South Shore Suite : Horizon Series
I walk each day along the shoreline of the Atlantic Coast in Nova Scotia, Canada. There is a special quality of light here. It sinks into your soul and becomes part of how you view the world. When you live at the edge of a continent, the elemental powers of weather, wind, and wave strip away your sentimentality for nature. Here you feel the force of the ocean at night as it grinds the granite boulders into sand. After storms, whole chucks of shore will have disappeared. Hurricanes rip away wharves and deposit sofas on the beach.
Because pathetic fallacy is not a viable way for me to portray seascapes, I compose my images around the horizon: the liminal edge where sea or land touches the sky and the point of access for the human eye. I am using the horizon as a division between conceptual and realistic, between found and created, between perceived and imagined. The imagery above the horizon (or sky) is taken from the real world; the lower portion (or sea) has been digitally manipulated.
These images are intended to be meditative and minimal. I find stormy days more interesting. To borrow from Tolstoy: Sunny days are all alike; every stormy day is different in its own way.
Kip Harris
