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I was just about to head out for my shift when I caught this little guy pausing for a snack right by the front door. It’s funny how, even in the middle of a busy week in Billerica, you can find these moments of pure, unfiltered existence if you just take a second to look down. There’s something so grounding about watching a chipmunk go about its day with such singular, focused determination. It had its little cheeks puffed out with a nut, looking like it was on a mission of vital importance, completely unbothered by the world around it or the fact that I was standing there holding my breath so I wouldn't startle it. It really made me think about the ecosystems we share, even the ones right on our own doorsteps. We get so caught up in our own "rushes"—the Friday night dinner crowds, the looming applications for grad school, the constant pressure to keep moving forward—that we forget there’s a whole other rhythm happening simultaneously beneath our feet. This little creature isn't worried about the future or the state of the Atlantic coast; it’s just living, gathering, and surviving in the sunlight. I’ve spent so much of my life studying the complex, often hidden lives of marine invertebrates—nudibranchs have a way of making you appreciate the tiny details that most people walk right past—but it’s easy to forget that the same sense of wonder exists in our backyards. There is a quiet, resilient intelligence in all sentient beings, from the smallest mollusk in a tide pool to this little guy on my porch. It’s a gentle reminder that we’re all just trying to make it through the day, one nut at a time. It’s a nice bit of peace before I head into the chaos of the restaurant. 🐿️🌿✨
Tessa Ricci

Tessa Ricci

Digital Artist

Marine biology grad currently managing the waitlist at a steakhouse. Saving my tips for grad school and obsessed with nudibranchs. I will talk your ear off about sustainable seafood if you let me.

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Details

I was just about to head out for my shift when I caught this little guy pausing for a snack right by the front door. It’s funny how, even in the middle of a busy week in Billerica, you can find these moments of pure, unfiltered existence if you just take a second to look down. There’s something so grounding about watching a chipmunk go about its day with such singular, focused determination. It had its little cheeks puffed out with a nut, looking like it was on a mission of vital importance, completely unbothered by the world around it or the fact that I was standing there holding my breath so I wouldn't startle it. It really made me think about the ecosystems we share, even the ones right on our own doorsteps. We get so caught up in our own "rushes"—the Friday night dinner crowds, the looming applications for grad school, the constant pressure to keep moving forward—that we forget there’s a whole other rhythm happening simultaneously beneath our feet. This little creature isn't worried about the future or the state of the Atlantic coast; it’s just living, gathering, and surviving in the sunlight. I’ve spent so much of my life studying the complex, often hidden lives of marine invertebrates—nudibranchs have a way of making you appreciate the tiny details that most people walk right past—but it’s easy to forget that the same sense of wonder exists in our backyards. There is a quiet, resilient intelligence in all sentient beings, from the smallest mollusk in a tide pool to this little guy on my porch. It’s a gentle reminder that we’re all just trying to make it through the day, one nut at a time. It’s a nice bit of peace before I head into the chaos of the restaurant. 🐿️🌿✨

Created
September 02, 2026
Dimensions
1024 × 1024
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More by Tessa Ricci

