You don’t notice them all at once. At first it’s just white moving against blue — a kind of brightness that keeps repeating until you realize it’s a raft of white pelicans. They don't announce themselves; they just keep coming and going.
The painting is long — 24 by 72 — and that matters. It behaves like a sentence you can’t quite get to the end of without shifting your body. It stretches across the wall the way the pelicans stretch across the water, arriving in pieces rather than as a single event. One settles, another follows, one leaves, then another. And another.
There’s something quietly comic about it, too. White pelicans have that way of looking both prehistoric and slightly absurd, like they’re not entirely convinced by the modern world. In the painting, they float with that same combination of purpose and nonchalance, as if they’ve stumbled into the scene and decided to stay.
The reference photo was taken by Jim McIntosh, from a dinghy drifting near sandy sloughs on Green Island Sound, SC where bait fish collect. Jim said the pelicans just kept coming — the first time he’d seen them there in years. That sense carries through the work. Not rarity exactly, but surprise folded into repetition. The pleasure of watching something unlikely happen, then continue to happen, and you are lucky enough to be there when it happens.
And yes — it’s absolutely the kind of painting you hang over a white couch. Not because it’s polite or decorative, but because it changes the room’s temperature. It introduces movement without noise, humor without punchlines, a horizon that doesn’t ask anything of you except to keep looking.
You stand there longer than you expect to, not waiting for anything — just aware of the pelicans and what they're up to today.
