Looking through boxes of shells collected over fifty years...seeing what I have kept and wondering what I have divested, thrown out, let go, or put into garden, the objects I have picked up on the beach.
The object in the hand, isolated, removed for closer observation, the one selected from the many begins to have story of its own. Somehow in the threads of memory, a clear moment of seeing reflects something in me that I want to make more solid, so I pick it up and the moment begins to imprint the object.
Walking along the beach, up and down the east coast from Maine to Florida, the feel of the sun, the sinking of the sand around your feet, the wash of the waves, it is still a thing I like to do. There is the light, the water, the shining bright cleanness of things swept up by the sea and also the foetid, rank and rotting stuff that also rises with the tide. These things seem to be laid out in some mystery of comings and goings, cycles of birth and death, a tangle of random elements woven together by a bit of fishing line, a piece of drift wood or a half rotted carcass of a sea turtle.
All of these things were important to my dad. They all had a hidden story of journey, an arch of beginnings, middles and ends. The waves heap them up to remind us of the way of things.
Thoughtful, morbid, a story teller who made up stories about pieces of bone, he ignored the story of his own life in favor of wandering thoughts of things he could only guess at, what he could not know; how this whale must have gotten lost or was sick and came to the warmer water of her youth to end her days. His stories were a reflection of his observation of the things that run to shore. As such, they were unreliable, but to me, his stories were far more interesting than the random event of something just washing up. I think he believed that everything in life had some meaning and it was up to us to work it out. To him, things were placed in front of us to tell us something we didn’t know before.
The secrets of the sea are diffuse, layered and optional. The objects are transitory, taken out of their time and space, they have an artificial life one that exists only in the mind of the viewer. These drawing are maps of seeing, reflection and shadows of something that is left, washed up detritus, informed by the process of spending time unlocking the surface, the form and playing at getting it on a piece of paper.
The object in the hand, isolated, removed for closer observation, the one selected from the many begins to have story of its own. Somehow in the threads of memory, a clear moment of seeing reflects something in me that I want to make more solid, so I pick it up and the moment begins to imprint the object.
Walking along the beach, up and down the east coast from Maine to Florida, the feel of the sun, the sinking of the sand around your feet, the wash of the waves, it is still a thing I like to do. There is the light, the water, the shining bright cleanness of things swept up by the sea and also the foetid, rank and rotting stuff that also rises with the tide. These things seem to be laid out in some mystery of comings and goings, cycles of birth and death, a tangle of random elements woven together by a bit of fishing line, a piece of drift wood or a half rotted carcass of a sea turtle.
All of these things were important to my dad. They all had a hidden story of journey, an arch of beginnings, middles and ends. The waves heap them up to remind us of the way of things.
Thoughtful, morbid, a story teller who made up stories about pieces of bone, he ignored the story of his own life in favor of wandering thoughts of things he could only guess at, what he could not know; how this whale must have gotten lost or was sick and came to the warmer water of her youth to end her days. His stories were a reflection of his observation of the things that run to shore. As such, they were unreliable, but to me, his stories were far more interesting than the random event of something just washing up. I think he believed that everything in life had some meaning and it was up to us to work it out. To him, things were placed in front of us to tell us something we didn’t know before.
The secrets of the sea are diffuse, layered and optional. The objects are transitory, taken out of their time and space, they have an artificial life one that exists only in the mind of the viewer. These drawing are maps of seeing, reflection and shadows of something that is left, washed up detritus, informed by the process of spending time unlocking the surface, the form and playing at getting it on a piece of paper.
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