Beauty follows us everywhere.
The color of the harbor today is blue, the color of the sky above it, blue, too, but paler. Of course, they are just reflections of each other. The shoal water across the sand bars is greener because of the bending of the light, although I can’t say just how.
Yesterday, both sky and bay were gray flannel, the line between them — that is, the horizon — barely distinguishable, somewhere between imagination and reality. The day before, in drizzle, a purple bruise of a cloud stretched from the Truro bluffs across the mouth of the harbor to Long Point. The lighthouse stood staunchly white against the rain, then vanished into fog. Fog is the absence of color.
We are not yet into the brassy summer sun that bleaches everything, but even then, in July and August, early morning and evening skies usher mild filtered light that makes every sight easy, pleasant. (And it is the winter skies, with their infinite arrays of gray, that are the showstoppers.)
I have not spoken yet of sunrises, which are holy, or sunsets, which defy description but keep on going in psychedelic paroxysms into astounding after-sunsets. The sky, whether violet or cream-colored, watches over us.
On the beach, the buff sand is dotted with sodden drifts of brown, green, and red seaweed — the wrack line — and littered with the detritus of the dead: haphazard crab parts, the empty shells of scallops, oysters, clams, mussels, and others, the occasional skull or carcass of a seabird. The erupting pin feathers of a baby cormorant are the most beautiful shade of delicate, translucent blue; there is sadness in its early demise. The lady (also called calico) crab is festively multi-colored. The blue-black mussel’s inner shell is a pearlescent miracle that mirrors the sky. An upturned horseshoe crab startles us back to the Pleistocene.
The natural world brings this beauty to us every day; all we have to do is be receptive to it. But we don’t live in a complete wilderness: this “narrow land” abounds in the works of humanity.
I am reminded of this when I walk the beach toward the east to the last house on the water before the riprap of the East End breakwater. There, on a seawall tangential to the water, appeared a spontaneous work of art that is startling in both its appropriateness and its vibrancy. It is a most unusual landscape, a scene of the harbor painted on the rough abraded concrete, pimpled with barnacles, cracked in a few places, with a large rust stain from rebar descending into the painting.
Standing in front of it and looking beyond, you can see exactly what the artist saw: bright blue water with regular interruptions of jetties, the Provincetown shoreline with the Pilgrim Monument, and the spires of the library (the old Methodist Church), town hall, and the Unitarian Universalist Church. A yellowish haze about the buildings suggests a setting sun. The roughness of the surface marries the splendor of the painting in a most appropriate way. It is temporary, of course, given the conditions it endures and is already showing signs of wear. Certainly, the storm before last Christmas pummeled it mercilessly, along with so much else.
I am not sure exactly when the painting was done. My dog and I walk that beach almost every day, as the tides allow. If only I kept a journal, I could quickly find the date when the pleasant shock of discovering it took place. One day a blank concrete seawall; the next day a piece of art. Public art is wonderful, as the Europeans know full well. And to have it juxtaposed to the scene it mirrors as to be almost part of that scene makes it even better.
The painting is not signed. I found out that the artist’s name is Dave Read, and that he comes from a long line of Reads who have spent time here; he lives in Florida. I congratulate the artist, who has added a touch of beauty to an already beautiful world.
