Kittens At The Beach

Kittens At The Beach, The Bird Watchers (Detail – oil on linen)

The original oil painting is slightly larger. I’m likely going to be doing more work before it’s really done but I’m very pleased with the way it’s progressing.

The kittens are George Jones and Tammy Wynette. I worked from a photograph of them taken inside their house at the moment the curtains were drawn back and the view of a thousand birds was in front of them. I moved them to the beach, invented a carved winged-lion chair, added the usual indulgences provided to kittens, including but not exclusively, wavy fabric, beach umbrella, insects, birds, bugs, torn slipper, and more. Great experience to work on. I’ll post the finished painting within the next few weeks.

Sunset and Cypress and Highway One

Last week, headed north driving a friend home, we both suddenly realized that a spectacular was in progress over our ocean. I pulled off the empty highway and we watched the sun sink in one of the

Sunset and Cypress and Highway One

most glorious goodbyes I’d ever seen.

There were close to zero clouds, nothing to catch the brilliant color against wisps and puffs, an empty sky but for that stunning sun. I don’t ever remember seeing that before, no clouds, only the slightest line of fog near the highway. And blazing unobscured sun.

Returning home was equal to it, a night of stars and moon lighting up the ocean, catching white wave tips.

In less than an hour I was at the easel to record the black and green cypress clump just above the beach that framed the orange orb with Highway 1 rocketing in front of it all.

Big Sur Magic

THE TRAIL YOU ARE BLAZING HAS LED YOU TO…

this one extraordinary bit of land, this Big Sur, this sudden, rough mix of elements and hold-in-the-hand substance.

I see it with my eyes, I see it in the faces and eyes and bodies of strangers who stand to experience the shock, the embrace, the startling intake, the welcoming thirst to want more to never leave.

Do locals tire of it? Is a complacency reached, a saturation when all events turn non-eventful. No.

It is the redwood windsong that I hear, my neighbor’s halloo: Have you seen the flower on the river bank? Look, look at those clouds! The ocean was unbelievable this morning…at dawn. Come this way, stand here, look at the mist over Apple Pie Ridge, can you believe…it’s violet! 

There is no complacency, not in the eyes nor in the souls of all who come to this most west of western ground. It is perhaps the most welcome loss of innocence. It is perhaps the unmet friend.