A beach of shells

For the past couple of weeks, I've been painting shells that I've collected in recent years on the beaches near St. Augustine. First, three small watercolors, each one of a different scallop, with a tiny smooth shell beneath. On July 4, I started a much larger painting, of many shells, arranged on a plain page; the impetus for this arrangement seemed to come from some deeper place in my subconscious. Why? I wondered, as I finalized the composition and set pencil to paper. What am I doing here?

The Fourth of July came on the heels of two other national holidays - Quebec's St-Jean-Baptiste on June 24, and Canada Day on July 1. The separatists always come out in force for La Fête St-Jean, along with the less-political French-Canadians who simply want to celebrate their heritage. By contrast, Canada - which turned 150 this year - barely seems to know what to do to celebrate itself, since the question "What is Canada?" often yields only amorphous answers, or stereotypes involving parkas, snowshoes, hockey, and beer.

On Canadian holidays I still feel mostly like the observer and recent, mid-life immigrant that I am. We went down to the Jacques-Cartier bridge on Canada Day to watch the fireworks, and the moment they finished, the heavens opened and there was torrential rain, drenching the thousands of people on the bridge in a few minutes. I looked around: as usual for the fireworks, here was a microcosm of Montreal: French and English-speakers, Indians, Asians, Middle-Easterners, Africans; older people like ourselves, family groups, teenagers in packs, couples with small children and babies. Everyone was laughing and chattering in their own languages, and smiling at the strangers near them. The initial dash to get off the bridge soon turned to a slow splashing stroll, and a kind of collective merriment. I was so wet I could feel water streaming down my legs inside my jeans from my soaked underwear; like almost everyone else, we had no umbrella, no hoods or jackets. By the time we finally got to our bikes, at the end of the bridge, the downpour had stopped, and we cycled home. Now, that experience seemed Canadian: the lack of drama or hysteria, the acceptance of nature's unpredictability, the good mood in the face of it. But you can't encapsulate that, it's merely a feeling, one that I not only recognize from being here for more than a decade, but share -- like a lot of other inexpressible things about Canada and Quebec -- because it feels natural to who I am, to who I've always been.

America, on the other hand -- what was anyone to make of July 4th this year?  The celebratory spirit seemed muted, but I felt even more removed than usual, and wrote to a friend that I felt I was "done with nationalisms of any kind."

 

Instead I stood at my work table that day and made the careful, detailed under-drawing for the new painting, and thought about the beach above St Augustine: a shell beach, with a perfect gradation from intact shells close to the water's edge, to smaller and smaller water-worn pieces, and finally coarse shell-sand forming the dunes. Each one of those shells, I realized, represented one organism, one life, in numbers that seemed much more profound than the clichéd impossibility of "counting the grains of sand." Who was I, I wondered, in the face of all those lives that had been lived: one human in the year 2017, bending down to pluck a dozen shells from the beach and put them into her pocket to bring back to Canada, far to the north, a cold place surrounded my frigid oceans where not one of those organisms could have survived for very long?

 Maybe, I thought, the multiple shells in the new painting represented some sort of subconscious move away from a focus on the individual, brought on by my reflections about July 4th and America. The shells are a sample that represents an entire beach, which in turn is a sample that represents the life of an ocean. They have characteristics and vital needs in common, yet are extraordinary and beautiful in their uniqueness.

Later, though, as I worked, I began to realize that the shells in the painting were also symbols for me of the refugees who have arrived on Mediterranean beaches, both dead and alive: people we have labelled collectively but who are -- as a few striking images have shown us - individuals with personal and deeply-affecting stories.

I wrote more about nationalism, immigration, and politics, but on re-reading deleted it: too heavy-handed, and maybe even too obvious.

Let's just say that the more I travel and the more people I meet from all over the world -- all of us arriving, some more battered than others, on these beaches of our lives -- the more I see my personal story as one of many, and that our shared humanity is a far greater connection than any arbitrary division, especially when it is those divisions that are so often responsible for conflict and exodus. I'm much more interested these days in trying to express my feelings about the interconnected world, which includes the preciousness of each anonymous human and non-human life. As the poet Gary Snyder wrote: “The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.”

