Watercolor – conte – pencils & crayon d’ache on charts of Buzzards Bay

Our extended family were given several houses on the island of Chappaquoit near Falmouth on Cape Cod. We had the great fortune to be able to visit the island to trace the paths of several generations of our grands. One of my favorite things was to swim across the channel and float in the warm, shallow waters that contained sea grass beds and rounded granite, to which periwinkle snails would clasp. I would rock gently with the incoming tide and spend hours investigating the teaming life that surrounded the inlet. It was on one of these excursions around 2009 that I collected a series of photographs of the sea life that dwell within their shells in the clear, shallow water of the Buzzards Bay side of Cape Cod.

While living in Maine, I finished this set of drawings on old charts that were given to me by my brother, who was working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute at that time. The charts covered the waters in which these creatures lived and offered interesting grounds into which to depict life that dwelled in waters so near to my family.