Rusty's Beach

Big waves, storm waves

2012-01-02T21:01:38-06:00

Stormy Breaker

I love big surf, especially storm-driven waves that crash and churn and then run up, and sometimes over, the beach. Drawing and painting these waves, trying to capture their energy, has been my ongoing challenge and passion.

Even in Wisconsin, I can enjoy California or Hawaiian surf; play in it, marvel at it, while painting it. Above is a 3 foot by 4 foot acrylic on canvas of a gnarly breaker along the central California Coast. I worked on this painted during the last two weeks, finishing it (I think) today. Here is its progress:

Dec 15

Dec 16

Dec17

Dec 22

Dec 26

Secret Cove

2011-06-09T11:04:11-05:00

I recently painted a beach I visited in California a few years ago. I know it is north of LA and south of San Francisco, but I forgot where it was exactly so I just call it "Secret Cove". Anybody know where this is?

The Clubhouse Book (Part 3)

2010-11-14T10:38:54-06:00

This is one idea I sketched to inspire kids to build their own clubhouse.

I tend to jump around in my work from painting beaches to drawing the figure to writing. I have promised myself to get this clubhouse/playhouse book out into the world before the end of the year, and I have found the world of non-fiction bookpublishing to be quite fascinating!

My next step, now that the book is more or less complete, is to find an agent and/or a publisher. I originally was thinking of self-publishing this book, but there is too much confusion about that these days to be worth it.

I recently finished writing Part 3 of what I now call The Clubhouse Book. This section explains how to get the right tools, find cheap or free materials and build a clubhouse. It is aimed at any 10-year-old-and-up kid or any adult who hasn't built anything before. Below are a few of the drawings from the book:

Suggestions for planning...

How to use tools...

How to build that first wall.

I am getting ready to send out query letters to publishers. If anyone out there knows of a publisher who might handle this kind of a How-To book, let me know!

Discovering New Beaches

2010-08-26T09:53:47-05:00

Fort Bragg, California is an aging mill town with no mill - the old Union Lumber Company that built the town is long gone. There are some nice beaches just north of town, easily accessed by bicycle on an old logging road called the Haul Road, now a public path (no cars).
I was able to spend two weeks in early August riding a borrowed bike to these beaches, and painting the bluffs, dunes, waves and the pervasive fog that usually hung low over the coast. I really enjoyed it and these watercolors are some of the results.

Sand Dunes, Ten Mile Beach

McKerricher Beach

Virgin Creek with Seagulls (and the Haul Road bridge)

Caspar Beach (south of Fort Bragg)

I've taken my love of beaches this far.

2010-06-16T09:47:25-05:00

This is one of the beaches I have painted that are part of New Island: the town of Wombey on the island's western coast.
Since about 1992 I've been imagining and drawing an island surrounded by hundreds of miles of beaches. It's become the island-nation I call New Island. My friend Scott and I just made a video about it. See it here on YouTube!

A book about building clubhouses

2010-04-24T15:28:15-05:00

I built several clubhouses while growing up, and I'm working on a book titled Our Clubhouses, Stories About the Joy of Building. It shares my clubhouse building experiences until I was well into my teens, and includes the stories of several other backyard playhouse builders. There are also how-to plans and sketches of great clubhouse ideas for kids and of backyard retreats for grownups.
I had built the clubhouse above in 1959, when I was 11. My friends Chris (in the picture), Kathy (whose yard this was in) and Chris's sister Chele and I formed a club and played in our clubhouse almost every day. It was painted turquoise. I spent a lot of time adding on rooms and fixing up the place (note the wallpaper in the doorway) and I believe it helped me grow and stay sane.
In 1989, I built the playhouse below for my three daughters, who have all outgrown it. Now the neighbor kids play in it.

Funny thing...just as I was writing this posting, I saw two girls heading for my daughters' playhouse with a bucket of paint! Sure enough, when I asked them what they were up to, they announced they were going to paint part of the inside that was still bare wood. I said OK.
And life goes on!
I'll post updates as the book progresses, and let you know when and where it will be available!

Real Estate, Greed, and Nature lost

2010-03-13T10:35:31-06:00

To dramatize how coastlines can be forever changed, I've assembled some aerial photos of Sunset Beach and Surfside, CA. The saltwater marshes behind Sunset beach were once home to thousands of ducks, pelicans, fish fry (baby fish), clams, shorebirds, mice, crawfish, hawks, foxes, wild pigs, snakes, and sometimes wandering kids. We just called it "the slough", and if I'd known about the snakes and pigs, I might not have gone out there as much!

