Gifts of the Sea

I have always enjoyed the act of reading...
curling up in a cozy chair or on the bed,
snuggling beneath a blanket with a good
book in hand, finding myself lost among
the pages, transported to another time or
place through the carefully woven words
of a story.

So you can see how easy it might be,
that a familiar manuscript began as the
foundation for my February Nature
Gathered artwork. A classic piece of
literature filled with wisdom that is still
as meaningful, maybe even more so today,
as it was the very first time I opened the cover.

Gifts from the Sea was merely a passing fancy
or impulse purchase, something that I
had bought off of the discount shelves
of a local bookstore over ten years ago.
I don't know what I really expected from
Mrs. Lindbergh's prose, but I definitely
got more than I bargained for. What the
thin paperback was lacking in girth, it
made up for in content.

I have never been much of one to read and
re-read the same tale twice. And honestly,
I had absolutely no intentions of re-reading
this book when I decided to pull it down from
the shelf, at the end of January. I was just
hoping to maybe, find a passage or two that
might spark in me, a starting point from which
to base this latest piece of art.

But it only took a few sentences to find myself
mesmerized once again by the thoughtful
observations emanating from its pages.

All of a sudden, I had not only re-read the entire
book but I had actually read it twice. It was
inspiration magnified.

Carefully I stitched quotes from the book onto the
canvas, to represent the ocean waves washing
their wisdom upon the sandy shores of my being.



Art and images copyright 2009 Tracie Lyn Huskamp