Photo Collage, Acrylic and Resin on Wood Panel | 12×12 inches | 1⅞" Deep | 2023 | Nudibranch Series

If Nudi Blue Crystal was the ocean at midnight, Nudi Orange Crystal is the same ocean at golden hour.

Everything here glows. Everything here burns with the particular warmth of amber and honey and autumn light — the colours of fire seen through glass, of sunset reflected in still water, of the inside of a geode cracked open to reveal what the earth has been quietly making in the dark for ten thousand years.

The orange crystal cluster at the centre of the composition is the sun around which everything else orbits — blazing, faceted, throwing its warm light outward in every direction. Around it, the natural world responds in kind. A carnelian sphere glows like a small planet in the middle left, its translucent orange the colour of a harvest moon. Smoky quartz crystals rise from the upper left in dark, mysterious columns — the shadow that makes the warmth more warm, the depth that makes the light more light. Peridot and olive crystals catch the glow from the upper right and return it as something cooler, more mineral, more ancient.

And then the living things.

A yellow scaled mushroom rises from the upper centre like something from the deepest, most magical forest — its surface a mosaic of tiny scales that catches the light with extraordinary texture. Orange oyster mushrooms spread their honeycomb architecture across the lower centre, each individual cup a perfect geometric form repeated endlessly in a pattern of breathtaking natural precision. A pink sea urchin offers its soft, spiky presence in the upper right — a gentler texture among all that crystal and scale and facet.

And the nudibranchs — always the nudibranchs, always the revelation.

Bottom left, a yellow and white ribbon nudibranch folds and unfurls in extraordinary sculptural loops, its surface marked with tiny red spots that blaze like embers against the pale yellow. It is one of the most beautiful creatures in this entire series — fluid and sculptural and utterly impossible looking. And bottom right, just when you think the warm palette has said everything it has to say — a flash of blue. The edge of a dorid nudibranch, its mantle trimmed in that cool, unexpected blue that makes the whole composition suddenly, perfectly complete. The one cool note in a symphony of warmth. The thing your eye needed without knowing it needed it.

Against the deep black background every element glows at its maximum possible intensity — the darkness giving the warmth everything it needs to become incandescent.

Part of the Nudibranch series — a body of work that finds in the ocean's most extraordinary inhabitants a mirror for everything the natural world is capable of. Which is, it turns out, everything.

✦ Original, one-of-a-kind work ✦ Photo collage, acrylic and resin on wood panel ✦ 12 × 12 inches | 1⅞" deep ✦ Unframed — deep cradled panel, ready to hang ✦ 2023 ✦ Part of the Nudibranch series ✦ Free worldwide shipping 

Golden hour. Deep ocean. Everything glowing.