Huntington Beach artist ‘paints with shells’ to create fleeting masterpieces
Inside her Huntington Beach gallery, Anne Marie Price creates stained-glass mosaics that become treasured objects of art for her patrons.
But every few days, she ventures outdoors to make art that is free, accessible, public and wholly ephemeral.
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While her boyfriend surfs, Price sifts through the sand at Bolsa Chica State Beach – dropping seashell fragments into a canvass bag.
Then she spends the next hour designing a whimsical image of a seahorse or a mermaid or a fish – usually near Lifeguard Tower 22.
As they tote their boards to the water, passing surfers have come to anticipate the fleeting works of art.
Admirers must look quick, however.
“The mosaics don’t last for more than a few hours,” Price said. “People trample them, children take the shells. Sometimes even seagulls pick at them.”
Her significant other, Allan Lloyd, compares the artwork to an Etch A Sketch: “Shake it up, and start over.”
Price, 46, moved in 2011 to California from Wisconsin with her two now-adult daughters. But she has yet to acclimated to the waves.
“I’m a beachcomber, more comfortable on land,” she said. “But I completely get the appeal of the ocean.”
Six years ago, for the heck of it, Price started fashioning shell shards into images of hearts, turtles, flowers, coyotes and such.
“My idea was to use only things I found: shells, kelp, sticks,” she said.
For souvenirs that endure beyond the mosaics, she snaps Instagram photos.
Occasionally, Price incorporates bits of plastic, that scourge of the ocean.
“But I always dispose of it after I take a picture – I never leave litter behind,” she said.
Favorable response, both virtual and in person, encouraged her to keep it up. And now, her fan base expects nothing less than to happen upon a fanciful creature in the sand.
On a recent morning, surfer Greg Tate, 57, paused for a few moments to observe as Price’s latest subject, a yard-long orca, took shape.
“I’m amazed every time,” Tate, an architect said. “She paints with shells, and doesn’t care at all that her creation is only here for a moment.”
Lloyd, 54, said people often suggest Price find a way to make the artwork permanent – perhaps by setting her mosaics in cement.
“They ask, ‘Can’t you save it?’” Lloyd said. “That’s missing the whole point.”
“I like that it’s temporary,” Price agreed. “Everything in life is temporary.”