Beach

→ I used to go to Fire Island → on Long Island, which is a queer place, a mythical place. → It’s been a gay beach since at least the 1940s. There’s a poem about it written by Frank O’Hara (“A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island”). I loved going there, the kindness of the environment, the body-positive attitude of the people. There is a deep sense of acceptance in this community which I think also comes from the ocean itself. Fire island is quite wild + sometimes you
can see deer on the beach. It’s about 3 hours by public transportation from NYC. You get the ticket directly from Penn Station which includes the train, taxi and ferry rides.

My mother told me that my grandfather was an alcoholic and when he got drunk he became very aggressive. So the family would → escape to the shore. They had a primitive relationship to it, they considered it their savior. Moreover, they used to catch lobster and octopus to eat because those are the things that they could get on the rocks. Back then you could still find crabs on beach. My mom helped with making nets.

During my childhood, the sea was a primordial dream and playground. Then when I was around 12, I started going there on my own to engage in artistic activities like sculpting the sand and driftwood into huge land art works well before I knew such art existed. Like Spiral Jetty (by Robert Smithson), I made large sand constructions on the beach that would quickly be transformed and destroyed by the daily tide water.

The great modernist Australian painter Clarice Beckett, who for many years was not well known, did a series of paintings in the 1930s of the very same beaches that I played on many years later during my childhood. Beckett’s work is quite unique, and for me, evokes many vivid visual and atmospheric impressions of my time spent on these beaches. Her painting techniques are deemed to be very innovative for the time; she used a distinctive flattened, fuzzy and abstract method of applying color in her landscapes. When I was a child of 8 or 9, my parents enrolled me in a local painting class that was held in a neighbor's house looking over the sea, and this was only attended by local women, mainly housewives. I like to think Beckett’s spirit was present in these classes somehow.

My family would spend each Christmas holiday period camping beside the ocean beach on the coast. The family home was right on a bay beach, so we experienced both sea and ocean worlds throughout the year. These beach holidays were quite adventurous in terms of experience and activities.

At Byron Bay (in Australia), there is one beach where people drown regularly. I’d often experience a dull pain in my kidneys just before entering the ocean there. Later I found out that this type of pain comes exclusively from fear.

There is a hippie colony near this beach and I once saw a naked woman park her baby in a stroller on the beach right in front of huge breaking waves. Then she went into the wild surf with the incredible undertow, leaving the baby to watch unattended. The view from the baby’s perspective must have been profoundly impressible and primordial, witnessing her mother disappearing into the massive waves with all the sounds of the breaking waves and wind raging around her. I was the only other person on the beach which was many kilometers long.

I think of the beach as a space preparing one to think of the ocean imaginatively and metaphorically.

One of my dreams was to live on the beach and feed on fish + coconuts and I did this in the South Pacific over the time I travelled there.

→ I also spent some time in Rio de Janeiro. The beach in Rio has a very important presence. There is an openness of the city towards the beach. However, at the same time, the beaches of the city are wild zones. There is extreme poverty and inequality in the city, so there is also a lot of crime.

P.H.Well, in terms of the physical atmosphere of the city. But also economically→. Rio is a big port. In fact, in Rio there is a → blurred boundary between beach life + city life. There is an atmosphere of carefreeness + leisure and + at the same time there is a certain tension in the air because of the high crime that happens on the beach(es).

I was by myself on the beach + throwing rocks. I would just sit + watch the ripples the rocks made on the surface. I still love walking on the seashore, feeling the wind on my face + listening to the waves. I just sit + watch the horizon and what is behind the horizon. It opens up a lot of ideas about how movement occurs. From France, you can see England from across the channel. When I was in Marseille → I was thinking of Algeria when looking out into the sea. There’s a moment of connecting through the horizon.

In fact, I do have a practice of painting the sea every day – this does open my mind. I go to the same spot on the beach in Ostend and make a polaroid image of the sea. Then I paint the polaroid. Every time I think: Puh, this is a difficult one; I don’t know if I can do it. But when I start, I don’t have that thought anymore. I conquer the fear of starting and that makes it easier to start.