© DAH 2007
The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
One grain at a time -- that's a certain method of examining an ocean beach. Given the small size of a two year old boy and the enormity of a swath of Pacific Ocean shoreline, it's a good way to begin.
I try to imagine how it was for me, the first time I saw the big ocean. It might have been from the deck of a Holland-America Line ocean liner, as I went off with my mother on a trip to the Netherlands as a very young child. There are old photos of me on the beach at Scheveningen in my little sun suit and bonnet. I am not looking at the vastness of the North Sea, but instead at the organ grinder and his monkey. Something small enough for me to process in my young mind.
My grandson has met the Pacific Ocean, and I can tell from other images my son sent that he is impressed. But in this photo, he is concerned about the sand on his foot. The nature of sand. It comes off the beach and into your shoes. This is something to think about.
For a while my art was about things seen in a microscope. I found that in photomicrographs the ordinary things (like sand, or bleach, or hair, or citric acid) become whole landscapes of alien shapes and colors and formations. I found I could get acquainted with these strange places by painting them -- realistically. They are real, of course. The paintings look like fantasies, but they are actually careful renderings of organic material. With even more sophisticated equipment, like electron microscopes, we will never run out of surprises.
Grain by grain, the sand stretches out until you cannot see the grains. Wave by wave, the water reaches out until it is a smooth horizon. The more you see, the more you cannot see. The closer you look the more complex everything grows.
Isn't it great?
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