Gotta Love the Beach

Board Girls

12"x12" oil on canvas

Above is another in my latest beach series, which will be going to Yarmouth Frame and Gallery for the show opening in June. If I remember correctly, the photo I worked from is from a very hot day at Old Orchard Beach.

Two painters who particularly inspire me to paint people on the beach, are Peggi Kroll Roberts and Alfred (Chip) Chadbourn. I love the way they abstract reality, and they do it completely differently.

Here's a lovely painting by Peggi, available on her website. I took a wonderful workshop with her a few years ago, and she talked about sitting on the sand under an umbrella, sketching and painting her daughters and their friends on the beach. Wonderful!

Chip Chadbourn was Yarmouth, Maine's most well known painter. He died in 1998 and I wish I'd had the chance to meet him. Both the Yarmouth Library and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art recently had retrospectives of his work. It was bliss. Such wonderful paintings! You can still see one of his winter scenes on the second floor of the Merrill Memorial Library in Yarmouth. Chip loved to paint beach scenes from masterful drawings that he did on site. His book, Painting with a Fresh Eye, is full of beautiful paintings and insightful and instructive text. And it's still available on amazon.

Here's one of my favorite beach paintings from that book.