Thalassography

Thalassography — the study and description of the sea — gathers two ways of working the same subject. The acrylics are built with a palette knife and modelling paste: thick, textured passages that hold the shoreline, the headland, the exact moment a sky gives way from day to storm. The alcohol inks work by letting go of that control. Pigment pools and separates on its own terms, finding channels across the surface the way tides cut through sand or cells divide under a lens — closer, often, to what I see at the microscope than to anything I've painted with a brush. Held together, the two bodies of work move across scale, from a beach at dusk to the structure underneath it, asking the same question two different ways: what does the sea look like from every distance at once?