Upon entering the lobby and public spaces, guests are greeted by a curated selection of artwork that captures the essence of the Pacific and Laguna’s creative soul. Thoughtfully blends contemporary design with artistic accents that reflect the fluid movement of the sea and sky. The collection includes commissioned pieces by celebrated artists that complement the sun-washed textures and coastal elegance of the interiors.
Art No: 18
Artist: Dale Chihuly
Location: Splashes
Medium: Glass Sculpture
We typically think of glass in flat planes, not in the organic forms you see hanging above you. Dale Chihuly has spent his career proving otherwise. Coaxing a material made from fire, then letting gravity finish the shape, Chihuly creates silhouettes that look pulled straight from the water. This piece was blown for Surf & Sand and hangs nowhere else. Its spirals gather overhead the way a swell gathers before it breaks, and the colors carry the water itself: the blue-green of a wave mid-break, sun scattered across the surface, the haze where the sand meets the morning. Stand beneath it and the glass stops reading as a chandelier and starts reading as weather, cool and clear one hour, warm and weightless the next. It belongs to a coastline artists have been translating for more than a hundred years, and to this property alone.
Art No: 1
Artist: Nemo Jantzen
Location: Lobby
Medium: Photographs, Glass Spheres, Resin on Wood
Size: 47 x 50 in.
Date Created: 2020
The first work on your left as you walk into the lobby reads as a portrait of a woman basking in the sun. Step closer and she breaks into hundreds of glass and resin spheres, each a small domed lens magnifying a single photograph. Originally from the Netherlands, artist Nemo Jantzen has lived and worked in New York, Bali and Barcelona, and it shows in these preserved images. Jantzen collects thousands of them (a palm tree, a city skyline, a Coca-Cola cap, a stray word of shop signage), sets each under glass, and arranges them by color until the whole field resolves into a face: warm reds and ambers for the body, deep blues for the sky around her. They look like other people’s vacations, caught and kept. One of the first pieces of art you encounter when you step inside Surf & Sand’s doors, New Blue asks, what new memories will you take home from this trip?
Art No: 2
Artist: Geoffery Gersten
Location: Lobby By the Elevators
Medium: Oil On Canvas
Size: 60 x 48 in.
Date Created: 2020
Aphrodite was born from the sea, and Geoffrey Gersten's Almighty Aphrodite hangs within view of it, just past the lobby on the way to the balcony over the water. The goddess of love and beauty, usually shown rising from the waves, is a sunbather here. Lifted from a midcentury photograph, she’s a black-and-white figure in a polka-dot swimsuit, stretched on a striped towel against a field of yellow and sky-blue flecked with confetti. The words "This Dream And You" float around the edges, leaving you to wonder whether she's dreaming or being dreamt. The red rose at the upper right is Gersten's signature, born from a scuff he once painted over, liked, and kept. Look just under it and you'll find the title scratched into the wet paint in his own hand.
Art No: 3
Artist: Marco Glaviano
Location: Lobby Restroom
Medium: Photograph
Size: 69 x 49 in.
These two photographs of a carefree Cindy Crawford, both shot on a beach (St. Barth in 1991, Cabo a year earlier) are pure black-and-white glamour, hung where you’d least expect to find them. Marco Glaviano turned fashion photography into something closer to fine-art portraiture, and shot the swimsuit calendars that helped make Crawford a household name. The pictures have the warm grain of an older era, yet Glaviano published the first digital fashion photograph in American Vogue, back in 1982, ahead of almost everyone in the business. Shot for Vogue Italia on coastlines not unlike Laguna's, they hold the lazy heat of an afternoon by the water, exactly the kind of day you flew in for.
Art No: 4
Artist: Ran Ortner
Location: Behind the Front Desk
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 42 x 66 in.
Behind the front desk hangs an open stretch of ocean, painted by Ran Ortner. He renders every texture of the water: the crest of a swell, the froth dragging back, the way light sits on a moving surface. Ortner paints almost nothing else, and can spend months on a single wave, building the image from thousands of separate marks. Stand with it a moment. You can't see beneath the surface, and that's the pull. The ocean keeps its depth to itself, the same way the days ahead of you here haven't shown themselves yet. But you can already tell they'll be beautiful. That light on the water is what drew the first California Impressionists to these beaches more than a century ago. It hasn't gone anywhere.
Art No: 5
Artist: Eric Zener
Location: Beside the Front Desk
Medium: Oil On Canvas
Size: 48 x 48 in.
Beside the front desk, a few steps from Ran Ortner’s open wave, Eric Zener gives you a swimmer pushing up through bright blue, her face lost in a cloud of bubbles. It looks like a photograph until you’re close enough to catch the brushwork. Zener grew up on the coast and has spent years surfing. The water in his paintings holds both sides of that, the weightless pleasure and the risk underneath. He crops the figure tight and hides the face, so the swimmer could be anyone. Between them, the two works near the desk give you two views of the water: Ortner’s open surf, Zener’s swimmer suspended in blue. Exhale 2 catches the held-breath calm of gliding underwater, the escape that’s easy to find here.
Art No: 6
Artist: Catherine Howe
Location: Lobby
Medium: Acrylic & mica pigments on canvas
Size: 24 x 30 in.
Date Created: 2024
Wallflower is the wrong name for something this alive. Catherine Howe works in mica, a fine crystalline powder, so the surface of the painting shifts and flares as you move past it, which is what it does here at the turn toward the lobby restroom, catching you on the way by. Against a glossy teal ground, with copper and olive breaking through like light through shallow water, she loops long ribbons of white and cream into luminescent forms somewhere between blossom and sea coral, each stroke streaked with pale colors so the shapes seem to lift off the canvas. Stand close and it keeps shifting on you. Howe has been after water and light the way Laguna’s painters have since 1903. Catching light like this in a hallway is the last place you'd expect it.
Art No: 7
Artist: Kelsey Irvin
Location: Lobby Lounge
Medium: Vintage Ephemera, Acrylic, Gold leaf, & Fabric
Size: 38 x 38 in.
