Ecology Collection

My paintings are about color and the sensations of light that is essential for seagrass survival. The interconnectedness of a vast number of species sheltered, fed and protected by seagrass habitats is an inspiration for my paintings. Reaching is inspired by the amazing phenomenon of aerenchyma, the spongy tissue that forms spaces or air channels in the leaves of seagrass. These air channels keep the seagrass leaves reaching up towards the light and allow for photosynthesis.

Just received a grant for my environmental work from Chashama !!! Super excited to be thought of as an environmental artist & honored to receive the award !!! The Chashama grant was made possible in part by a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Wispy charcoal lines mixed with golden oil paint suggest CO2 in the air. My abstracted seagrass meadow in the foreground is painted with broad strokes, graffiti like marks and drips of paint. Small amounts of pink reflections poke through the plant like matter. I like to create part ambiguous space, I am interested in the viewer bringing their own interpretation and try to encourage more questions. For example why are 20 football fields of seagrass lost everyday? How is Carbon stored in the sediment? What happens to this natural storage bank when seagrass beds are destroyed? I try to portray the quiet beauty and crucial role seagrass plays keeping our air and waters clean.

This painting is about the wonderful interchange that occurs in seagrass meadows. Marine ecologists test Isotopes in seagrass meadows to track different elements in the food web. They can test Carbon, Nitrates and Sulfates Isotopes in different different animals which shows the ecosystem services the eelgrass provide.. pretty amazing!

In “Mapping Seagrass” I created a large scale abstract map of Duxbury Bay. I wanted to recreate our experience of “Searching for Seagrass”. In August 2019. I volunteered on a “Citizen’s Scientist” project with Mass Bay NSRWA Watershead ecologist Sara Grady in Duxbury Bay. They had been documenting eelgrass in the area for several years and monitoring the water quality. We went to 18 different sites in two days and our job was to do document the seagrass. We only found one site with eelgrass. These eelgrass sites are disappearing at fast rates. In my painting I tried to capture the beautiful day and this movement of zipping to different locations looking for seagrass.

"Uprooted" reflects the precarious balance that the seagrass faces whether it’s been uprooted by storms, dredged, shaded by algae blooms, or uprooted by predators like green crabs. In this painting I try to capture the transient nature of floating seagrass with layers of transparent hues. This painting has over eight layers of semi-translucent colors beneath the top layers.