Sketch of the Week: California Palms

About a year ago I was at the University of California, Irvine to give a paper on Peter Hurd's landscapes at the University. I was participating in a conference about light and atmospherics in the American West, so my research on him fit in quite nicely. A lot of the talks focused on California, and specifically Los Angeles, with the major theme of the afternoon sessions being the dark side of sunlight. Film noir, with its emphasis on dramatic brooding shadows, encapsulates this idea exquisitely. The sun, for all its brightness and illumination, casts equally mysterious, forbidding shadows, and the stronger the light, the more intense the darkness.

I was thinking about this juxtaposition while sketching these palms the following afternoon. I had an extra day in town before flying back to Roswell, so I headed to the beach to walk in the surf and sketch. As I was mulling over the previous day's academic inquiries, I overheard a gaggle of teenage girls walking through the sand. Giddy with the sunshine and the impending conclusion of the school year, they were boisterous, gleeful, and utterly carefree in that moment. Would they have cared about yesterday's discussion about the multifaceted nature of sunlight and its ongoing influence on southwestern American culture? I doubt it. For them, it was a beautiful day to spend with friends, nothing more, nothing less.