Date Created: 2024
A woman sits on the sand with her back to the room, looking out at the water in a white swimsuit and a wide black-and-white hat. You never see her face, and you don't need to. Facing the ocean the way you will from the balconies here, she stands in for the ease you came for. Look closer and the hat turns to paper: the Capitol Records logo, Frank Sinatra’s name and the record sleeve of ‘The Nearness of You’ worked into the brim. Irvin builds her figures this way, from the cast-off print of another era, and the swimsuit is real fabric set into the canvas. It's a quieter cousin to the café scene she made for Splashes.
Art No: 8
Artist: Stallman Studio
Location: Lobby Lounge
Medium: Sculpted canvas & acrylic
Size: 37 x 75 in.
Date Created: 2024
Eventide transforms as you cross the room. Walk past it left to right and the surface shifts from blue to gold to violet, the way the water outside changes color as the afternoon burns down toward dusk. Stallman Studio, the duo of Jason Hallman and Stephen Stum, created Eventide for this wall using a method they call canvas on edge: strips of painted canvas layered and sculpted on their sides until a flat panel reads as a moving swell. Stand still and it settles into one picture. Move, and the light rolls across it like weather coming off the Pacific. It was made for Surf & Sand and hangs here alone.
Art No: 9
Artist: Justin Teilhet
Location: Lobby Lounge
Medium: Ceramic
Size: 36 x 28 in.
Date Created: 2024
Hundreds of small ceramic tiles, set by hand, ripple across these two panels like ripples of sand created by waves lapping on the beach. From across the lounge they read as soft swells. Up close the surface turns almost scale-like, each tile catching the light at its own angle, with the look of clay cracked dry in the sun. Justin Teilhet has spent years working this kind of depth into ceramic, at every size from the intimate to the wall-sized. The pair hangs by the lounge seating near the balconies, made for the slow, up-close looking a stay here invites. It looks just as good from the far side of the room.
Art No: 12
Artist: Justin Teilhet
Location: Lobby Lounge
Medium: Ceramic
Size: 36 x 28 in.
Date Created: 2024
Hundreds of small ceramic tiles, set by hand, ripple across these two panels like ripples of sand created by waves lapping on the beach. From across the lounge they read as soft swells. Up close the surface turns almost scale-like, each tile catching the light at its own angle, with the look of clay cracked dry in the sun. Justin Teilhet has spent years working this kind of depth into ceramic, at every size from the intimate to the wall-sized. The pair hangs by the lounge seating near the balconies, made for the slow, up-close looking a stay here invites. It looks just as good from the far side of the room.
Art No: 10
Artist: Bronson Shonk
Location: Lobby Lounge
Medium: Acrylic on layered glass
Size: 21 x 10 x 4.6 in.
Date Created: 2024
Up close, Perennial Motion looks like a bouquet held in clear resin. It isn't. Seattle-based artist Bronson Shonk paints on sheet after sheet of glass and stacks them, so the blooms gain depth the way real flowers crowd a vase. Step to the side and the illusion comes apart into separate brushmarks floating on separate panes, each pane catching the light at its own angle. The flowers are specific ones: ranunculus, torch ginger, red peony. Their colors come from an arrangement by a friend who runs a flower farm on the Washington coast, the same farm where Shonk and his wife were married. Set in front of the lounge mirror, the piece doubles back on itself, the glass and its reflection passing the bouquet between them. It rewards the second look.
Art No: 11
Artist: Christy Lee Rogers
Location: Lobby Lounge
Medium: Archival pigment print on Dibond
Size: 36 x 27 in.
Date Created: 2022
At first, Flower Bodies is a mass of blooms. Hold your eye on it and limbs surface, then whole bodies, tangled among the petals: a shoulder here, the curve of a back there, a hand reaching up through the flowers. Christy Lee Rogers shoots her subjects underwater at night, the water lifting them into a slow, weightless drift she never spells out. Printed on a sleek aluminum panel, the image takes on a sheen that makes you feel like you’re looking down through the surface at the scene below. The deep color and floating light give it the richness of an old painting, surprising in a photograph. The figures drift in the current, lit and unhurried, caught the way only Rogers can, a few steps from the real thing outside.
Art No: 13
Artist: Max Steven Grossman
Location: Lobby Lounge
Medium: Archival pigment print on Dibond
Size: 37 x 75 in.
Date Created: 2024
Walk up to this and you'll swear it's a bookshelf. Guests do it all day, the concierge says. It's actually a photograph. Max Steven Grossman builds his Bookscapes one spine at a time, shooting books in stores and collections around the world, then assembling them into a library that never existed, this one stocked with the names that shaped modern and contemporary art. He trained as an engineer before turning to photography, and it shows in the way he built this piece: real shadow and depth, each volume at its own angle, one tilted as if just pulled and set back. Find the names you know, Warhol, Hockney, O’Keeffe, then take the sofa, pick your own beach read, and let the ocean off the balcony do the rest.
Art No: 14
Artist: Kelsey Irvin
Location: Lobby Lounge
Medium: Vintage ephemera, acrylic, & fabric on canvas
Size: 38 x 38 in.
Another of Kelsey Irvin's faceless women, this one standing in profile at the water's edge, the brim of her hat pulled low, her hand raised as if she just picked a shell up off the beach and is rolling it between her fingers. The background moves from blue, teal and periwinkle into grey and gold, some of it soft as watercolor, like spray drifting off the surf. The texture is what you’ll remember about this piece: a woven hat that looks ready to lift off the canvas, a white wrap set in real fabric that ripples as if the breeze just caught it, gold leaf running across her skin and down into the sand below. Look closely and you'll find the cast-off prints of other lives worked into the figure, the same trick Irvin pulls in the Sinatra-hat piece nearby. This woman holds the far end of the lounge by the concierge desk, in no hurry to be anywhere else.
Art No: 15
Artist: Janna Watson
Location: Lobby Lounge (next to Concierge Desk)
Medium: Mixed media on panel
Size: 78 x 36 in.
