When the Gulf Holds Its Breath: Winter Light at Orange Beach

When the Gulf Holds Its Breath

For our New Year’s vacation this year, my family and I traveled to Orange Beach, Alabama. I love going to the beach in the winter. No bugs. No sweating. No pressure to have a tan. And far less risk of my pale self ending up sunburned.

Winter also brings fewer crowds, which allows me to fully enjoy the calm and solitude of the shoreline. My husband and I can take long walks in the sand. I can stand still for long stretches of time, watching the sky and the sea move together. I can while away hours drinking coffee, watching birds fish and play in the invisible waves of air above the water.

I fully planned to paint while on vacation.I just… didn’t want to.

Instead, I rested. I took photos. I sketched a little. And I quietly gathered inspiration, knowing I wanted to create an Orange Beach collection once I returned home.

Now that I have a few finished pieces underway, I’ve realized something important. The reason I didn’t want to paint plein air right away wasn’t resistance — it was processing. My artist brain was working, sorting through the feelings the beach was giving me and searching for the right way to express them.

Winter changes the relationship between the sky and the sea. There’s no soft humidity haze, no heat rising from the sand to blur edges and mute contrasts. Everything feels sharper. More dramatic. More honest.

That’s what I want to capture — the intensity, the energy, the stark beauty of the Gulf in winter.

This piece, When the Gulf Holds Its Breath, is a night scene painted in watercolor on paper, inspired by the quiet tension that settles in before a coastal storm. The moment when the world seems to pause, the air feels heavy, and the sky and sea mirror one another in anticipation.

This is just a sneak peek of what’s coming. I’m experimenting with new watercolor techniques and pushing the boundaries of what this medium can do — letting the paint move, settle, and speak in its own way.

The Orange Beach Collection is about memory, atmosphere, and emotion. About listening to a place long enough to understand how it wants to be painted.

Soft, shifting layers of indigo, slate, and storm-washed blue drift across this night seascape, capturing the quiet tension before a coastal storm arrives. The horizon blurs where sky and sea begin to mirror one another, creating a sense of stillness and anticipation — that fleeting moment when the air feels heavy and the world seems to pause.

Painted in watercolor on paper, this piece embraces looseness and atmosphere rather than detail, allowing the pigments to move and settle naturally, much like the weather itself. Inspired by evenings along Orange Beach, this painting reflects the Gulf in one of its most introspective moods — calm on the surface, powerful just beneath.

This work is part of my Orange Beach Collection, a series exploring light, memory, and emotion along the Alabama coast.