"Stefani Esta could paint a restless sea, alternately battering and bathing the craggy coast at dawn. She could paint the rolling palisades in their spun gold, textured by tousled wheat and elderly oaks. She could pain the windswept expanse of an unsheltered beach, the coffee-like crystals of a freshly plowed field.

But she doesn’t. Life is more than a landscape.

Esta appreciates the beauty that surround her Peninsula home, but she’d much rather peel back the layers to paint life’s inner landscape, the interior spaces we house but rarely visit; the significance of who we are and what we represent.

"Most of us have this vision that is the world," said Esta, "but it just isn’t. We have such space within us, in our bellies and in our hearts, and in our hands, and we never look. I think we all have it, and it could support us if we would take the time to go in there. I think that’s why I’m drawn to Asian art. The simplicity of what’s not there says volumes.

Esta has always viewed life through the eyes of an artist. She loves texture, loves layers, loves interaction. She loves rust. It guides how she looks at the world and how she reflects it in her art.

When Richard Gadd, executive director of the Monterey Museum of Art, Visited Esta’s Sand City studio to select work for the Museum’s outdoor sculpture garden, he encountered a space flooded with light, illuminating a wide array of wall sculpture, textured with various surfaces and glowing with vibrant layers of color. It was, he said, unlike anything he’d seen.

When curator Mary Murray selected pieces for Esta’s current show at the Museum titled "Steel and Stone," she was drawn to the pieces that carried an Asian sensibility, those with very simple designs, great reds, geometric shapes and plenty of unspent space.