The colors complement, and the shapes fit. Perfect alignment.
Tag Archives: tide line
Shell Fragment and . . . Space Alien?
Although it’s just a seed pod, variety of plant unknown, it caused me to pause when I spotted it. I rarely bring shells or stones home, but this strange item now sits on my window sill.
Anyone who might know what plant this is from, please let me know!
Comet
Simply a cluster of sea weed and shell bits; but attached to the underside of a lady’s slipper they become a sea comet.
Mundane Beauty
The mundane can be beautiful, too. We only need to look carefully … Or with ‘different’ eyes.
Hear the Jingle?
A brilliantly colored jingle shell! Its placement beside a tiny pebble of a similar color makes the arrangement perfect.
The Beauty of Texture
A piece of coal, well eroded and washed ashore is perfectly aligned with a bit of dune grass that was blown to the tide line by a strong west-wind. Together on the sand they present a trio of lovely textures and colors.
A note on the coal: a scuba dive leader once told us before a dive to look for old, worn coal on the bottom, and told that in that particular area it had come from steamers at sea; some of them lost at sea. When bits of rounded coal wash ashore, I wonder if they have come from a similar source.
The Sea’s Autobiography
There is something about this still life that speaks. It tells a story. Perhaps it is a sentence written in the sea’s kanji, or in a heretofore unknown abugida. It is the sea’s autobiography, in the sea’s own written words, left as a mystery for me to ponder.
Similarity Between the Ornithological and Botanical Worlds
The foot prints. A dead bit of a branch. The forms echo one another in the dunes, along the tide’s highest line.
Sketch for a Masterpiece
I originally had this photograph oriented horizontally. It was not until I opened it to watermark that I noticed its similarity to Fragonard’s masterpiece, “A Young Woman Reading”. My parents would be delighted that I still retain bits and pieces of my art history education!
Buried Treasure
This is not the most interesting of still life compositions, but it is buried treasure for me. It has been decades since I found one of these, a whelk egg case. When I was a child and spent summers on New Jersey’s barrier islands, I would come across several in a season. This one was peeking out of the dune on the south end of Hilton Head Island, SC. It is jarring when memories like this are evoked as I walk the tide line. It is like déjà vu, but more vivid and heart-filling.
This particular egg case had completely hatched and was empty, but seeing it I could still ‘hear’ the sound that the infinitesimal whelks make when they are shaken in the egg case. I have not heard it in decades, but the sound is a delight-filled memory. Finding one of these when I was little (particularly when I had my magnifying glass with me!) was like uncovering one of the sea’s mysteries.
Like discovering buried treasure.
Tide Line Still Life 