11 x 14

Oil on Linen

True Shadow Frame

The beach series is one that started as a color theory experiment and then became a beach series. It is often when I am not trying to do something that I learn more than when I approach a task and try to complete it (paint a beach today! for example- usually works against, not for, me) . These paintings are obviously beaches but to me, at first, I saw them as color field pieces -stripes of pure color with hefty, solid thickly applied paint with solid colors top and bottom in a thinner more translucent layer. Turned vertically that is what they are. But then I see something I am not even trying for and once I noticed what I was doing, I began to seriously push the bounds of whether I could keep a basic stripe format with various tonal changes in the background and have it read as certain times of day. As a painter it is this kind of unplanned exciting escape that is almost magical. It was so fun to take the elements to their basic form and then begin to play up the beach elements like the clouds as they went further along, then back to the basic stripes on solid colors that these paintings are as I finished the series (for now).