When Robin Popp’s “Dune Shadows” arrived among other submissions for this issue’s Ocalan Art Edit, I certainly admired it as a painting. Then, almost without warning, I was a 7-year-old boy again enjoying the summer at my aunt’s Pensacola Beach rental. I found myself returned to a place I thought lost long ago. The wooden, rustic house partially hidden by the dunes and sawgrass could have wandered off some Edward Hopper painting, though I was too young to appreciate any of it.
My sister, two brothers and I would race down the weathered stairs that led outside from the kitchen right to the sand. The sound of the crashing waves could be heard, but not seen, hidden by those dunes so masterfully fashioned by Popp. Between the hills and sawgrass, a narrow path snaked its way to our destination and we would race through, seemingly oblivious to the sand spurs dotting the route like land mines. Once we reached the water, we pulled the sand spurs from the bottom of our feet and enjoyed the relief as though the pain never existed in the first place.
The last summer spent at my Aunt Rhoda Kay’s beach place was also the summer “Jaws” was released. Aunt Rhoda Kay took my sister to see it then later my sister recounted every scene to us as though she were telling ghost stories around a campfire. We still ran into the surf the next morning.
About a dozen years later Rhoda Kay would pass away from cancer. The old beach place is gone as well, replaced by gentrified condos and hotels that now define a new era. My aunt is gone and so is that place, but memories of both remain, and in some small measure are a reality that can never be extinguished.
Digging up sand fleas to use as bait for whiting. My brother being hooked near the eye from an errant cast. Fishing with a family friend named Sanders, who seemed a gruff old seafarer – he was our Captain Quint. The hypnotic whir of the ceiling fans. Card games played on the hardwood floor long after the sun had gone to bed.
All these thoughts, memories that somehow drift to the surface of the mind all because some painting makes its way to my eye. An eye now treading water.
Perhaps that is the quiet power of art. A painting does not simply show us a place or moment in time – sometimes it returns us home. Robin Popp painted dunes and sawgrass, and there I found my aunt, the summer of “Jaws” and a childhood that had slipped away.