Seashell In Pastel
by Deena Stoddard
Title
Seashell In Pastel
Artist
Deena Stoddard
Medium
Photograph - Digital Art
Description
Sanibel Island, on the Gulf coast of Florida, is famous for a number of things: beautiful shore birds, long white sand beaches and postcard sunsets. But most of all, it's famous for its seashells. Because of the unusual angle of the island in relation to the Florida coast, Sanibel acts as a giant sieve, harvesting huge numbers of shells from the depths of the sea and leaving them on the sand.
By offering up something so perfect, the sea makes a very un-sealike gesture. After all, the ocean is beautiful, but it is also huge, violent, and in its way, terrifying. But the shell carries a message. It stands out, as the poet Paul Valery put it, "from the common disorder of perceptible things."
The shell might be the world's first souvenir. Seashells have been found at ancient archaeological sites hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, showing that even in the earliest periods, people felt the desire to collect and keep them, just the way we do today. The Camino de Santiago, the celebrated pilgrimage that ends in the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela, the legendary resting place of the Apostle James, has for centuries featured a scallop shell as its emblem. No pilgrim returns from the journey without such a shell as a memento of its successful completion. For hundreds of years, the Huichol Indians of Western Mexico have journeyed to the distant Pacific, where they collect shells and bring them back with them into Mexico's interior to use in their sacred art.
Just as people throughout history have carried shells with them as keepsakes, so also have the world's most creative minds used them as inspirations for their artistic or architectural creations. The ancient Greeks modeled their Ionic column on the spiral of a shell. Dante envisioned Earthly Paradise in the shape of a spiral reminiscent of the pink turns of a shell's interior, and some of Blake's engravings of heavenly staircases crowded with ascending and descending angels have a distinctly shell-like look to them. A shell lies at the source of Frank Lloyd Wright's celebrated ground plan for New York City's Guggenheim Museum as well. In the shell, Wright wrote, "we see the housing of a lower order of life, but it is a housing with exactly what we lack: inspired form. Certainly divinity is manifest here in these shells in their humble form of life."
Like the ocean, life itself is turbulent and chaotic - full of winds and waves and unexpected storms. Yet behind this not always tranquil world, there lies another one, of beauty and harmony and heavenly perfection. It's a world we get reminded of when, walking on the beach, we look down and see a little piece of it right at our feet.
All images © 2011-2018 Deena Stoddard ~ All Rights Reserved
Uploaded
October 18th, 2013
Statistics
Viewed 1,020 Times - Last Visitor from Beverly Hills, CA on 03/28/2024 at 4:46 PM
Embed
Share
Sales Sheet