The Coastal Life: Beach Paintings

I grew up on the beaches of the West Coast of Canada. Laced with salt and sand, my childhood summers were long, open-ended days filled with treasure hunts along the shoreline.

The beach offered everything we needed: a place to run, build castles from sand, collect shells, and create new things from the rocks, driftwood, and treasures we discovered. The days were wonderfully exhausting. Salt air made for deep sleeps, and by the end of each day we were completely spent, ready to continue our adventures in dreams.

Our days were magical and sun-kissed, with the wind tossing our hair and shaping the waves. When the tide went out, we would walk as far as our wet sneakers would allow, following the shoreline over rippled sand and watching tiny crabs scurry beneath our feet. Every trip to the beach was an adventure, but it was also an opportunity to make something: a castle, a sculpture, a shelter, a collection of treasures arranged just so.

When I moved to Parksville, BC  last year, those early memories began flooding back. Here, the beaches seem to stretch endlessly when the tide goes out, revealing a vast landscape of sand, shells, driftwood, rocks, and little discoveries. That same childlike instinct to explore and create has returned.

Now, my beach walks are often small missions. I set out looking for specific things: an unusual shell, an interesting piece of driftwood, a collection of stones, or evidence of what others have built along the shore. I photograph my finds and sometimes arrange them into temporary compositions, leaving them behind for someone else to discover.

Coastal Beach Paintings

Lately, these beach treasures have been making their way into my paintings. Cairns (towers of rocks) and floating shells. Stacks of driftwood transformed into makeshift shelters. Simple arrangements created by nature, by beachcombers, or by the passing hands of strangers. I am drawn to the evidence of human curiosity and creativity found along the shoreline. Someone has stopped to stack these rocks. Someone has gathered this driftwood. Someone has arranged these shells. Each little construction is temporary, destined to be scattered by the next tide, yet for a moment it becomes a work of art.

Perhaps that is what I find so compelling. The beach has always been a place of making for me. As a child, I made things from whatever I could find. Today, I make paintings from those same memories and discoveries. The materials have changed, but the impulse remains.

I am exploring these coastal themes in my newest paintings, giving shells, stones, driftwood, tides, and childhood memories a new life on canvas. They are paintings about the West Coast, but also about the instinct we carry with us to explore, collect, arrange, build, and create.

Some things, it seems, never really leave us. Sometimes they simply wash back in with the tide.