Date Created: 2025
Up close, Summer Rain is all motion. Wide ribbons of mauve, violet, grey and white turn over one another as if the paint is still wet, with smaller bursts of coral and peach clustered at the edges, like flowers caught in a downpour. Janna Watson paints her canvases on the floor, with no composition set in advance, letting the swing of her arm decide where a mark lands. Her subject is the sky and its shifting, no-place moods from a studio walled in floor-to-ceiling glass in the Grey County forest north of Toronto, where she watches the seasons turn. A color palette that could read as a grey morning instead feels full of possibility. Hung near the concierge desk, this piece is worth a pause on the way through: the weather of somewhere else, holding still beside the ocean's own
Art No: 16
Artist: Kelsey Irvin
Location: Splashes Restaurant
Medium: Vintage ephemera, found object, oil, acrylic, & leather on canvas
Size: 72 x 84 in.
Assembling the old and the new, Laguna Beach local artist Kelsey Irvin builds her scenes from vintage scraps: printed ephemera, found objects, fabric and leather are layered with oil and acrylic until a café that was never real carries the weight of memory. Café Campari sets you at a table you're sure you've sat at before, yet it never existed. Spend a minute with this piece and you'll start to see just how many details of the scene have been plucked from somewhere else: torn labels, scraps of cloth, a vintage sheet-music cover for 'Syncopated Gems for Alto,' the cane webbing pulled from a chair. Each fragment is set into a new story. Stay with it a moment and the borrowed pieces keep surfacing. Keep your eyes open, and you’ll see more of Irvin’s work throughout the property.
Art No: 17
Artist: Yorgo Kypris
Location: Splashes
Medium: Mixed Media, Metal on Panel
Size: 31 x 48 in.
Date Created: 2024
Look above the fireplace in Splashes and a school of fish wheels through blue water, mid-turn, as if the whole shoal changed its mind at once. Step closer and the fish turn solid: each one is a small sculpture in copper and aluminum, set into a deep frame and casting shadows against a photographic sea. Yorgos Kypris trained as a ceramicist before he moved to metal, and he makes fine jewelry too. You can read it in the precision of every little body in Acqua. He grew up in Cyprus and works now between Santorini and Athens, never far from the water his Acqua series keeps coming back to. Hung steps from the water, it puts a whole sea's worth of motion on the wall and keeps it there.
Art No: 19
Artist: Tyler Shields
Location: Splashes Bar
Medium: Chromogenic print on Kodak Endura Luster paper
Size: 28 x 42 in.
Date Created:Oct 2025
Head towards the bar and you’ll see Still Water on your way. A woman lies in shallow water, her back to you, a length of cloth wrapped at her hips and the water blurred to long painterly streaks around her. Tyler Shields drops the horizon out completely, leaving nothing in the frame but water, light, and one still figure. The blue of her wrap and the sea blend together until she half-dissolves into it. Shields’ other piece on the property, the helicopter shot in the Laguna Ballroom, runs on risk and adrenaline. This is the opposite mood: proof he can do both. With the real waves breaking just past the window behind you, it’s an easy place to lose a minute.
Art No: 20
Artist: Reza Torabi
Location: Towers Corridor Level 1
Medium: Mixed media on canvas, loose
Size: 52 x 63 in.
Date Created: Oct 2025
Three bicycles ride down this corridor, none of them quite a bicycle. Reza Torabi paints them out of color and clamor: a black seat flecked with white dots, a checkerboard panel, wheel-fenders striped like beach umbrellas, the word “Me” scrawled in red across a frame. Stand with any of the three and the surface keeps offering more: layers of paint, scratched-in text, small scenes cut into the canvas, loose shapes laid over older ones. Torabi has painted since childhood and trained as a musician too, and there’s a song’s harmony in how these hold together. He left Iran for Turkey and then the United States through a United Nations program for artists starting over, and the work keeps that restless, in-motion feel. Hung the length of the corridor, the three Obsessions turn a hallway into the long way round, worth taking slow.
Art No: 21
Artist: Reza Torabi
Location: Towers Corridor Level 1
Medium: Mixed media on canvas, loose
Size: 52 x 52 in.
Date Created: Oct 2025
Three bicycles ride down this corridor, none of them quite a bicycle. Reza Torabi paints them out of color and clamor: a black seat flecked with white dots, a checkerboard panel, wheel-fenders striped like beach umbrellas, the word “Me” scrawled in red across a frame. Stand with any of the three and the surface keeps offering more: layers of paint, scratched-in text, small scenes cut into the canvas, loose shapes laid over older ones. Torabi has painted since childhood and trained as a musician too, and there’s a song’s harmony in how these hold together. He left Iran for Turkey and then the United States through a United Nations program for artists starting over, and the work keeps that restless, in-motion feel. Hung the length of the corridor, the three Obsessions turn a hallway into the long way round, worth taking slow.
Art No: 22
Artist: Reza Torabi
Location: Towers Corridor Level 1
Medium: Mixed media on canvas, loose
Size: 42 x 36 in.
Date Created: Oct 2025
Three bicycles ride down this corridor, none of them quite a bicycle. Reza Torabi paints them out of color and clamor: a black seat flecked with white dots, a checkerboard panel, wheel-fenders striped like beach umbrellas, the word “Me” scrawled in red across a frame. Stand with any of the three and the surface keeps offering more: layers of paint, scratched-in text, small scenes cut into the canvas, loose shapes laid over older ones. Torabi has painted since childhood and trained as a musician too, and there’s a song’s harmony in how these hold together. He left Iran for Turkey and then the United States through a United Nations program for artists starting over, and the work keeps that restless, in-motion feel. Hung the length of the corridor, the three Obsessions turn a hallway into the long way round, worth taking slow.
Art No: 23
Artist: Pacific Art
Location: Towers Meeting Rooms Level 6 & 7
Medium: TBA
Art No: 25
Artist: Jorg Dubin
Location: Bella Vista Terrace
Medium: Stainless steel
Date Created: NA
A ten-foot wave curls at the entrance to Surf & Sand, caught the instant before it breaks. Its mirror surface reflects back the palm trees, the Laguna hills, and the sky, while a bed of blue and clear glass at its foot stands in for the foam. The stainless steel captures the metallic look of the ocean at different times of day: blinding one hour, soft and glassy the next. Local to Laguna Beach, artist Jorg Dubin used the same alloy for Tempest that can be found in the sphere central to his 9/11 memorial in Heisler Park just up the coast. The polished metal is meant to hand you back your own reflection. Step close, and you join the wave, the roses at its base, and the ocean beyond.
