Surf & Sand Resort Art Collection

Tempest, 2024, mirror-polished marine-grade stainless steel, resort entrance.

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.

Element #44, 2025, oil on canvas, 42 × 66 in., lobby.

Behind the front desk hangs an open stretch of ocean, painted by Ran Ortner. Ortner paints almost nothing else, and can spend months on a single wave, building the crest of a swell, the froth dragging back and the light sitting on a moving surface out of thousands of separate marks. 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. 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.

Summer Rain, 2025, mixed media on panel, 48 × 36 in., lounge.

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, captured from a studio walled in floor-to-ceiling glass in the Grey County forest north of Toronto, where she watches the seasons turn. Hung near the concierge desk and the balcony overlooking the Pacific, this piece is worth a pause on the way through: the weather of somewhere else, holding still beside the ocean's own.

Fairies VII/5, Fairies VII/6 and Fairies II/11, 2023, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth paper, 31½ × 31½ in. each, Aquaterra Spa.

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-e 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. It's beauty held mid-change, while you're transitioning from the ocean right outside to the quiet of the spa.

Il Canile, 1980, photographic pigment print, guest suite.

Sunbathers are stretched on a white terrace above the sea, the rocks of Pizzolungo dropping into the water below. Slim Aarons shot this on Capri in 1980, on the terrace of Il Canile, the villa of Italian costume designer Umberto Tirelli. It's the Mediterranean, but trade the Faraglioni for the rocks off Laguna Beach and it could be the Pacific just as easily. The palette is pared back: blue, grey, green, white, with the flowers and the swimsuits supplying flecks of color. That restraint is what makes the image. Aarons made his name catching the elegant and the leisured at their ease, never staged, just seen. Nobody is performing here; the terrace and the cliff do the work. It's the same unhurried ease the resort is built to hand you, forty-odd years later and an ocean apart.