Comments

[Natalie]

Beth, that's a wonderful post and your description of the Canadian downpour on the bridge is perhaps even more visual to me than your lovely delicate shells. You certainly have a gift for words that give a vivid sense to the reader of 'being there' along with your thoughtful, analytical observations. In the shells, I don't see symbols but only their marvellous patterns and architectural structures.

[Rachel]

Oh, Beth, this is so beautiful -- the words and the images both. Thank you. This is balm to my heart today.

[Pascale Parinda]

<3

All of this, so beautiful!

[Duchesse]

The shells, emptied of their life, are remnants, thrir home was a home elsewhere. Shells have always had this 'container' sense to me, and like Natalie, I find them marvels, but also melancholy, like empty nests or abandoned houses.

As an immigrant too-but 45 years ago- I have my own sense of what 'Canadian' is, and I am grateful to be here. Thank you and I hope your deleted thoughts make it back here in some form/

[Marly Youmans]

Lovely patterns and shapes and negative space...Shells are wonderful little beauties and world travelers and mysteries, but they are most wonderfully mysterious to me because they are a speaking mystery that sings of the sea, or of something we cannot understand. And only when emptied of life can they sing to us when held to an ear. And we of course hear ourselves in that sound, so I suppose it is life and death singing together.

[Jean]

The shells, and your drawings, are so beautiful. Maybe this needs ultimately to be, along with your lovely botanical drawings, part of an exhibition or book or website which, along with your equally beautiful words, paints a wider picture and story? I love and appreciate all of it.

[Kathy Hughes]

Love this Beth. Love your shell analogies and paintings - feels a bit like you are going in a new direction to me - nice way for me to start my day with your lovely thoughts - thanks.

[Beth]

Thank you! Natalie, I'm glad you liked that description of a memorable happening. We've had so much rain this summer that maybe we should have been better prepared, but it was such fun, really, to just get soaked along with thousands of other people. A Woodstock moment, I guess!

Rachel, thank you, I'm glad.

Pascale, thank you.

Duchesse, thanks for your reflections on shells - I never thought of them as melancholy because they leave behind such beauty, but when I thought about that beach full of former lives it was a bit overwhelming! And I'm happy that we've been able to converse about Canada and the U.S. and share our similarities and differences as immigrants...

Marly, only you would find such poetry in the mystery of shells! Thank you.

Thanks, Jean. I'm thinking along the same lines and have started a journal to see where that might lead. Blogging used to be the perfect and ultimate platform for work like this that combines images and words, not necessarily in a completely linear way, and I think those of us who spent a lot of time in the early years have been deeply influenced by that. But now, I feel like I need to work toward some different and more permanent project-goal, with the blog maybe as a sketchbook/notebook. Thanks for your encouragement.

Thanks, Kathy! I know you are very familiar with that beach! Yes, a new direction, but as usual for me, it's one of several. The trick is keeping everything moving forward...not so easy, but that's what feels normal. Hopeless, but fun!

[mary]

Ah,this is lovely. The thoughts as well as the drawings.

[Sharyn]

I think this is your most beautiful painting yet, and the writing. I love it.

[Hattie]

Beth: On my desk computer the lines of text and the small type make reading your blog difficult. I don't know if it's just my experience????Anyway, I've taken to looking at the pics on my computer and then reading the text on my smart phone, where the text reads perfectly fine.
I continue to appreciate your explanations of process in art.

[Hattie]

I did pick something up that I had not noticed before: that art is an integral part of your life world, not something set aside. That could be what defines an artist as opposed to those of us who dabble in art.

[Beth]

Mary, thank you very much.

Sharyn, that is so lovely of you to say! Thank you. (I don't seem to have an email address for you anymore - can you send it?)

Hattie, is it possible that you have your screen resolution set in such a way that the text appears small? Because it doesn't on my computer, and I haven't received other complaints. In any case, I'm sorry it's a problem for you, and glad you can read it better on your phone. Yes, art (of all kinds) is integral to my identity and my life, you're right about that, and it explains why I move in-between different art forms so much; they all (cooking, gardening, sewing, knitting too) feel like part of the whole. I guess that's different from many people, but not for some of the creative people I know, though some professionals do seem to compartmentalize their art and the rest of their lives. I've talked about this with a young woman friend, a singer who is quite creative in other parts of her life too - she's beginning to construct her adult life and wanting to live this way. It's certainly not for everyone, but it's what has always worked for me and feels most "true."