Art No: 26
Artist: Eric Zener
Location: Conference Pre Function
Medium: Oil On Canvas
Size: 48 x 48 in.
Date Created: NA
You met Eric Zener once already, in the lobby when you checked in: the swimmer seen from above. Here he keeps the water and lets the swimmer disappear. The figure has gone under, and all that’s left is the plume of the plunge. Spray leaps off the pool’s surface, a green Montecito hillside steady behind it. Zener works the spatter so finely, you almost flinch from the drops before you remember it’s paint. Montecito Morning is a single second of chaos, stopped cold. The whole property runs on water in motion; here it’s caught at its loudest and held. Set where the Laguna Ballroom opens up, between arriving and whatever you’ve come dressed for, it’s a bit of play before the event begins.
Art No: 27
Artist: Tyler Shields
Location: Laguna Ballroom Pre Function
Medium: Chromogenic Print on Kodak Endura Luster
Size: 45 x 60 in.
Every image Tyler Shields makes is shot on film, with nothing added after the shutter. No effects, no digital fixes. This large-scale picture is the proof. The tilted hat brim, mist banked on the mountains behind, a helicopter edging into the corner of the frame: all of it caught in one instant, rather than stitched together later. Shields left school early to skateboard professionally before pursuing photography, and that appetite for risk still runs through his work. At a time when a convincing image can be conjured from nothing in seconds, this photograph demonstrates what it takes to capture a perfectly choreographed moment. Shields shot it on an IMAX camera and made the first fine-art print ever pulled from an IMAX negative. His blend of vintage reference and contemporary edge runs through the rest of the collection here too.
Art No: 28
Artist: Robert Mars
Location: Laguna Ballroom Pre Function
Medium: Oil On Canvas
Size: 50 in. diameter
Sophia Loren looks back at you from a circle of bright pink and grey, her photograph printed in newsprint halftone with the word VOGUE laid in giant black type across her. Robert Mars builds his portraits out of the 1950s and 60s, layering vintage ad clippings and magazine logos, era-accurate down to the fonts, over a tessellated pattern borrowed from American quilts. He was the first to bring that quilt geometry into pop art, and here it pays off: the hard pink chevrons throw the soft black-and-white film still into relief. A coat of high-gloss resin seals the surface like glass. Look close and you’ll see a LIFE logo and a torn headline reading STYLE: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE, echoing Surf & Sand’s mix of vintage-meets-now. It hangs where the dressed-up crowd gathers before an event, the right company for a little old-Hollywood glamour.
Art No: 29
Artist: Costa Christo
Date Captured: July 2022
Medium: Archival pigment print on acrylic face-mount
Size: 39 x 28 in.
Location: France
Inspiration: “French Blue" was captured on a hot summer day - specifically Bastille Day in Nice, France, in the summer of 2022. It was the first fully open and traditionally celebrated Bastille Day since the tragic 2016 terrorist attack. Emotions ran high around the city. The blue umbrellas at the beach club really captured that sense of innocent summer fun and I stood there for a while before capturing the shot. What I love about this Image is that you see all these glimpses of people arms, legs, feet but never anyone’s face. It’s all about the atmosphere.
Medium / Materials: Photographic paper on gallery acrylic face-mount Ink: Archival Pigment Paper: EPSON Glossy Acrylic Thickness: 1/8 in Protection: 99% UV Protection + Abrasion Resistant Paper Weight: 250gsm Finish: High gloss with anti-reflective coating
Edition Info: "French Blue" is a Limited Edition of 15, meaning the Image will only be produced a total of 15 times. Whether the Image is printed on acrylic, cotton paper, a Porsche hood, a Ferrari hood, etc., all count toward the 15 Editions.
Rows of blue-and-white umbrellas run down to the Mediterranean, and not a single face appears in the frame. Costa Christ shot French Blue on Bastille Day in Nice, France in the summer of 2022, and what he held onto was the atmosphere of the day: an outstretched leg, a towel, a sliver of someone mid-doze, the rest left to the umbrellas. They hold the scene together. Their stripes pick up the blue of the water behind them, and they lean and crowd together like a cast of characters standing in for the people you never quite see. Nothing pins the scene to France. Trade that sea for the one outside your window and it could be a July afternoon here, the kind where the hours blur and nobody checks a watch. That feeling of ease is the whole point.
Art No: 30
Artist: K. Nari
Location: Seaview Suite Rm 251
Medium: Acrylic painting on canvas
Size: 40 x 40 in.
Orchids on a wash of seafoam green and blue, painted so loosely you’d take it for watercolor, except K. Nari works in acrylic paint, layering thin colors until the surface keeps that same soft bleed. She grew up drawing beside her mother, a seamstress and self-taught painter, in Seoul, came to Los Angeles as a child, and now works out of Scottsdale, landlocked in the desert. Orchids are among her favorite subjects, and the Vanda is one of the showier ones: a flower that grows on air, its roots reaching down into nothing. Here the blooms float on color that could be the shallows just past the sand. Look from the canvas to the window and the greens rhyme. The water she left out is right outside the glass.
Art No: 31
Artist: Katherine Burns
Location: Spa Level 1
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Date Created: 2024
All water, almost no shore. Katharine Burns paints the ocean so closely, and so exactly, that people standing in front of her canvases argue over whether they’re looking at a photograph. This one holds a single wave at the point of collapse: the curl folding over, foam piling in the trough, the backwash pulling away in thin lines. Burns grew up on the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia and observes the ocean from a sea kayak, which is why the water moves like something watched for years rather than copied once. She gives you nothing to place this wave, so it could be Nova Scotia or the set breaking past the deck here. You’ve already met her work if you’ve been to the spa. The real thing is a few steps from your door.
Art No: 32
Artist: Liz Jardine
Location: Seaview Suite Rm 251
Medium: Mixed media on canvas
Size: 20 x 20 in.
