It’s only natural that Chris feels protective of the reefs. He spent his childhood living in Hawaii where they and the beaches and waters that accessed them were his playgrounds, so his appreciation for marine life grew in him as he grew up. “The ocean has been a really, really heavy place in my construction of youth,” Chris says, “which is a place that I tend to look to in my art.”

“I watched the environment directly around my home. Part of the island got really developed and in about a three or four year period [note that coral reefs take hundreds to thousands of years to grow] the reef completely died out. It just turned white and bleached out. Knowing the wealth of what was lost, it was really shocking,” he says. Coral reefs are absolutely invaluable, both to the earth’s ecosystem and its people. They provide a critical source of food for millions of the world’s people, including some of its poorest, they protect coastal regions from cyclones, tsunamis, and hurricanes, and they’re as full of life and as critical to the global environment as the Amazonian rain forest.

Chris’s interest in marine science, however, was ignited only a few years ago when he was given the opportunity to work at a marine quarantine facility in Honolulu. While Chris was there, the facility was farming and studying giant Japanese kuruma shrimp. “That experience was just the weirdest, weirdest thing. I was just fascinated with the different containers growing these small micro-creatures and with the regiment of science of how we deal with the systems that humans exist off of,” he says.

Chris’s time in Honolulu left him with a lingering interest in the aesthetic aspects of marine science, and when he moved to San Francisco he began to explore this interest through his art. He says, “I want to make things that are crazy beautiful and things that people can take an image of beauty away from. But, I also want to make things that are a product of the environment - a product not of my own craft, but a product of what’s going on under the water and what’s going on in nature. There’s a sort of reverence we’ve lost that we should be placing back in these natural annals.”

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