I grew up in a beach town on the California coast. As a child my friends and all would often tell wild stories about the ocean. Sometimes those stories spawned night mares. This painting is based on a re-occurring nightmare about being stuck at the very bottom of the ocean. My dream always started out the same; I would be walking on a beach at night. The distant sounds of life were subdued by what felt like the pressure of water on my ear drums. I could never make out any distinct sounds; I would wander around on the beach confused, lonely and frightened. There were no signs of people or animal life around me and my feet were painful from the stinging coldness. When I looked up through the dark sky, I could see what looked like some stars and clouds, but they were very fuzzy, and obscured by what I thought was fog. In each occurrence of this dream, as soon as I noticed the sky I would slowly in a panicky sort of way get this horrible feeling that something was very wrong. I could hear the pelicans or seagulls couldn’t smell the fog or feel the pounding surf vibrating in my stomach. I would concentrate on the stinging sensation in my feet and realize they were in heavy wet sand, and that I was in fact walking around the on the ocean floor, in complete bareness and disturbing silence. The fact that I could breath underwater only seem to add to my demise. I knew in my dream that I would be stuck there forever as there wasn’t any way to reach the surface because the gravity and pressure of the tides were to much for body to overcome. The sadness of spending the rest of my life complexly alone, out weight the fear and panic I felt about being lost and forgotten at the bottom of the sea. This is a hard painting to get a good photo of, but I have included many shots to help you get a perspective.