To all the friends of the Save the Ocean mosaic (aka, the Surfing Madonna):

First of all, please accept my heartfelt thanks to all of you who have expressed such wonderful appreciation and enthusiasm and – dare I say – love of the Surfing Madonna mosaic – and her message!

During those first dark days when I was first "outted," you were the ones who kept me out of jail. You were the ones who made the politicians pause in calling the mosaic "graffiti." You were the ones, who in your great numbers, kept them from "scraping that thing" off the wall of the train bridge. And you were the ones whose enthusiastic support helped the story go completely viral!

So please accept my humble thanks for your support.

And also please understand too that I’m not a mosaic artist. My career has always centered on business development in the software industry.

But I am also a guy who listens to his intuition. And I have a sketch book. And this image of the Surfing Madonna with her Save the Ocean message kept appearing in my sketch book, first in 2005, then again in 2008, and then again in 2009. Finally in 2010, after a lot of resistance, I listened.

And that is how I came to be inspired to quit my job that October and spend nine months making this mosaic. I’ve never done anything like it before, and I doubt very much that I’ll make anything like it again.

And now that the Save the Ocean mosaic is back up, I am even more grateful that we have found a long-term home for the mosaic at Café Ipe, 970 North Pacific Coast Highway 101, Leucadia, CA 92024.  If you haven’t had a chance to go see the new installation, I encourage you to visit!  She looks beautiful there.
 
Special thanks go to attorney Anton Gerschler and to the Paul Hastings Law Firm for their incredibly generous pro-bono work to make this all possible.  And we must also thank Keith Harrison, long-time Encinitas local, who provided the new location for the mosaic.
 
Now that the mosaic is up, the non-profit Surfing Madonna Oceans Project can now focus on actively supporting efforts to Save the Ocean!
 
Thank you for your support and your continuing participation with us in that effort.
 
Very gratefully yours,