it honestly. With our whole selves. That’s what this work asked of me. To show up. To feel it all. To be moved.
This series is not meant to illustrate water, but to embody it. To speak in its rhythms, its silences, its urgencies. It is both offering and invocation. An invitation back to the source.
In the next post, I’ll share more about the making—how the marks formed, how the layers built themselves, and how I navigated the line between emotion and abstraction. For now, I leave you with this:
We are not separate from the water.
We are water.
And maybe, just maybe, painting is how I remember that.
Opening Reception: Friday, July 18, 2025, 5pm - 8pm at Anno Artem Gallery.
