har-ish

My earliest memory of the sea goes back to a visit to Grandpa’s guest house in Vizag. I remember hearing the roar of the water from a distance, long before I could see it. Perhaps it was the distance playing tricks on me, but from where I stood, it seemed as though the sea had swallowed all the lights along the horizon. I was fascinated, though never entirely comfortable around water, a curious love tempered by a lifelong caution.

That fascination kept finding its way back to me through books. The tropical passages in The Moon and Sixpence gave the sea an almost feverish, dreamlike quality, while Dickens could make even some distant Devonshire village or seaside hamlet feel like a place I had somehow visited before. Perhaps that is why, whenever I draw the sea, I am never quite drawing the sea itself. I am drawing the memory of hearing it before I could see it.