King Tide

Artist: Pam Haunschild

Format: Acrylic on board, black wood float frame

Dimensions: 11" x 14" x 2"

Description:

King tides arrive on the West Coast just three or four times a year — dramatic, oversized swells that pull the ocean unusually high onto the shore, beautiful to witness and impossible to ignore. Pam Haunschild renders that drama from above, the coastline reading almost like a living organism — cracked, cellular textures built up across the surface, color radiating outward in bands of rust, blue, and gold as if the land itself were responding to the water's pull. A single bird crosses the sky, small and steady against all that movement below. For Haunschild, the King Tide is more than a striking seasonal event. "They are also a harbinger of sea level change and flooding that will likely occur with the warming of the oceans," she says — and the painting holds both truths at once: the tide's undeniable beauty, and the warning carried inside it.