Friday, November 21, 2008

Playa Paintings- Exploring Cali beaches III


These two designs were done on Abalone beach, north of Fort Bragg. This area of Northern California had tons of good beaches. This was perhaps the best beach we've discovered yet, surpassing even Ocean Beach in San Francisco.
 Cracks I

This design started by imagining that the rocks were communicating with each other. It would seem that they do so in direct pathways. Perhaps they build bridges. Once we were into it, the design felt more like cracks. Ember is in red on the bottom leftish rock.
 Waves I

A good attempt at doing large scale natural free form. We started by imagining that the wind blew sideways along the shore and attempted to paint the vortices the wind would make. I love to watch air currents given form. Blow a stream of bubbles in places where wind is doing crazy things.
One day while out painting on the beach, we pulled out the bubbles to check out some cool rock formations and discovered that the space immediately around any surface acts as a buffer, sharply deflecting whatever comes towards it. If whatever is going towards the surface is light enough, like a bubble, you'll see it doing all kinds of crazy movements, hurtling towards a barrier then barely kissing the surface, hugging around tight turns of the rock face. Along the face of a rock we watched flies zipping around matching in their motions the contours of the jagged rock. The we noticed the bubbles following the same pathways! Since the bubbles can't exert any influence in their movements, I concluded that there was a buffer of air transporting the flies and bubbles. I remembered learning about pelicans hovering a few feet above the water on their ocean-crossing migrations, flapping every so often but otherwise being carried by the wind. Same phenomenon, different scale. Existence is fractal.

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