The Beach with Sally Swatland and Robert Graves

More days spent on the beach.
The grandchildren and the dog are going home tomorrow and although I’ll miss them, I think I need the peace, I’m verging on exhausted. We have spent the last few days on the beach; and still the sun shines  I’m going with the beach theme for this weeks Art Sunday. 

The art work is by American artist Sally Swatland and the poem is by Robert Graves. I don’t think either are what I would normally chose but they fit exactly with the way I feel right now. Sally Swatlands paintings reassure me that the way my grandchildren have behaved these last few days is typical of children the world over and from all generations.

Robert Graves poem shows that even the most intelligent and talented of men………..can be seduced by the simple pleasures of the beach.

SALLY SWATLAND
(b. 1946)

Memories of Summer

Sally Swatland was born in 1946 in Washington, DC and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut when she was seven. Her father was a successful attorney, which allowed her family to spend long periods in the countryside with many vacations at various seaside locations throughout the United States. She shared a passion with her family for beaches, sunshine, and fresh air. Most summer days were spent at the beach playing in tidal pools, chasing minnows, collecting shells and exploring.
 

Read more here
http://www.sallyswatland.com/?page=63&key=
Poet Robert Graves has an extraordinary story;
The Beach Robert von Ranke Graves (also known as Robert Ranke Graves and most commonly Robert Graves) (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985)was an English poet, scholar/translator/writer of antiquity specializing in Classical Greece and Rome, and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works.

Graves's poems—together with his translations and innovative analysis and interpretations of the Greek myths, his memoir of his early life, including his role in the First World War, Good-Bye to All That, and his speculative study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess—have never been out of print.

Read more here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Graves

by Robert Graves

Louder than gulls the little children scream
Whom fathers haul into the jovial foam;
But others fearlessly rush in, breast high,
Laughing the salty water from their mouthes--
Heroes of the nursery.
The horny boatman, who has seen whales
And flying fishes, who has sailed as far
As Demerara and the Ivory Coast,
Will warn them, when they crowd to hear his tales,
That every ocean smells of tar.