Mapping Seagrass, Oil on Canvas, 60″x 48″, 2020

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. 

When The Fog Rolls In, Oil on Canvas, 48″x 60″, 2018

Tangible, intangible, fog brings this wealth of sensations that we are not usually aware of. This experience of being engulfed by Fog happened on one of my field trips with Alyssa Novak’s seagrass conservation group in Wellfleet. One minute we were harvesting seagrass the next minute the fog was so dense that you could barely see anything. It was amazing since all your sense came alive, colors were brighter, textures more exaggerated , and the sound almost went up a notch. In this painting I try to capture this tension between dulling down and the unexpected magnification of beauty of the eelgrass meadow. 

Collecting Samples, Oil on Canvas, 24”x 72”, 2020

Collecting Samples depicts the rich biodiversity of a seagrass meadow underwater as I experienced it snorkeling to collect data samples in Virginia for a Long Term Study on Eelgrass. I reversed the colors so the blue-greens of the water became hot orange-pinks to feature seagrass as the prominent stars of the habitat.  The physical sample collecting part was a balancing act for me; dealing with wave action, moon jelly fish and occasional stingrays that swam by made it a little hard to collect exactly the right amount of sediment.