I finished a new painting! My favourite piece I have made to date, because I feel like I was more successful than ever at capturing the experience of being there, which is difficult to describe in words so that I have to try to communicate it visually instead.
“Shorewash (Daley Road Beach)”
Rebeka Darylin, April 2025
9” x 12”, acrylic on canvas panel
It’s one of my favourite places in the world: Daley Road Beach on the Northumberland Strait, just south of Murray Harbour, Prince Edward Island (Epekwitk). (It can sometimes be tricky to clamber down to the beach, and climb back up after, but I always feel very grateful that I am able to do it.) I feel so connected to the land and sea there, both the present moment in time and the natural cycles of change.
This painting is a landscape in “portrait” orientation, emphasizing distance and depth — and character. The narrow, ungroomed beach invites the viewer to travel their own path between the ocean and the unclimbable eroding cliffs, to the distant sandy point, but the scattered stones require the traveller to focus on each next step through and around the obstacles, until the going gets easier and they realize how far they have come, one step at a time.
Each wave pushes up onto the shore as a heavy sheet, smoothing the sand: at first reflecting the sky, shimmering blues, then soaking into the porous surface even before the wave washes back into the next breaker. As if the water was pulling the light down with it, the saturated sand becomes dark, before it begins to lighten as it dries. All of these states are visible at once along the beach, obscuring the ever-changing boundary between land and sea, never the same from one second to the next.
I took a few progress pictures of this painting along the way:
Process for “Shorewash (Daley Road Beach)”:
- Sometimes I start with a pencil sketch or line drawing, but not this time. The monochrome underpainting used only a big brush and one colour (phthalocyanine blue) to indicate light, medium and dark.
- Then I added more colours (including some quinacridone red and azo yellow that were leftover on my palette from a previous painting), and lots more white, to help define my big main shapes from each other so I could get a sense of foreground, middle ground, and background.
- With that framework in place, I limited all further layers to only using four pigments: titanium white, transparent burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, and phthalocyanine blue.
- …many layers and many many hours later, finished!
This painting is not yet for sale. It’s reserved for the Art Show at Sir Andrew MacPhail Homestead (Orwell, PEI) in July 2025.
I am also getting prints made, because I love this piece so much that I don’t think I would be willing sell the original if I couldn’t keep it as a print.
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On to the next painting…!