Every afternoon, after painting, I would walk about one block down a narrow dirt road lined with adobe walled gardens overhung with bougainvilleas of varying hues: pinks, deep red, white, yellow. Mourning doves perched on the electrical wires overhead and kept one round eye on my passage, accompanying me with their soft calls. Fabulous? You bet!
The houses ended and the the road became a path across sandy fields filled with scrubby plants and lined with barbed wire fences on old wooden posts, most of the fencing decrepit and half down. Ahead of me was the top of the last large dune, beyond that the endless Pacific Ocean. When I got to the top of the dune, the view opened up to the one you see in this painting: the wide, almost empty, beach, the ocean beyond, the distant hills, a tiny stretch of the palm gardens, the surf sometimes gentle, sometimes wildly crashing on the steep shore.
What you don’t see in the painting and the main reason I walked down here every day are the grey whales, many of them, all over in every direction, spouting way out on the horizon and all the way in to within about fifteen feet of shore. For me, it was a privilege to just come down and sit in their company. Often one would pop up, holding its head above the water to have a look at those of us gathered in small groups on the beach, just as we were there having a look ourselves.
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Mexican Beach, 31″ x 41″, Acrylic
