Kerik Kouklis: Earth is Home II – A World of Color

Dedicated to his brother, Bill Schwab (1959 - 2025)

Home is something that Kerik has been thinking a lot about in recent years.  After 30 years in his last home, in 2020 he and his family pulled up states and moved 350 miles from the Sierra Foothills to California’s Central Coast, two miles from the ocean.  He moved from the hot summers and cold winters of the foothills to the moderate climate of the Central Coast where it is “never too hot or too cold and wildfires are rare.”  Although at first everything was unfamiliar, Kerik knew he had made the right choice.  From the beginning, Kerik says that it felt like home even though he didn’t know where the grocery store was or where to find the best cappuccino.  Those things came with time, but the feeling of home for him was there from the start.

Over the last ten years, Kerik has spent a lot of time exploring and has had similar experiences in his travels since he left the corporate world.   Some places he has been to repeatedly (eight times to Iceland, three times to Mongolia and countless times to Yosemite) and others only once or twice (Japan, Brazil, the Galapagos, Norway, Germany, Austria, Italy and Hungary). All these places represent Home to him in their own way. Travel has greatly enriched Kerik’s life and his understanding of the people with whom he shares the planet.  He is often humbled by how their life experiences differ from his. Imagine a Mongolian nomad living on the steppe where winter temperatures easily read minus 40 degrees and worse when it is windy.  Kerik has had a small taste of that.  He also stood in the middle of the Gobi Desert on a summer night when there was nothing but starlight and the light from his campfire.  That was the first time he experienced stars from horizon to horizon.  Kerik has stood in awe of mother nature watching the aurora borealis dance across the skies in Iceland and even once in Yosemite. Kerik craves experiences like these and attempts to capture them to the best of his abilities as photographs and short films. In 2023 he exhibited “Earth is Home” at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite.  That exhibit was primarily monochrome with a few color images.  This exhibit is the opposite, mostly color with a couple monochrome images.