Stay off the Dunes!

This painting marks the first time I felt the weight of my own voice as an artist — not just skill, but meaning. It was my first glimpse of what would later become my life’s work: capturing the moments where time slows, where emotion crests so quietly it almost goes unnoticed.

The subject is my first child at two years old, painted one year after my family made the terrifying decision to uproot our lives and move across the country. That choice came with sacrifice, doubt, and long stretches of uncertainty. There was no immediate reassurance that we had done the right thing — no sign, no relief. Until this moment.

She is standing on a sand dune, unknowingly breaking a rule we ourselves didn’t yet understand. As she played, my husband and I looked up the reason for the warning signs, then looked back at her — so small, so curious, so innocent. And without speaking, we shared a glance that held everything. In that silence, we weren’t parents or adults or people with responsibilities and plans. We were simply two humans remembering ourselves — remembering the rules we once broke, the risks we once took, the lessons learned the hard way, and our own parents standing where we now stood.

We understood, all at once, that this moment was already disappearing. That before we "picked her down" — before the inevitable tantrum, before time resumed — we were witnessing something sacred and fleeting. A confirmation not delivered loudly, but gently. A quiet reassurance from the universe that despite the fear, despite the cost, we were doing something right.

Stay Off the Dunes! is about innocence, risk, memory, and the unbearable tenderness of knowing a moment is ending even as you’re still inside it. It is the kind of moment that builds us — not through spectacle, but through stillness.

This is a real, profound. and immensely impactful moment that took place at small, relatively hidden beach called Inlet point in Pawleys Island Beach, SC.