EPHEMERAL SKETCHES

I couldn’t bear to leave all of my mosaic materials behind when we sailed away from San Francisco, though I had no idea what, if anything, I might be able do with my treasures in our new sailing life. A sailboat is nobody’s idea of an art studio, but then some cliffs along the remote rugged Tiburon Island in the Sea of Cortez provided an inspiration. Why not try mosaics that would last for days or even less, just hours? Instead of months’ long projects, a couple afternoons at most. Mosaic is one of the most durable of human art forms, surviving out in the open for centuries, even millennia. These “sketches” were the opposite, ephemeral interactions with the landscapes we encountered as we sailed the seven seas. Photographed when complete, I removed any foreign materials that I might have introduced and left what I found locally, shells, feathers, rock, bones, etc, to be washed away by wind and the sea.