West Coast Story

California has always been better at selling the idea of itself than the reality. Endless summers. Surfboards on station wagons. Beach motels. The Beach Boys on the radio. The promise that life somehow gets better once you're close enough to smell the ocean.

I built this piece from hand-cut vintage surf magazines, travel brochures, advertisements, and found photography, layering together decades of West Coast mythology into a single scene. It's less about one place than the version of California people have been chasing for generations. The kind that lived on postcards, movie screens, and album covers long before it existed in memory.

Every element was cut and assembled by hand. No Photoshop, no AI, no digital manipulation. I leave the faded colors, rough edges, and imperfections exactly as I found them because they're part of the story. The history of the paper matters just as much as the images themselves.

This is an original one-of-one hand-cut analog collage mounted on a 9 x 12 black canvas panel and comes framed, ready to hang. No reprints, no editions, and no second copy.