Dover Beach

May 11, 2020

I wanted to get to my sunrise again. It had been a couple of days, the paint was dry. I’ve blended wisps of light blue with the mix of brilliant yellows and oranges that fills the horizon as the sun emerges. Often, gray clouds drift high above the sea, then close to the horizon. The sunlight is reflected by the clouds, edging them in its glow and highlighting the deep grays where the light fades. The clouds cast shadows, and mottle the surface with faint stripes between the darker grays of the waves as they wash the beach.

I can’t paint depth. I could never achieve the subtle dimensions you see in Andrew Wyeth’s portraits of country people in rural Pennsylvania. I’ve done portraits of Sandy, she doesn’t care for them. I like the way they turned out, but we’re not going to hang them in the living room. Landscapes and sunrises work for me.

Sunrise, after all, is what we get on the east coast. When we walk on the beach early in the morning, we’re listening and watching. The waves crash, but they seem to crash quietly. The water is drawn back with that soft hissing sound, to return with the next wave. Then, sunrise.

Meanwhile, in the real world: unemployment is now officially around 15 percent in America; unofficially, around 23 percent. The pandemic is still with us. The federal government can’t seem to wish it away.

The Victorian poet and essayist Matthew Arnold lived through the boom years of England’s Industrial Revolution and witnessed its tragedies. He knew of the horrific working conditions in coal mines and factories, the appalling abuses of child labor, the spread of overcrowded, disease-ridden slums, the growth of cynicism, the loss of religious faith.

He wrote “Dover Beach” in 1867. He describes the unceasing rhythm of the surf breaking against the beach sands:

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,                                                                                            Begin, and cease, and then again begin,                                                                                   With tremulous cadence slow, and bring                                                                                  The eternal note of sadness in.

For Arnold, the lonely roar of the surf at midnight spoke of the tragedies of his time. Today, we, most of us, think of a walk on the beach at sunrise as an escape from the hard stretches of life, a few moments that communicate serenity and peace. For me, and others, it tells of the nearness of God. I look for those rare mornings when broad strokes of sunlight are cast against pale blue of the dawn sky, set off by the richer, deeper blue of a tranquil sea that massages the beach rather than crashing against it.

I took the photos I’m working from on our rushed two-day junket to Virginia Beach a year ago, when we wanted a break from the ugly routine of radiation and chemo. It was a hard time. Apart from the treatments, the weather was rotten, every day cold and drizzly. So we got a hotel room and left town. It poured for the entire drive. Our room faced the beach. That first night the white foam of the breaking waves, whipped by a howling wind, lit up the darkness.

We awoke to silence. The wind had died away, the surf had calmed. We walked out on the beach, a few others already were there. The horizon was pale orange, the sky a pure, milky blue. We hiked down to the water’s edge. The surf lapped at the sand. By then the sun had risen brilliantly above the sea, the sky was radiant with light and warmth. The air was fresh and clear. For a little while, we were in a different world.

Sitting in the front room where I keep the paint gear, I looked over the half-finished canvas. The sky needed more color. I tried to correct the mistakes. I tapered the gray of the clouds into the sunlight by mixing black and white with a dab of yellow, dipping the brush quickly in the brush cleaner, wiping off the excess, then testing it.

I daubed the canvas lightly. The color isn’t exact, but it’s close. Sometimes “close” is what’s going on in nature. Often I’ll stare at a photo but can’t recognize the color I’m looking at. I added a little white, a little yellow. Oil paint is forgiving, up to a point. You can wait for your mistakes to dry, then try delicately to fix them. The texture has to be right. Paint slopped on too thick will stay too thick.

The surf is tough. In the photo, waves seem simple—they’re waves. I looked at what I did. Lines, not waves. Yet I sketched them in, stretching across the sea exactly as they appear. Or seem to appear. I stepped back a few feet, now they’re waves. I added a few more and stepped back again. Lines again, not waves. I touched up the sky. The reflection of the rising sun across the water didn’t exactly meet the reflection on the shore. I extended the yellow-orange-white mix just a tad, hoping to make it more natural. It gave the horizon a bit more brightness.

The sky still looked flat, two-dimensional. I bounced my fingertip off the surface to check the dryness. I went back with the gray and touched up the waves, extending them slightly. From five feet away, then 10 feet, it looked okay. I picked up the canvas by the edges and walked it out to the living room and balanced it on a chair for a new angle.

Sitting in from of an easel is exhausting. Getting images and color right is like a long hard run without moving a muscle. I’m trying show the world I see, that everyone sees. We can argue with each other about politics, comfortable in our prejudices. We can’t argue about the appearance of the world around us. Nature is nature.

I wouldn’t call my sunrise art. But anything short of what is real is incomplete, illusory, artificial. When we’re satisfied too easily, our sense of the real is diminished. When I’m at that point with the sunrise, I’m still searching. I see failure and dishonesty in the headlines every morning, as Arnold saw them in the abuses of mid-19th century England. They led him to darkness and desolation:

“And we are here as on a darkling plain                                                                                 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,                                                           Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

The images of “Dover Beach” are real. I’m struggling to create something very different,  something I hope brings at least an intimation of the joy that a solitary morning on the beach can convey, and that endures. My sunrise isn’t there yet. Maybe tomorrow.