One of the predictable elements of staying in a rented beach home (apart from splintery decks and textured drywall compound ceilings) is the indiscriminate collection of faded art prints that have anything do to beaches, shells, ships, or sand. And that’s not including the textile prints, nick-nacks, and signs that read things like “Home is where the beach is” or “Shell we dance?” I feel like the home owner is subtly hinting at his doubt in my ability to remember my location on a map. Like, “in case you wake in the middle of the night, gasping and saying to yourself, ‘GOSH! Where the heck am I?’ I’ve placed little reminders around the house, EVERYWHERE around the house actually, to perpetually reinforce your current coordinates.” At the outset of my hiatus I determined to do some pleinair painting. Seeing this over abundance of themed location reminders i had a paralyzing fear that someday my pleinair paintings would someday be hung in a similar collection of Goodwill acquired art. So, I began attempting to look beyond the mere fact that: i was currently at the beach. The mundane can be a good thing… it can also cause us to forget all thats happening around us. It can lull us into saying “OHHHH YAY!!! I’m at the beach!” and excepting the endless barrage of cliche and indistinct motifs. We fail to recognize the rare, unusual, and maybe passed over elements of life around us. The truth is: the rare isn’t so rare. It’s just not always so glamorous. Hence my rationale in finding this decaying fish carcass so interesting. This was a rare opportunity to study this animal that, if alive and well in it’s natural domain would have been too fast (and wet) to paint. So, we shared a moment on the beach in a pile of crumbling shells, broken reeds and driftwood sticks. A subtle reminder of the dominating fact surrounding us; death is a reality in this current age… even here at the beach. I don’t intend at all to be a ‘Debbie-Downer’ but let’s not let the novelty of location ever distract us from the story perpetually unfolding around us.
