Andy Moses - Echoes of Light

There is a point in the late afternoon, as you look out across the Ocean from Santa Monica beach towards Malibu, when the solid world dissolves. Squinting into the sun along a path of refracted light, boundaries disintegrate, the horizon melts, and sky, sea and land merge into an ever shifting pattern. Light reverberates across this constantly moving surface, skimming across the wave peaks, echoing in the troughs; a darting, deliquescent, intangible substance slowly fading into darkness as the sun disappears. Dotted here and there amongst the line of breakers, surfers wait patiently for the next 'set' to arrive, forming indistinct black smudges in this pearlescent haze.

 

As a boy, Andy Moses would walk the few yards from his house on Mabery Road, Santa Monica and stand with his brother and parents to watch the sun set across the Pacific. Later, as a teenager, he would sit on his surfboard, legs dangling in the water, eyes scanning the horizon, looking for those subtle shifts in pattern that would herald the arrival of the next big set of waves. In that liminal tidal surf zone as deep ocean meets land in a thundering melee of salt, sand, water, light and air, Moses found himself engulfed in both the immensity of the limitless ocean and the minutiae of individual waves.