Discovering Memory in the Torrey Pines Art Series

Torrey Pines Series, 2025–2026 Ink, ground natural pigment with mixed media on wood panel

A palimpsest is a surface written over and over — each new mark layered onto what came before, the earlier inscriptions still alive within what followed. Every version holds its predecessors. The surface becomes a form of memory.

This is also what happens to a person who keeps returning to the same stretch of coastline.

The southern reach of Torrey Pines State Preserve is a place of active geological surrender. Sandstone cliffs fracture and fall. Hoodoos spiral toward their own dissolution. The tide pulls against exposed reef. The whole coast moves at a pace just slow enough to require repeated return — and patient enough to reward it.

These paintings grew from that return.

The Goethean Method of Seeing

Goethean seeing is a disciplined practice of participatory attention in which the observer returns again and again to the same place — under different light, different weather, different tides — until the landscape begins to speak on its own terms. Practiced alongside Jungian arts-based research, it becomes a form of psychic reorganization. At the center stands anima mundi — the soul of the world — C.G. Jung’s and James Hillman’s recognition that the natural world is a living field of participation, and that human consciousness is embedded within it, shaped by it, continuous with it.

What the coastline offered were encounters: an osprey’s descent reorganizing spatial awareness around vertical force; peregrine falcons dissolving the boundary between rock and air; a sea lion surfacing within arm’s reach, shifting the ocean from expanse to inhabited medium. Each encounter reorganized perception. Each carried forward into the studio.

Material Inquiry

Materials from the site traveled with the inquiry — sandstone ground into pigment, kelp residue, saltwater drawn into the wash. The coastal terrain entered the paintings through their substance. Layering followed: accumulation and selective erasure, marks applied and covered and reworked, earlier states persisting as traces within the evolving surface. The Dionysian pattern — dissolution as precondition for renewed form — proved to be the coastline’s own characteristic way of proceeding, and it became the paintings’ organizing principle as well.

The field shaped perception. Perception shaped surface. The surface holds open the possibility of return.