The Mercury News interviews Obi Kaufmann on the Coasts of California

Here’s an excerpt from the interview: It was on just such an overcast morning recently that Oakland author Obi Kaufmann visited Mussel Rock, a Daly City beach of geological significance. Kaufmann, 50, is an artist, poet and one of the foremost communicators of what California landmass represents. His latest in a series of extraordinary field atlases is “The Coasts of California” (Heyday, $55), which tells the multilayered story of the shoreline through visually striking watercolor paintings and maps, insightful conceptualizations and doctoral-level proficiency in the natural sciences.

Artwork from The Coasts of California: A California Field Atlas by Obi Kaufmann (April 2022) reproduced with permission from Heyday. 

“Inexpressible fertility” is how one early explorer described the Bay Area, Kaufmann writes. “Over a thousand species of animals still make their home here in this place that is now as ecologically compromised as it is fathomlessly beautiful. Metropolitan industry has overtaken most of the Bay, yet on its margins, hundreds of thousands of birds still recognize this essential landing spot on their annual migrations up and down the Pacific Flyway.”

Read the full article here.