Last summer I was in the Abaco’s with my family and I started reading "Islands In The Stream" by Ernest Hemingway. It’s a love letter about Bimini written in the perspective of a painter living there. After reading the first paragraph, I had to travel to Bimini and see what Hemingway lived and described.

" THE HOUSE was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream. The water of the Stream was usually a dark blue when you looked out at it when there was no wind. But when you walked out into it there was just the green light of the water over that floury white sand and you could see the shadow of any big fish a long time before he could ever come in close to the beach.

It was a safe and fine place to bathe in the day but it was no place to swim at night. It was no place to swim at night. At night the sharks came in close to the beach, hunting in the edge of the Stream and from the upper porch of the house on quiet nights you could hear the splashing of the fish they hunted and if you went down to the beach you could see the phosphorescent wakes they made in the water. At night the sharks had no fear and everything else feared them. But in the day they stayed out away from the clear white sand and if they did come in you could see their shadows a long way away."

Many things have changed in Bimini since Hemingways day. But the water and beach is much the same. I took over 800 photos and color studies as reference for an upcoming studio series that will be paintings of 10 beach and seascape studies. I saw the sharks he described as "shadowing off in the distance in the clear white sand". I walked on "the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and open sea". I swam in and saw "the water of the Stream ". I walked ,talked and drank in the beauty of the water and sand described as "floury white.” It all there but there isn’t any sign or photo describing what Hemingway wrote. Perhaps that the idea, you must go yourself to see this legendary island with the Bimini Blue water. I had my notes from the book printed and I used it as a map. I was so easy to find and once you see it, you know in your soul all that he said was true was then and remain true now in 2018. 

There is a lot to say about Hemingways Bimini of 1935 compared to today. This will not be my mission. What is my passion is to share the beauty of the "Lost Beaches of Hemingway's Bimini" in paint. 

More to come...

Thanks

Susan