Ocean Tribute

(100 themes - ocean)

When I was a child, there was a painting on our dining room wall - a beautiful, realistic picture of a brooding sunset over a dock and dark green water, on a coast I'd never seen. At first I thought it was a photograph. Then I was told no, that's no photo - somebody made that. Your family made that. Your Great Granny O. was a painter, and she was self-taught, and never picked up a brush until she was all grown up - went out for walks on the seashore and took pictures, came home and copied them on her canvas. Then I went to my grandparents' for the first time I could remember, and there were more of those paintings on their walls - blue skies and storm clouds, wind and surf - family heirlooms made by my kin, her art in my blood.

Landscapes aren't a thing I do much, but I wanted to do something like this for this Ocean prompt, kind of for her - my photograph taken walking down the coast, my seacoast copied like an echo of one of the first artists I knew was a person like me making wonders, rather than somebody strange and famous and unobtainable.

The hardcopy is going to my grandparents for Christmas. Maybe, if I'm really lucky, it might go on their walls near one of those pieces by Great Granny O.