DRAWING AND PAINT

If you live in a desert, then you know all about dunes.  They drift across the roadway, they drift into your front yard, they drift through your front door.  But if your experience with dunes is only through vacations at the beach or the oases of the Sahara through your grand African tour, you may not know about the dynamic patterns of light and shadow that they form through their drifts.  You may not have seen the desert dunes at moonrise, silvered in the soft rays, or lit up like the Fourth of July in the sunrise’s bright colors.  Sand dunes are a symphony of movement and even sound when the wind shifts the top ridge and the curve reforms to another, fascinatingly different curve.

Dune art seeks to capture that synchronicity, that point in time where the dune is at rest long enough for the artist to paint it.  Like all moving objects, this is difficult to capture.  The artist may rely on moving pictures of the dune, but the best option is to actually travel to a dune and spend the day observing.  When the dune is baking under the sun or being teased into luminosity by a full moon, then the inspiration strikes and the artist has found his perfect subject.  Back to the easel he goes, working quickly so the scene in his mind’s eye is captured in its entirety.  The result is dune art and the place for dune art is in the personal space of someone who truly appreciates it for what it is, a static portrayal of an almost living thing.

Where would you like to start with your collection of dune acrylic abstract art paintings?  The seaside?  Then the subject could be a purely stark sand dune, highlighted against a stormy sky or a calm blue one.  The dune may have other elements, at your whim.  A sprig of dune grass, waving in the offshore breeze, or a half-covered piece of weathered timber, tossed up by a careless wave from a recent stormy upheaval at sea.  Dunes come alive with the addition of people enjoying them, tramping awkwardly in their flipflops through the sand on their way to a day on the beach.  Dune buggies, loud and adventurous, fly up the side of one dune and down the other, spraying sand wildly.  Seagulls hover above a sand dune, hunting for that elusive scrap of leftover picnic goodies.  All of these depictions of dunes are relevant and important to the mood that you want your display to embody.

But what if you desire the inland heat of the desert dune?  Then you are in luck, because artists have been fascinated by the dunes of the Sahara and other deserts for ages.  In our modern 21^st century travel, it takes merely hours to visit the farflung dunes of a desert, from the Gobi to the sere solitude of Chile’s Atacama.  Or you can do it the easy way, visiting websites with photos or even galleries of dune paintings that enable you to select the perfect piece for your home or office.  Once installed, dune art takes on the pleasant job of just being itself, illustrating through art the glory of the ever-changing dune.