MOLONO ISLAND- A STUDIO BUILT ON THE EDGE OF A REEF IN THE CORAL TRIANGLE
VANUATU
Molono Island is not an escape from the world. It is a place from which to observe it more closely.Throughout our careers, we have encountered three approaches to painting beneath the sea: working from photographs, working underwater, and working from memory. Each offers advantages and limitations. Photographs preserve anatomy, but not time, motion, perception, color, or the emotional truths of lived experience. Painting underwater allows direct observation, but under conditions that compress color and limit time while inhibiting vision - particularly color. Memory is the rarest and most challenging of the three and, for us, the most exciting.
We have long been fascinated by the ways memory transforms experience. It softens boundaries, compresses time, merges separate moments, and allows emotion, misconception, and subjectivity to become truth—at least on the canvas. The constraints of the coral reef as a subject necessitate invention, which is exactly why we love painting here. The reef's inaccessability and aversion to being visually defined are ultimately the very qualities we've been seeking in our work. Molono was built around that conviction.
Perched on the edge of a reef in the Coral Triangle, the island offers exactly what we were seeking: continuity. We acquired an uninhabited island and transformed it into a studio where experiences are given room to linger. Its isolation demands physical presence. The place cannot be understood remotely, consumed passively, or experienced in passing. It rewards only sustained immersion.
Experiences are revisited and rewritten with greater comprehension each time. Questions return over years. Observations accumulate. What begins as a fleeting encounter gradually becomes familiarity, and familiarity becomes understanding, and then personal truth. Personal truth cannot be rushed. It is forged not in days or even seasons, but in years of attention.
Our paintings are not attempts to replicate those subjective truths, but to respond to them, interrogate them, and empower them.
We have long been fascinated by the ways memory transforms experience. It softens boundaries, compresses time, merges separate moments, and allows emotion, misconception, and subjectivity to become truth—at least on the canvas. The constraints of the coral reef as a subject necessitate invention, which is exactly why we love painting here. The reef's inaccessability and aversion to being visually defined are ultimately the very qualities we've been seeking in our work. Molono was built around that conviction.
Perched on the edge of a reef in the Coral Triangle, the island offers exactly what we were seeking: continuity. We acquired an uninhabited island and transformed it into a studio where experiences are given room to linger. Its isolation demands physical presence. The place cannot be understood remotely, consumed passively, or experienced in passing. It rewards only sustained immersion.
Experiences are revisited and rewritten with greater comprehension each time. Questions return over years. Observations accumulate. What begins as a fleeting encounter gradually becomes familiarity, and familiarity becomes understanding, and then personal truth. Personal truth cannot be rushed. It is forged not in days or even seasons, but in years of attention.
Our paintings are not attempts to replicate those subjective truths, but to respond to them, interrogate them, and empower them.