Above is my home town, Sunset Beach, in July 1956. The beach was small, but the marshes were vast then. That area I drew in 1961, on the previous post, is just left of the center.

Here it is today!

Here's That part I drew in 1961, today. The old railway is a park (nice!) However, the beach is sterile, no more clams and only scavenger birds; and it's littered with enough plastic and other debris as to be visible from space! The old slough,once to the right, is all built out.

Sunset Beach and Surfside California in the late 50s, early 60s

2010-03-13T09:37:41-06:00

In my early teens I used to wander the streets, behind buildings and especially along the beach and the back bay. When I was about 15, I sat down and drew this sort of map-aerial view of my old neighborhood. Here's what is what:

1. The lower-left corner is the ocean. The little dots are surfers at a surf spot then known as "Anderson Street", which was also the border between Surfside and Sunset Beach. In 1963 the beach was washed out so the houses to the left (in Surfside) were hanging over the waves on pilings.
2. The narrow double line is the old Pacific Electric railroad that ran through town then.
3. The four-lane road is the Pacific Coast highway or PCH, complete with cars and a Greyhound SceniCruiser bus.
4. The two short streets are Anderson Street, center, and 26th Street, right. I lived on 25th Street, which is just cut off by the airplane wing. (I don't know why I didn't draw my own house...)
5. Above the highway were some funky boat harbors and repair yards adjoining Sunset Bay, the open channels (complete with speedboats) and the salt marshes. These were already being filled in (at upper right) for Huntington Harbour, a huge high-end waterfront housing development that we all hated.
6. The green patches are grassy or marsh areas. The rest was more or less pavement, bare dirt or sand. Our neigborhood had no trees, only some lush plantings in yards and in front of some houses.
7. Houses in Surfside were (and still are) packed together only 3 feet apart. They were little 1930s cottage then, and most have been replaced by 32 foot-tall boxes. Most Sunset Beach houses had back yards and I seemed to know what all of them looked like.
8. The round shape near the center was the Sunset Beach water tower, which is still there though is now a private residence, and was featured once on HGTV.
Below the drawing is a photo I took in 1959 of the tracks looking south from Anderson Street (or toward the lower right in the drawing). The local residents parked their cars, hung out wash and burned their trash along the railroad then. Now it's a long park with paved parking, restrooms, some grass and trees, and no tracks.

Here is Surfside with the washed-out beach during an imagined storm. I drew this at about the same time as I drew the aerial view.

The Story Continued: Being in Disasters

2010-01-28T20:37:35-06:00

As a teenager, I vented my frustrations and anger at the world by imagining tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, floods and other natural mayhem. I never drew anyone suffering, just human-built structures, usually real ones close to home, being destroyed. I could get lost in a kind of being state drawing these things completely from imagination and memory. I still work like this today, though usually not so destructively.
I imagine that today I might have had a few interviews with school officials and maybe a psychiatric screening for this kind of thing.

A local gas station exploding in flames after I saw Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds".

The Seal Beach Pier in Southern California getting eaten by a tsunami in 1966.

Part of my elementary school after a mysterious explosion. All I remember about doing this was the challenge of getting the rubble to look authentic!

The story behind my art: Storm Surf!

2010-01-11T22:38:24-06:00


    About four blocks from our house was (is) the town of Surfside. Like Sunset Beach, it was built on a sand beach with two streets lined with small cottages. In the early 1950's most of the sand washed out in a series of storms and the waves then attacked Surfside's beachfront houses. I think I was along when my mom took this picture in 1956. At about that time (I was eight then) I started to walk down here regularly to see the damage.
    It was fascinating and awesome!
    Acres of beach had simply vanished, houses were gone, and the street was covered in sand or missing!
    What power!
    So over time I began to re-create these events in miniature or on paper. Instead of sports or Boy Scouts, I would sometimes wander the back bay and if I found a sandy shoreline and some junk I would build a little town with roads and buildings and a seawall and then clobber it with waves I made with a board... Later I built a 'wave box' in the back yard that I filled half with sand and then spent hours building a model beach house on the sand. I'd then fill the
'ocean' with the hose, and bring in the storm surf with a board and that was the end of the house!
    I usually did the wave - board thing by myself, but also built model houses and towns on the beach with my friend Chris. It was an extra treat if the tide came in and the waves got it!
    Then I began drawing the ocean, or trying to, and came up with scenes like the one below, done in oil pastel when I was about 15. I was trying to visualize what it would be like being in one of those Surfside houses when that big wave came that ultimately destroyed it...