Daley Road Beach on the Northumberland Strait, just south of Murray Harbour, Prince Edward Island (Epekwitk).

This is a landscape in “portrait” orientation, emphasizing distance and depth -- and character. The narrow, ungroomed beach invites the viewer to travel their own path between the ocean and the unclimbable eroding cliffs, to the distant sandy point, but the scattered stones require the traveller to focus on each next step through and around the obstacles, until the going gets easier and they realize how far they have come, one step at a time.

Each wave pushes up onto the shore as a heavy sheet, smoothing the sand: at first reflecting the sky, shimmering blues, then soaking into the porous surface even before the wave washes back into the next breaker. As if the water was pulling the light down with it, the saturated sand becomes dark before it begins to lighten as it dries. All of these states are visible at once along the beach, obscuring the ever-changing boundary between land and sea, never the same from one second to the next.

(The underpainting is more pink and green, because I was using up some leftover paint I already had on my palette from a previous project, and so it includes azo yellow and quinacridone red. All further layers (and there are many!) were restricted to only using four pigments: titanium white, transparent burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, and phthalocyanine blue.)

Includes black wood-composite frame, ready to hang.