Discovering Memory in the Torrey Pines Art Series

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

Two works from this series — Torrey Pines #2 and Torrey Pines #3 — are on view in Changing Terrain: Regional Artists Interpret Our Landscape at Oceanside Museum of Art and San Diego History Center, August 22, 2026 – January 27, 2027.

A palimpsest is a surface written over and over. Each new mark is layered onto what came before, the earlier inscriptions still alive within what was previously created. Because of this layering, there can be a ghost-like aliveness in the works. Everything remains, settling under what comes next, still faintly warm, still capable of changing the temperature of everything painted above it. The surface becomes a form of memory.

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

The southern reach of Torrey Pines State Reserve is a place of active geological surrender. It’s an utterly wild stretch of land nestled in a city of 3 million+ people. The weather and oceanic erosion affect the land, where sandstone cliffs fracture and fall, each collapse a quiet admission that every shape here — sandstone included — is in flux. Hoodoos spiral toward their own dissolution with reverent grace. The tide works against exposed reef, patient and relentless, changing with the seasons. This coast moves at a pace just slow enough to invite repeated return, and a form of intimacy.

I hike it. I walk it. I surf it. Somewhere after years of exploring, the place evolved from something I looked at into something I was in conversation with — which is another way of saying it began asking something of me in return.

These paintings grew out of these repeated returns.

The Goethean Method of Seeing

Goethean seeing (or Goethean observation as phenomenology) is a discipline the poet-scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe developed two centuries ago, built on fidelity, practiced as return: you go back to the same place under grey skies and hard, flat light, at low tide and at high, until it begins to show you its own particular moods. Paired with the way depth psychology treats image-making as a form of inquiry, this becomes a way of reorganizing how you perceive — of learning, gradually and subtly, to tell the difference between what belongs to the place and what you carried into it yourself.

At the center of that reorganization is anima mundi — the soul of the world. Jung, and later his student James Hillman, held that the natural world is a living field, psychically alive on its own terms, and that human consciousness is embedded within it, shaped by it, continuous with it — already in the middle of its own long story, ready to include whoever keeps showing up.

I was included frequently in the phenomenology of Torrey Pines. An osprey folded itself out of the sky and rose from the shallows with a fish still fighting in its talons. For the length of that single motion the shoreline reorganized itself into a hunting ground. A pair of peregrine falcons ran courtship arcs across the sandstone face with a slew of geared-up photographers gawking up the cliffs’ end to capture a prize image. And once while out surfing, a young sea lion surfaced in the reef line up close enough that I heard it breathe before I saw it. Sure, shark varieties including juvenile Great White, whales, massive sunfish, and bat rays have all been witnessed while in this stretch of ocean.

Each encounter reorganized perception — and I took each forward into the studio just a few miles away.

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.