Blue poppies almost shouldn’t exist. The true blue ones are a Himalayan species, notoriously hard to keep alive, which is part of what makes Liz Jardine’s bloom the way they do against a sheet of gold. It’s a rare thing given a rare setting. She builds them in mixed media on canvas, the petals a clean cornflower blue, a few stems reaching past the edge as if the plant outgrew its frame. Jardine paints out of her San Diego studio, flowers and water as her subjects more than anything else. The blue here is the blue waiting outside, poppies standing in for the sea and sky just past the window. A companion canvas hangs in a neighboring suite, and you’ll find more of her work down at the spa.
Art No: 34
Artist: April Leila
Location: Penthouse Powder 2
Medium: Mixed media on yupo paper
Size: 23 x 17 in.
Up close, Aria Air #11 is mostly weather and water: sea green, sky blue, deep navy and a sandy brown, pulled into broad strokes and laid over with a metallic shimmer that catches like sun on a wet surface. April Midkiff, who paints under the studio name Leila, works on yupo, a slick synthetic paper that lets color pool, bead and run instead of soaking in, so the surface keeps a just-poured shine. An aria is a melody, and it is also the Italian word for air; the title holds both, and the piece sounds like a few clear notes of color set against the white of the page. A third-generation Arizonan, Leila paints from the desert she grew up in. Hung here, her work reads as the water just past your window, like surf thrown up and caught mid-spray.
Art No: 40
Artist: April Leila
Location: Penthouse Powder 3
Medium: Mixed media on yupo paper
Size: 23 x 17 in.
Grey, silver, a little gold, a wash of pale blue: this painting is the waterfront on a foggy morning, the minute before the sun burns off the marine layer. April Midkiff, who signs her work Leila, lets the paint open from top to bottom in broad metallic streaks, like a pair of butterfly wings drawing apart and back together. Sit with it. The center holds the deeper color, and the longer you look the more the edges earn their keep: a drip here, a band of bare paper there, the empty space weighted as carefully as the paint. It’s one of her Aria pieces, more of which hang elsewhere in the resort. Each painting is a few clear notes of color and quiet, the visual version of the hush over the water at this hour.
Art No: 51
Artist: Katherine Burns
Location: tbd
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Date Created: 2024
At first glance it’s a photograph. Stand closer and it’s oil. Katharine Burns paints a single wave with everything in it: spray lifting off the crest, sun cutting through the lip, foam bubbling up and dragging back before the next one lands. She grew up on the Atlantic in Nova Scotia and studies the ocean’s surface from a kayak, which is why her waves carry nothing but the water doing what water does. She lets the sea behave like a character and catches it mid-performance. Up here in the spa, away from the sand, her painting brings the ocean to you: a wave held still, easy to lose yourself in while you let everything else go. This one never breaks.
Art No: 37
Artist: Costa Christ
Date Captured: July 2015
Size: 50 x 47 in.
Location: Greece
Inspiration: "Thalassa," which means "ocean" in Greek, has a deeply personal backstory. It was taken in 2015 in Nafpaktos, Greece, during the week of my wedding to Jackie. We were on a ferry leaving town to pick up her family that had flow in, and I just captured the water rushing under the propellers. It was never meant to be part of any series, but it’s become one of my top sellers, especially on Porsche hoods.
Medium / Materials: Medium: pearl metallic super gloss vinyl on genuine Porsche 911 (type 964) hood Porsche Color: ArtToSample, White Crest: Vintage Crest
Edition Info: "Thalassa" is a Limited Edition of 30, meaning the Image will only be produced a total of 30 times. Whether the Image is printed on acrylic, cotton paper, a Porsche hood, a Ferrari hood, etc., all count toward the 30 Editions.
Costa Christ takes a single photograph and runs it onto surfaces you wouldn’t expect. Thalassa (the Greek word for sea) lives on the steel hood of a Porsche 911. He shot the image in Nafpaktos, Greece, the week he got married, leaning over the rail of a ferry while the water boiled white under the propellers. This photo was never meant for a series, yet it became one of his best-known pieces. What hangs in the suite is all turbulence and foam, the sea at full churn, frozen on a curve of automotive metal. No horizon, no boat, just the water doing what the Pacific is doing a hundred yards from your room. A piece of moving ocean, held still and brought indoors.
Art No: 38
Artist: Liz Jardine
Location: TBD
Medium: Mixed media on canvas
Size: 20 x 20 in.
Blue poppies almost shouldn’t exist. The true blue ones are a Himalayan species, notoriously hard to keep alive, which is part of what makes Liz Jardine’s bloom the way they do against a sheet of gold. It’s a rare thing given a rare setting. She builds them in mixed media on canvas, the petals a clean cornflower blue, a few stems reaching past the edge as if the plant outgrew its frame. Jardine paints out of her San Diego studio, flowers and water as her subjects more than anything else. The blue here is the blue waiting outside, poppies standing in for the sea and sky just past the window. A companion canvas hangs in a neighboring suite, and you’ll find more of her work down at the spa.
Art No: 39
Artist: Costa Christ
Date Created: July 2019
Size: 39 x 28 in.
Location: Greece
Inspiration: "One Fire" was taken in Praiano, Italy. While everyone else was dancing during the beach club’s famous "melon time," I quietly captured a peaceful moment as the afternoon unfolded. It’s an Image that turned from a personal snapshot into another top seller.
Medium / Materials: Medium: Photographic paper on gallery acrylic face-mount Ink: Archival Pigment Paper: EPSON Glossy Acrylic Thickness: 1/8 in Protection: 99% UV Protection + Abrasion Resistant Paper Weight: 250gsm Finish: High gloss with anti-reflective coating
Edition Info: "Santo” is a Limited Edition of 30, meaning the Image will only be produced a total of 30 times. Whether the Image is printed on acrylic, cotton paper, a Porsche hood, a Ferrari hood, etc., all count toward the 30 Editions.
