A Conversation ~ Long Beach Figures

PR: I did a lot of paintings of Long Beach, because we would go down there quite a bit for holidays and it seems to me that’s a place where people go for various reasons, but an awful lot of people go there just to recover from a busy life, or to rest, or get their thoughts together, or solve problems, or solve problems with each other.



You see couples walking on the beach in very serious conversation, and then they stop and then they argue, and walk in different directions.



I think I watch. I know I’m very observant, and I like watching things from the periphery, from the edge of things so I would be walking myself and I would take this in with this beautiful scenery, and because I love drawing figures, there was a whole world of subject matter for me of these figures in landscape, figures on the spit, figures along the beaches. So I did a lot of paintings to do with that.
 


I think there were two called Conflict;  there was Conflict One and Conflict Two. Conflict One was a male head and a female head. You saw the back of his head and the front of her head, and it was framed in, I don’t know, a window of a boathouse or something—nothing very specific—with the ocean in the background. 



Obviously something had been going on between those two, and there was another one called Conflict Two where two people, a man and a woman are standing on the beach, obviously in deep conversation. 



There was another one called Crosscurrents, which had to do with three figures, I think, standing barefoot in the sand, all interrelating.



And another one called Sand, where a man and a woman—she is sitting on a log, and he is standing up beside her, and there is something going on between them.



It’s probably translucent, too, and you can see the landscape coming through them so there’s all this rather ambiguous stuff going on in the painting (laughs). That was important to me then. 

Notes for Crosscurrents figures again, tho not again, 3 figures by the sea. This time on island on a point—1girl Pigtail, 1 Boy, long hair etc. 1 man older. Not necessarily looking out but looking in at themselves—relating in a wholly (sic) normal & natural way. No gaps (media created)—no symbolism just 3 links in a closely bound chain.