Wording and drawings copied from the early notes written by Germolus, as be began his project, are written in between layers of semi-transparent paint.

A ghosted image of Germolus is glazed within a stylized painting of water.

The ocean zone represented here is coastal surface water off Cape Cod. It is active water, full of movement, rich with vibrant mixtures of both land-derived molecules and oceanic molecules. It is a "hot mess" of ever-changing mix of molecules, where nutrients are amplified by pollutants, pharmaceuticals, and other human activity.

The ocean zone represented here is surface water far out from the coast of Bermuda. This is a place where we rarely find the interrelated communities of activities found in coastal surface water. Molecules get used up, break down, and bleached out in the relentless sunlight, creating a sense of an “ocean desert.”

The painting visualizes this part of the ocean as a desert—using the palette of a desert with imaginary waves whose shape and form were derived microscopic images of bleached bones on a desert.

The lower left corner includes detritus of molecules and forever chemicals.

The ocean zone represented here is the deep chlorophyll maxim (DCM), also called the subsurface chlorophyll maximum. This collection zone was in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Bermuda, below the surface of water in an area with the maximum concentration of chlorophyll. The artwork emphasizes the vertical migration, or movement of phytoplankton within the water column, which contributed to the establishment of the DCM due to the diversity of resources required by the phytoplankton. The amount of activity here suggested a molecular party, and so the molecules are represented as balloons and disco balls.

The collection zone represented here is the Upper Mesopelagic in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Bermuda, deep below the surface of water beyond the reach of UV rays of sunlight.

Why is this painting so blue? The mesopelagic zone—also known as the Twilight Zone—is about 650 to 3,300 feet below the ocean surface, just beyond the reach of sunlight. In water, colors with lower energy, such as reds, oranges, and yellows are filtered out quickly. Because blue light waves have more energy, they travel deeper through water.

What do we see here? What you can see if you look closely in the painting, are bits of detritus. Marine “snow”— clumps of dead plankton, bacteria, fecal pellets, and other particles rich in organic carbon—sink from surface waters through the twilight zone to the deeper ocean. Sea creatures such as jellyfish do live in this zone, but since this project is about the chemistry of the water, not the animals, none of these paintings include sea creatures. Since there is little or no chemical life activity in this zone we see only the microscopic detritus drifting down. The horizontal bands of dark and lighter blues indicate the pressure and sideways movement of this zone of water. It is as if driven by a massive conveyor belt, rather than the active churning of the surface water above..