Before Costa Christ made prints like this, he spent close to a decade photographing homes (two thousand of them) and shot every one in natural light alone, no flash, no rigs. Santo shows it. A white Cycladic archway frames a wedge of the Aegean, the light landing exactly where the architecture looks best, the sea and the curve of coast set cleanly in the opening. The whole image is made up of sea and surf tones: blue, white, grey, a breath of green. Mounted to glossy acrylic, it reads like a window cut into a wall in Greece, giving us a peek of someone else’s bright morning on the other side of the world. The calm in that doorway is the same calm you came here for, an ocean away and right outside at once.
Art No: 41
Artist: Kelsey Irvin
Location: TBD
Medium: Mixed media ephemera on panel
Size: 48 x 36 in.
A woman lies back on the sand in her beach best, and almost none of her is paint. Kelsey Irvin builds her subject from salvage: the hat pieced from old cloth, the swimsuit cut from white, sand and black scraps, and gold leaf laid down for the necklace and the bracelets at her wrist. Quilted fabric fragments give her body its weight and the shadow beneath her its depth. Judging by the short, hard shadows, the sun is straight overhead, but she isn’t only sunbathing. She’s looking out at the water, gone somewhere in her head. The angle Irvin catches gives the sea a slow forward push. You’ll know the artist’s hand from the café scene she made for Splashes: the same vintage patterns, the same light touch, here turned to a single figure at total ease. She isn’t waiting for the trip to start; she’s already in it.
Art No: 42
Artist: Liz Jardine
Location: TBD
Medium: Mixed media on canvas
Size: 20 x 20 in.
This is the third of Liz Jardine’s blue poppies in the collection, and the one to take in from across the room. Pull the chair to the window and let it sit at a distance: from there the gold-leaf ground turns warm and aged, less like metal than like old, late sunlight. The blooms run their whole cycle: buds barely closed, a few just opened, two heavy ones with petals about to fall. Meanwhile the stems trail upward so faintly you can almost watch them reach. Cool blue against warm gold, a garden fixed at golden hour. Hold it against the real view out the window and the painting and the coast keep the same light. Jardine’s poppies appear more than once at Surf & Sand; this is the one that rewards the long look from the far side of the room.
Art No: 43
Artist: Mary Mackey
Location: California Suite, 440
Medium: Acrylic painting on paper
Size: 30 x 22 in.
From across the room it’s a seahorse. Up close it comes apart into what it actually is: a loose gathering of lines, sea-green curves, and washed shapes that only assemble into a creature when you step back. Mary Mackey worked as a photographer before she turned to abstraction, and you can feel that eye in the way she frames a fragment of underwater life and leaves your own eye to finish it. Follow one of the green forms as it bends and you drop into a glimpse of the world below the surface, seen secondhand, through someone else’s looking. There’s another Mackey across the suite, with a second creature to find. The water this one half-remembers is the water filling your window.
Art No: 46
Artist: Mary Mackey
Location: California Suite, 440
Medium: Acrylic painting on paper
Size: 30 x 22 in.
One of two Mary Mackey paintings in this suite, this one plays the same game as Seahorse, in a sunnier key. Look long enough and a seahorse surfaces again, a crowned head, a curved body, the hint of a tail, though Mackey never says so and leaves you to find it. This one runs warm: pale, sunlit color barely flecked with blue, black and a little pink, where the other seahorse keeps to sea-green. It's part of her Deco Series, the shapes cleaner and more patterned than her looser work. One creature seems to drift in cool water; this one basks in warm light, not unlike what you'll be doing on the sand this week.
Art No: 51
Artist: Mary Mackey
Location: TBD
Medium: Acrylic painting on paper
Size: 30 x 22 in.
One of two Mary Mackey paintings in this suite, this one plays the same game as Seahorse, in a sunnier key. Look long enough and a seahorse surfaces again, a crowned head, a curved body, the hint of a tail, though Mackey never says so and leaves you to find it. This one runs warm: pale, sunlit color barely flecked with blue, black and a little pink, where the other seahorse keeps to sea-green. It's part of her Deco Series, the shapes cleaner and more patterned than her looser work. One creature seems to drift in cool water; this one basks in warm light, not unlike what you'll be doing on the sand this week.
Art No: 44
Artist: Christy Lee Rogers
Location: Cali Suite Rm 440
Medium: Archival Pigment Pring on Dibond
Size: 48 x 36 in.
Life, Love and Experience looks painted: a swirl of bodies and fabric lit from within, deep taupe and terracotta giving way to lavender and purple. It’s actually a photograph. Christy Lee Rogers works at night in a lit pool, choreographing her subjects underwater until the water softens everything into brushwork and the whole image starts to read like a 17th-century canvas. You met her work in the lounge; this piece runs darker and richer. It belongs to her Myths and Legends series, where she restages old stories beneath the surface. The drama of one is here in full, with fabric gathering and lifting like wings, a scene caught mid-turn underwater. Most of the Surf & Sand collection runs on daylight; this is one of the few pieces that doesn’t.
Art No: 45
Artist: TBD
Location: California Suite, 440
Medium: TBD
Art No: 50
Artist: TBD
Location: Vista Suite, 450
Medium: TBD
Art No: 47
Artist: Leila
Location: TBD
Medium: Mixed media on yupo pape
Size: 24 x 24 in.
Two panels, meant to be seen together: Overlay #5 and #6 are weather over open water, caught mid-change. April Midkiff, who signs her work Leila, works fast and light here, with taupe, white, grey and dark blue pulled across the sheet in strokes that still show the bristle of the brush, with gold and brown grounding it all to sand. One panel answers the other. A bank of white gathers at the center of each, the way a squall holds something back before it lets go. Yupo paper takes paint without absorbing it, so the color sits up on the surface and keeps the speed of the hand that laid it down. Step back and the two read as one slow time-lapse: the marine layer rolling in, breaking up, and rolling in again over the same coast you can see from the suite. There are several Leila pieces here at Surf & Sand, each catching the water in a different key
Art No: 48
Artist: Eric Zene
Location: TBD
Medium: Aluminum print
Size: 40 in. diameter
A swimmer hangs suspended underwater, a column of silver bubbles streaming off her like a chandelier turned loose. That plume is the title, and it’s the first thing the eye follows. Eric Zener, whose work you’ve met at the front desk and off the Laguna Ballroom, never shows you her face. The picture is about light and water rather than the person. We see the sun breaking the surface above, hair drawn upward, the cool dark gathering below. This one is printed on aluminum rather than painted; the dye is fused into the metal under heat, which is why the water seems lit from just under its own surface. She’s caught at the still point of a long glide, going nowhere and perfectly at ease. The same sound carries in from just outside the suite: a swimmer breaking the surface, then the calm that follows.
