Because I Too Embrace a Nautical Scene is a body of work built in tension—between photography and painting, abstraction and landscape, sincerity and irony. The images draw inspiration from painters like Mark Rothko, whose simple palettes hum with emotional weight, and photographers like Edward Weston, who sought precision and purity in form. I’m drawn to the visual language of both: the saturation, the stillness, the spiritual resonance of color, light, and structure. But I work in analog color film, using chemistry and light to translate that vision into the photographic register—grain, emulsion, and exposure replace brushstroke and canvas.

Despite my best efforts, I haven’t fully abandoned the romanticism that clings to nautical imagery. Vast water, distant horizons, sky as color field—these things still carry longing, projection, escape. But I lean into that failure. These photographs embrace the contradictions of trying to make something both emotional and restrained, both rooted in tradition and willfully at odds with it.

Printed at over 50 inches and made entirely through traditional, chemistry-based materials, the final works are both physical and optical—images you stand before as much as look at. They ask to be seen not just as photographs, but as propositions: What happens when the elements of the sea become a surface? When color itself becomes content?

Each photograph relies on color to shape affect—to communicate not what was seen, but what was sensed, remembered, or longed for. They are less about what is visible and more about what remains—residue, sensation, and the slow collapse of boundaries between looking and feeling.