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The idea was to gather a van load of friends, three (12 foot by 100 foot) rolls of black paper, some homemade non-toxic white paint and go to the beach in order to mono-print the paper on the surface of the ocean.

I had been scheming ways to dip the paper over the previous months and come up with some pretty ingenious ideas. My first attempt was to unroll the paper, carry it into a quiet inlet, dip it all at once then raise it all at once and bring it back over to the beach. We unrolled it, the wind picked up and ripped it into 2 pieces. This was quite a kick in the face which made me realize that I needed to rethink my not so well thought out approach and try again. Of course, no approach could have been to well thought out. I had never been to this place nor seen photos and the wind and general weather conditions which were completely beyond my control were a major variable in the success of the dips.

In order to become comfortable with this daunting project we decided to try the dip with a more manageable sized sheet. The 30 foot by 12 foot sheet we gathered from the wreckage would do fine. We did the dip and it came out fine, actually it was really beautiful, I had never made such a beautiful print in my life and this gave us all the courage needed to attempt a larger sheet.

In order to inch up on our comfort zone, we next tried the 70 foot piece that had been ripped from the original roll. To combat the unruly wind that we were attacked by in the first attempt, we decided to unrolled the paper on the water. The unrolling worked well but lifting it out of the water was an area we hadn't planned on being so difficult. The water logged paper was so frail and heavy that in the attempt to move it, we destroyed it.

At this point with so much hope from the success of the second attempt and now devastation from the third we decided to swim and recompose ourselves at a point in which it seemed the project would ultimately fail. It was then in our relaxation that we reflected upon how the paint dried instantly upon touching the paper's surface and that this would allow us to roll the paper up as we unrolled, making it a cinch to carry on the beach to dry.

This unroll and roll method was successful. We carried it on to the beach to unroll in sections so that about every 20' it could dry and we could way it down so that the wind would not rip it. With only some minor tears from where the paper folded upon itself and became tangled the 100' x 12' of ocean printed paper was complete.

The results revealed a rare and beautiful image that only such a process could have, as it was a method, due to logistical complications and lack of functionality, that not many people have explored creating. Thus, we created what our eyes had never seen before, bestowing upon us the opportunity to think past the limits of our own visual definitions. Mono-printing the fluid dynamics of the oceans surface on this scale is a completely unexplored method of image production not that it deserves further investigation but perhaps developing new image making processes does. Just as the microscope allowed us to see what was before invisible or the mirror gave us an idea of our own physical appearance, this brings to our attention a new form and a better understanding of our surroundings.