PHIPPSBURG, Maine — Three or four times each summer, wanderers along the winding sands at Popham Beach stop in surprise and marvel at the intricate, winding drawings being created by Kathy Icando Lambert.
Lambert, 56, of Haverhill, Massachusetts, uses as variety of tools, including a long wooden rake handle and a claw-like metal garden rake, to create the scrolls, some in a mandala shape and some closer to waves.
Late Friday afternoon, clad in a batik tunic and leggings, Lambert added texture to her design with a 15-prong rake, then stopped to look at the thunderclouds rolling in.
Even though the tide will soon wash away her work, Lambert takes time to find the right spot to create.
“The sand has to be just so,” not too marked with footprints or other debris, “and with some scenery,” she said.
She’s visited Popham for nearly a decade but only began “scrolling” in the past three or four.
On a trip to the beach years ago, Lambert found she “couldn’t just sit there in the sun” with her friends, so walked back across the dunes to the cottage, removed the green plastic end of a rake and headed back down to the sand to draw.
On Friday, after filling in geometric shapes with “shading” — created by dragging a retractable rake through the space — she steps back and thinks before circling the mandala, measuring and tracing single curved lines with an old wooden stick.
Before long, those curved lines have become an elaborate design of curls and tendrils similar to flower vines.
The thunder is booming up the Kennebec River near Bath, and lightning flashes occasionally, although the beach doesn’t empty. Still, Lambert begins to finish up.
This design she’ll capture with her iPhone camera, but larger patterns — some hundreds of feet long — she photographs with a drone.
Lambert usually draws scrolls in the sand just near the beach’s 90-degree turn in front of Pond Island. Just over the dunes sits the cottage of, her friend, Patricia Hatch. Having committed to building a business out of her art, Lambert plans to be at Popham more often to scroll. While she’s here, she often works on Hatch’s cottage (this week she was building cabinets).
Lambert sells postcards and canvas prints of her work on her website and through social media, as well as at Percy’s Store right on Popham Beach.
Lambert used to practice pottery but eventually found she couldn’t support the cost of studio space. She worked for 14 years at PetSmart, but earlier this year left that job and decided to create a portfolio of the canvases and postcards featuring her artwork.
She plans to look for a job, would like to find something that gives her time to focus more on building her art business.
She’s created a website, www.seasidescrolls.com, branched out to social media, and has found quite a bit of popularity on the Facebook page, “I Love Popham Beach.”
As she drew Friday, Jennifer Couture, who lives “two houses down from the ‘Message in a Bottle’ house” [referring to the Kevin Costner movie filmed at Popham], told Lambert this was the first time she’d seen it, then added, “I envy you.”
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