Art No: 49
Artist: Pete Tillack
Location: TBD
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 30 x 80 in.
A woman stands looking out to sea, sun hat on, her back to you. It’s the same solitary gaze you may recognize from Kelsey Irvin’s beach figures elsewhere on property, though Pete Tillack gets there in oil paint rather than salvaged materials. He left Australia at twenty-three for what was meant to be a short surfing trip, and spent the next ten years chasing waves around the world before he landed on the California coast and taught himself to paint. That surfer’s read of water and light runs through his work. He likes to take a familiar scene and work it until it holds some weight, and the title gives a wink here: All Day Parking, a spot held on the sand for as long as you want it. If you can’t make it down to the beach below, this is the next best seat.
Art No: 52
Artist: GK Austin
Location: Spa Level 1
Medium: Digital Fractal Flame Collage
Size: 60 x 40 in.
Almost nothing else in the collection shows the ocean at night, but this one does. It’s the sea under a full moon, worked into something between feathers and an ink-brush painting. GK Austin builds his images from fractals, the same self-repeating patterns that shape nautilus shells, honeycombs and rosettes, remixing them digitally until they fold into shapes nature never quite made. He calls the method by his own name, Fractalism, and prints the result bonded to aluminum under heat and pressure, so the surface holds a wet, metallic glow. The title tips its hat to Hokusai’s great wave, redrawn here in moonlight. A Great Wave in Asian Sea belongs to his Super Critical Liquid series, and it’s tuned for this room: a slow pull toward letting go. Float in front of it long enough and the spa does the rest.
Art No: 53
Artist: Liz Jardin
Location: Spa Entrance
Medium: Acrylic on canvas, loose
Size: 50 x 70 in.
Liz Jardine turns up all over the property, and this is the largest canvas she has here: a wide field of grey and white with steely blue, taupe, gold and a deep black worked in underneath. She paints from nature, and the title points the way. Jet Stream is a band of clouds strung high above the earth, weather seen from above. Read it differently and it’s the marine layer settling low over the coast, the same haze that burns off your window most mornings. Both images are there at once, and you don't have to pick one. There's nothing here you have to solve, and at this size that's the point: a wide, open field to step into and let your eyes drift, exactly what a room like this is for.
Art No: 54
Artist: Katherine Linkersdorff
Location: TBD
Medium: TBD
Size: 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in.
Three photographs line the hallway between the spa lounge and the treatment rooms, and they reward a slow walk. Kathrin Linkersdorff trained as an architect in Japan, where she took up sumi ink painting and the idea of wabi-sabi, that things fading and imperfect are worth looking at closely. Her Fairies series began as an experiment that turned her studio into a small laboratory. She dries tulips for months, draws the color back out of them as a liquid, then lowers the spent flowers into fluid and lets the petals unfurl again. What you’re seeing is that second life. The forms hang weightless and half-translucent, stems and their reflections trailing below like jellyfish in water. They're worth lingering over: beauty in the middle of changing, somewhere between the lounge and the quiet of the table.
Art No: 55
Artist: Katherine Linkersdorff
Location: TBD
Medium: TBD
Size: 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in.
Three photographs line the hallway between the spa lounge and the treatment rooms, and they reward a slow walk. Kathrin Linkersdorff trained as an architect in Japan, where she took up sumi ink painting and the idea of wabi-sabi, that things fading and imperfect are worth looking at closely. Her Fairies series began as an experiment that turned her studio into a small laboratory. She dries tulips for months, draws the color back out of them as a liquid, then lowers the spent flowers into fluid and lets the petals unfurl again. What you’re seeing is that second life. The forms hang weightless and half-translucent, stems and their reflections trailing below like jellyfish in water. They're worth lingering over: beauty in the middle of changing, somewhere between the lounge and the quiet of the table.
Art No: 56
Artist: Katherine Linkersdorff
Location: TBD
Medium: TBD
Size: 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in.
Three photographs line the hallway between the spa lounge and the treatment rooms, and they reward a slow walk. Kathrin Linkersdorff trained as an architect in Japan, where she took up sumi ink painting and the idea of wabi-sabi, that things fading and imperfect are worth looking at closely. Her Fairies series began as an experiment that turned her studio into a small laboratory. She dries tulips for months, draws the color back out of them as a liquid, then lowers the spent flowers into fluid and lets the petals unfurl again. What you’re seeing is that second life. The forms hang weightless and half-translucent, stems and their reflections trailing below like jellyfish in water. They're worth lingering over: beauty in the middle of changing, somewhere between the lounge and the quiet of the table.
Art No: 57
Artist: Liz Jardine
Location: Relaxation Area 1
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 36 x 36 in.
A larger Liz Jardine canvas hangs in the spa lounge. These paintings are cooler in key: misty branches in layered blue and white, the paint left to run in thin drips down the canvas like rain still coming off the leaves. The two panels are halves of one view, a window cut into a garden, which is what she calls the series: Slice of Heaven. Step back and it could be coming into focus or slipping out of it; she holds it right on that edge, the leaves dissolving as they reach the borders. The blues and whites are the same ones at work outside the glass: water, clouds, the soft light off the sea. That softening at the edges is the assignment for the next hour, the day’s hard corners melting off while you sit still and let the room do its part.
Art No: 58
Artist: Liz Jardine
Location: Relaxation Area 2
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Size: 36 x 36 in.