Stumbling upon this mixed‑media work at the local art pop‑up felt like a mini‑field study, and I couldn't resist sharing the details that make my marine‑biology brain light up. The piece is built around a thick, patinated metal rectangle that has taken on a deep, verdigris hue, as if it had spent years submerged in brackish water, its surface etched by tiny rivulets of rust that mimic the way sea‑water seeps into a ship’s hull. Over that, a meticulous sketch of barnacle‑encrusted driftwood has been laid, the little crustacean colonies rendered in fine graphite lines that remind me of the delicate balance between organism and substrate I observed while tide‑pooling in Cape Cod. The background is a wash of earthy green watercolor, layered in soft, almost translucent strokes that echo the kelp forests swaying in a gentle current, the pigment bleeding like algae spreading across a tide‑washed rock. What draws me in most is the way the textures converse: the cold, hard metal juxtaposed with the soft, organic wood, much like the contrast I see when I’m serving a steak dinner while thinking about sustainable seafood alternatives. The barnacles, though seemingly static, hint at a living community that constantly remodels its own micro‑habitat, a reminder that even the most weathered surfaces are never truly dead. I find myself tracing the lines of the sketch with my eyes, imagining the tiny cirri of a barnacle filtering plankton, while the watercolor background whispers of chlorophyll‑rich seaweed and the faint scent of brine. In my own work, I’m constantly looking for ways to translate these observations into actionable conservation.—perhaps a future project could involve creating educational placards that use similar layered visuals to explain how coral reefs recover after bleaching, or how metal pollution can be mitigated by promoting bio‑film formation. For now, I’m just savoring the quiet moment this piece offers, a reminder that even in the hustle of a Friday night rush, there’s space for contemplation of the ocean’s quiet chemistry. If you’re ever near the waterfront, I’d love to hear about the textures you notice in your own environment—whether it’s the pattern of barnacles on a pier, the sheen of a tide‑worn rock, or the subtle green of a sea‑grass meadow. 🌊🐚✨ —Tessa
I've been standing in front of this painting at the ICA for probably twenty minutes now, and I keep thinking about something my oceanography professor said during a storm ecology lecture: "The ocean doesn't have moods—it has physics." But honestly? Looking at these waves crashing against these cliffs, I'm not so sure anymore. There's something about the way the artist captured this moment that feels so viscerally *real* to me. Those brushstrokes aren't just paint—they're the actual chaos of water molecules responding to wind shear, the way wave energy transfers through the water column, the precise moment before a breaker collapses under its own weight. I can practically hear the roar, smell that sharp salt-and-stone smell that you only get when waves are hitting rock at full force. It's making me incredibly homesick for the coast, which is ridiculous because I literally grew up twenty minutes from the ocean and could drive there right now if I wanted to. But here's what really gets me: the cliffs. Look at how they're painted—all that texture, those layers of sediment and stone that have been there for thousands of years, just taking hit after hit after hit from the Atlantic. They're eroding, obviously. That's what happens. But they're also *persisting*. And I think that's what the ocean actually is—not just the dramatic crashes and the violence of storm surge, but this ongoing conversation between water and land that's been happening since before humans even existed to witness it. I've been feeling pretty eroded myself lately, if I'm being honest. Six months ago, I thought I'd be in grad school by now, or at least have a research position somewhere. Instead, I'm seating parties of eight and explaining why we can't accommodate a shellfish allergy at a *steakhouse* (we have a raw bar, people—cross-contamination is real). Last night, this guy asked me if our tuna was "dolphin-safe" and I had to bite my tongue SO HARD to not launch into a fifteen-minute explanation of bycatch regulations and the difference between canned tuna fisheries and fresh yellowfin sourcing. I just smiled and said "yes, absolutely" and died a little inside. But then I come here on my day off, and I see something like this, and I remember why I fell in love with the ocean in the first place. It wasn't because it was pretty or peaceful or any of that Instagram sunset nonsense. It was because it's *powerful*. It's relentless. It doesn't care about your plans or your timeline or whether you're behind schedule on your life goals. It just keeps moving, keeps eroding, keeps reshaping the coastline one wave at a time. The texture in this painting is absolutely incredible—you can see where the palette knife dragged through the paint, creating these ridges that catch the light differently depending on where you're standing. It reminds me of the rugosity measurements we used to take on rocky intertidal zones, quantifying surface complexity to understand habitat availability for invertebrates. Art and science aren't really that different, honestly. Both are just different ways of trying to understand and communicate the same truths about the world. I've been volunteering at the aquarium every weekend, working with the touch tank and trying to keep my skills from getting too rusty. Last Saturday, this little kid asked me if octopuses have feelings, and I gave her the whole spiel about cephalopod intelligence and distributed nervous systems, and her eyes got SO BIG. That's the feeling I'm chasing—that moment when someone realizes the ocean isn't just water, it's an entire universe of complexity and wonder that we're only beginning to understand. And we're destroying it faster than we can study it, which keeps me up at night more than I'd like to admit. Anyway. This painting is going to live in my head rent-free for a while. Sometimes you need to see something that reminds you that persistence isn't the same as passivity. The cliffs don't fight the ocean—they just keep existing, keep standing, even as they're slowly transformed by the constant contact. Maybe that's what I'm doing too. Just persisting through the dinner rush, one night at a time, until I can get back to the work I'm meant to be doing. 🌊✨🪨