On their last morning of vacation, my daughter’s family met us to absorb the last savory breaths of the ocean. Perhaps nowhere else in nature are all of our senses so alive, feeding on the sensibilities that landscape whips up. Our grandsons especially seem transported on the millions of footprints underneath their own tiny feet, only surpassed by an endless indigo morning sky and ticklish seafoam.
This universe is the mystery that covers us when unseen smells mitigate stress levels on a wind that tosses our hair until it is the same mop everyone else has on the beach. Can someone explain to me again why we are getting our hair styled, and spending a fortune on “product?”
Our family spent the next hour bent down peering for sharks’ teeth on the line where high tide had reached its apex. Shiny black, sharp triangles occasionally popped up and even the four-year-old, several feet closer to the sand than us, found a few of them. In all, our collection amounted to perhaps a dozen before time drew a window shade on their trip and they raced away to catch their flight home. We all should be reminded of the days when what we were doing was so much fun that time stood still and we became so immersed in the moment that no greater purpose or ambition could improve our existence.
When we hugged goodbye, tiny salty-filled tears began to form as my grandson Cash tried to fathom any other life than that of time spent finding sharks teeth surrounded by everyone who loves him most. It was as if his emotions had been dipped into a smorgasbord, and I pried him loose to place him in his car seat. He had freely roamed the beach complete of threats, scolding, correction, or advice. Nature and encouragement alone were his boundaries. We would all do well to use those same boundaries as we forage in our high and low tides. Is it no wonder we often come up empty handed, feeling confused and fearful?
I wonder too if my art is able to call up whose same emotions in my viewers. Have I been successful making pieces that are really washed up in some ego centered tide of my own selfish making? Is my art riding on the restless surface or below the waterline where the richer still moments rest? Is the viewer able to lean into the marks and found objects in my work and take a brief vacation if only for a second, before being called to catch another flight?
In At War with Jack’s Rats, I am on a quest, looking out from the crow’s nest with my spy-scope, keeping watch over the ocean for unwanted flotsam and jetsam that might jam my rudder, my path forward, my metaphorical journey for wisdom. The weather seems tempestuous where I scratched the zinc plate in this hand-colored etching. Fog (spit-biting for those of you familiar with the technique) fills the atmosphere around the ship with scratchings of words and commands being yelled by hidden sailors on board. I am maintaining my course, but I am besieged by an imaginary sea of waring, short tempered pirates. They are nothing but the dull-witted rats we all face. They merely need to be kicked aside. They are not to be feared for their tempestuousness. Batten down those hatches. We are loved.