A larger Liz Jardine canvas hangs in the spa lounge. These paintings are cooler in key: misty branches in layered blue and white, the paint left to run in thin drips down the canvas like rain still coming off the leaves. The two panels are halves of one view, a window cut into a garden, which is what she calls the series: Slice of Heaven. Step back and it could be coming into focus or slipping out of it; she holds it right on that edge, the leaves dissolving as they reach the borders. The blues and whites are the same ones at work outside the glass: water, clouds, the soft light off the sea. That softening at the edges is the assignment for the next hour, the day’s hard corners melting off while you sit still and let the room do its part.
Art No: 59
Artist: Stacy D’Aquiar
Location: Spa Treatment RM 8
Medium: Acrylic on canvas, loose
Size: 24 x 18 in.
One painting from Stacy D’Aguiar’s Dreamy Greens series hangs in each treatment room on this floor. They’re variations on a theme: loose green leaves, more felt than drawn, floating against a metallic ground that shifts as the light moves. D’Aguiar works out of San Diego and builds her paintings in see-through layers, folding in the things that matter to her, like Reiki energy and the repeating shapes of sacred geometry, so the surface reads calm. There’s a thread worth knowing here: she trained under Liz Jardine, whose canvases hang a floor below, so the spa keeps the teacher and the student under one roof. Green is the color you came here to feel, growing and unhurried and easy on the eye. It’s the color in front of you as you let your eyes rest.
Art No: 62
Artist: Stacy D’Aquiar
Location: Spa Treatment RM 4
Medium: Acrylic on canvas, loose
Size: 24 x 18 in.
One painting from Stacy D’Aguiar’s Dreamy Greens series hangs in each treatment room on this floor. They’re variations on a theme: loose green leaves, more felt than drawn, floating against a metallic ground that shifts as the light moves. D’Aguiar works out of San Diego and builds her paintings in see-through layers, folding in the things that matter to her, like Reiki energy and the repeating shapes of sacred geometry, so the surface reads calm. There’s a thread worth knowing here: she trained under Liz Jardine, whose canvases hang a floor below, so the spa keeps the teacher and the student under one roof. Green is the color you came here to feel, growing and unhurried and easy on the eye. It’s the color in front of you as you let your eyes rest.
Art No: 65
Artist: Stacy D’Aquiar
Location: Spa Treatment RM 6
Medium: Acrylic on canvas, loose
Size: 24 x 18 in.
One painting from Stacy D’Aguiar’s Dreamy Greens series hangs in each treatment room on this floor. They’re variations on a theme: loose green leaves, more felt than drawn, floating against a metallic ground that shifts as the light moves. D’Aguiar works out of San Diego and builds her paintings in see-through layers, folding in the things that matter to her, like Reiki energy and the repeating shapes of sacred geometry, so the surface reads calm. There’s a thread worth knowing here: she trained under Liz Jardine, whose canvases hang a floor below, so the spa keeps the teacher and the student under one roof. Green is the color you came here to feel, growing and unhurried and easy on the eye. It’s the color in front of you as you let your eyes rest.
Art No: 60
Artist: Stacy D’Aquiar
Location: Spa Treatment RM 7
Medium: Acrylic on canvas, loose
Size: 24 x 18 in.
One painting from Stacy D’Aguiar’s Dreamy Greens series hangs in each treatment room on this floor. They’re variations on a theme: loose green leaves, more felt than drawn, floating against a metallic ground that shifts as the light moves. D’Aguiar works out of San Diego and builds her paintings in see-through layers, folding in the things that matter to her, like Reiki energy and the repeating shapes of sacred geometry, so the surface reads calm. There’s a thread worth knowing here: she trained under Liz Jardine, whose canvases hang a floor below, so the spa keeps the teacher and the student under one roof. Green is the color you came here to feel, growing and unhurried and easy on the eye. It’s the color in front of you as you let your eyes rest.
Art No: 63
Artist: Stacy D’Aquiar
Location: Spa Treatment RM 5
Medium: Acrylic on canvas, loose
Size: 24 x 18 in.
One painting from Stacy D’Aguiar’s Dreamy Greens series hangs in each treatment room on this floor. They’re variations on a theme: loose green leaves, more felt than drawn, floating against a metallic ground that shifts as the light moves. D’Aguiar works out of San Diego and builds her paintings in see-through layers, folding in the things that matter to her, like Reiki energy and the repeating shapes of sacred geometry, so the surface reads calm. There’s a thread worth knowing here: she trained under Liz Jardine, whose canvases hang a floor below, so the spa keeps the teacher and the student under one roof. Green is the color you came here to feel, growing and unhurried and easy on the eye. It’s the color in front of you as you let your eyes rest.
Art No: 66
Artist: Stacy D’Aquiar
Location: Spa Treatment RM 3
Medium: Acrylic on canvas, loose
Size: 24 x 18 in.
One painting from Stacy D’Aguiar’s Dreamy Greens series hangs in each treatment room on this floor. They’re variations on a theme: loose green leaves, more felt than drawn, floating against a metallic ground that shifts as the light moves. D’Aguiar works out of San Diego and builds her paintings in see-through layers, folding in the things that matter to her, like Reiki energy and the repeating shapes of sacred geometry, so the surface reads calm. There’s a thread worth knowing here: she trained under Liz Jardine, whose canvases hang a floor below, so the spa keeps the teacher and the student under one roof. Green is the color you came here to feel, growing and unhurried and easy on the eye. It’s the color in front of you as you let your eyes rest.
Art No: 61
Artist: Stacy D’Aquiar
Location: Spa Treatment RM 7
Medium: Acrylic on canvas, loose
Size: 24 x 18 in.
One painting from Stacy D’Aguiar’s Dreamy Greens series hangs in each treatment room on this floor. They’re variations on a theme: loose green leaves, more felt than drawn, floating against a metallic ground that shifts as the light moves. D’Aguiar works out of San Diego and builds her paintings in see-through layers, folding in the things that matter to her, like Reiki energy and the repeating shapes of sacred geometry, so the surface reads calm. There’s a thread worth knowing here: she trained under Liz Jardine, whose canvases hang a floor below, so the spa keeps the teacher and the student under one roof. Green is the color you came here to feel, growing and unhurried and easy on the eye. It’s the color in front of you as you let your eyes rest.
