A First Winter Visit to the Beach

During the warm spell I finally made it down to the beach. The first time for the year. Despite the bitter cold of the first couple of weeks of January and the end of December, the lake remains open. Ice runs off the shore about 100 feet but even there it is shattered into plates. Below you can see a lovely little ice peninsula stretching out a ways, but as you can see it is calm and iceless out to the horizon.

The plates of ice that crowd the edge of the frozen dunes along the shore take on all kinds of shapes and sizes. It was worth the trip down just to see this. If there would have been a bit of surf the whole thing would become more dynamic, but it has its own charm at rest as well.

The eastern wall stretching out from the Stonewave has been largely obliterated and what remains is encased in ice for the time being and the embankment survive intact for now. In this light the wall looks pretty grim.

Two painting recently finished. The leaf piece is in a watercolor show at Mercyhurst U right now and the other is another wave experiment that didn't quite turn out the way I planned. I will try one more time.