Ocean Wind

This painting is thrilling to me! “Ocean Wind.”

It is sunset, the sky brilliant red, pink and yellow, the sun about to dip away behind the horizon of the sparkling blue ocean. A cleansing wind, warm and wild, swoops across the sky, carrying with it a flock of soaring seagulls. One of them hangs above us in the foreground, careening on its path through the open air.

This makes me smell the salty sea air, and it fills me with an invigorating joy. I imagine the wind just snatching up every thought, every worry, and carrying away every bit of stress in my body.

I am headed to Belize next week by myself! I’ll be meeting up with several long-lost friends there, where we will stay in a youth hostel, go snorkeling and cave tubing, and lie on the beach feeling the sunshine and looking out at the white sand and clear blue water.

I have not gone on a trip like this in about a decade! While I’m there, my hope is to let go of some of the heavy things I’ve been carrying around in my mind, and to rejuvenate my spirit.

This windswept tree, pulled by a continual ocean breeze, has grown in a bent and twisted position, all its arms reaching out to the sea.

I first saw real trees like this at the beach in La Jolla, California, and they have stuck with me ever since. (Incidentally, Dr. Suess spent much of his life in Southern California, and was clearly inspired by the trees there. I never realized until I arrived there myself and thought, “Wow–there are Dr. Suess trees everywhere!”)

As in all my paintings, this image continues around the deep edges of this stretched canvas. You can see it here with the tip of the gull’s wing:

And here, where the tree’s roots in the craggy, sandy ground continue across the bottom edge.