This conceptual sketch embodies the artist's vision within the larger Surreal Shoreline Series. The seashell floats monumentally against the shoreline, transformed from ordinary object to sentinel through a surrealist lens. Its bone-white form with delicate spines and protrusions captures that magical moment when a beachcomber discovers treasure in the sand.

The painting evokes the dreamy suspension of time experienced during childhood explorations along Laguna Beach. The impasto technique gives the shell a sculptural quality that contrasts with the more fluid treatment of sky and sea, emphasizing how memory can magnify and transform ordinary objects of fascination.

The shell's shadow grounds this surreal vision in reality while simultaneously suggesting something otherworldly—contrasting but balancing the real and imagined. The three-tiered composition (sandy beach, cerulean waters, cloud-dappled sky) creates a familiar environment that makes the oversized shell's presence all the more striking.

With "Drift" the artist is trying to capture that liminal space between memory and imagination, where childhood fascinations take on mythic proportions and everyday objects become totems of experience.