Vision

This flaskposte (Norwegian for "message-in-a-bottle") was thrown by my dear aunt Ann Haraldstad off the coast of Norway into the North Sea. Thrown on September 21, 2016 around 4:15 PM. This collage, Oceanic Intrigue, for the letter "O", was inspired by the children on a getaway fish, somehow oddly reminiscent of James Bond on a jet ski to me.
In the children's illustration sections of various open-source imagery, there are a lot of charming illustrations of kids by the sea. The first sea I have actual memories of swimming in as a 3-year-old was the Atlantic, off Wasque Beach on Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts. I remember being sans culottes, utterly free of gravity in the greenish glowing sea, sun beaming down, seeing my mom on the beach as I bobbed up and down by myself in the salty waves.
The photo on the bottom right of the collage is one I took of a driftwood sea monster at Wasque about 5 years ago. So reading the image left to right, there is a sense of blithe, childlike innocence, an unfettered joy and simple tranquility; but it's presaged by the looming complexities of growing up, in the form of a duo of ominous fish following sleekly and and relentlessly forward. This is emphasized by the Japanese characters, Ashinaga ("Long-legs") and Tenaga ("Long-arms"), strange fisherman with long limbs, symbolic of a change into bad weather, and the walrus skeleton a harbinger of the end of the cycle before its energy renews again.