I have spent my life in the ocean. Surfing it, diving it, chasing it across coastlines and continents. Everything I make begins there.

Some of it begins quite literally in the water. For years I've practiced a kind of treasure hunting, scouring reefs, beaches, and back alleys for the things the ocean takes from her explorers: surfboard fins ripped free by kelp, sunglasses lost in the shorebreak, dive masks drifting along sandy bottoms, boards rescued from dumpsters. In a modern take on the ancient art of Gyotaku, each relic is inked and pressed to paper or canvas, a one-of-a-kind impression of an object with a story, given a second life on the wall.

That same instinct to capture what the ocean leaves behind carries into my paintings. My abstract series, Wind on Water, is built in layers of tide and turbulence: whitewater lace over deep blues, reef textures, the gold of late light on open water. They aren't pictures of the ocean so much as records of being in it.

And I never put the camera down. My photography follows the same trail the rest of my life does — dawn patrols, empty lineups, desert highways, and the small roadside moments that make a trip worth taking.

Every piece is an original. Every original has a story. Most of those stories are salty.

— Mark K Ley