A couple of recently discovered sketches from a trip to Anchor Bay, California this time last year:

kelp on the beach

The Gerwing-Iversons have just come back from a short visit to the ruggedly beautiful California coast in southern Mendocino County.  

Having grown up in Kentucky and lived most of my life inland, I don’t have much experience with being around the sea.  The quality of light is certainly different, the hazy reflections back off the water have a flatness that you see here in rocky California or in flat, sandy Florida. In Colorado, shadows are cast iron black, the sunshine bleaching white.  Along the coast, through the black frame of a camera lens it doesn’t look that different, but with the eye the landscape is a gradation of grays, never anything fully black or white.