Category: Art

I bought a painting from Catherine Christiano, a local Lyme artist. The subject of the painting is a stretch of beach we used to call the “private beach.” An ironic tag as we were climbing over the Flat Rocks from our own very private, gated, Old Lyme Shores Beach. The “private beach” (i.e., Edge Lea) was a strip of largely empty shoreline, backed by marshland, on which a couple of old-fashioned New England cottages sat. One of those cottages is depicted in CC’s painting. It’s a quiet stretch of beach—a reminder of what the Connecticut shoreline was like 100 years ago, before gated beach associations, fences, barriers, jetties, guards, and a proliferation of ‘Keep Out’ signs dotted the shore.

The Lyme Art Association Gallery had an exhibit of New England Landscapes this month. I bought a painting by Dodie D’Oench entitled, ‘Griswold Point.” I thought having spent some time walking on Griswold Point, camping on it, running the boat up on it, and finally watching so much of it wash away in the tides of time that I should buy the painting as a reminder of younger days in Old Lyme. The place also appears in my Work In Progress, The Cottage Industry.

Griswold Point isn’t what it used to be. Once it was a significant peninsula of grass and sand. People camped and fished on it during the summers. Now it’s a wormy little island of marsh awaiting one more drowning by the rising tides. Here’s a timelapse view of the area over an 80-year period.