Jeri Eisenberg

I grew up near the ocean.  Not on the ocean, or by the ocean, but close enough so that many languid summer days of my childhood were spent there with family, jumping waves and playing in the sand.  Adolescence may have changed my companions on the beach blankets, but the ocean remained the backdrop of many long summer days.

I no longer live near the ocean, but its power and beauty still beckon.  Its rhythms are eternal; its majesty, even when cruel, undeniable.  This series looks, with perhaps a bit of nostalgia, at the ocean’s cresting and crashing waves, as well as its more tranquil blue/green swells.  “It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.” – Rachel Carson

These images are first printed with water-soluble dye-based inks.  This lets me brush or spray the printed images with water to make the dyes run in selected areas.   It gives the imagery a very unusual quality as the dyes puddle and pool, and hues that lie just below the surface are brought forward to alter the photographic nature of the initial imagery.  Those altered prints are then scanned, printed on Japanese Kozo paper with archival pigment inks (which are not water soluble), and then waxed. 

To see more of these images, click here.