Between houses in the early 1940s, Chuck Jones, his wife Dorothy and their young daughter, Linda, lived with Chuck's mother in Manhattan Beach, California for a bit (that's Mabel's house to the right in the background.)  If you live here or if you've ever been to southern California, you probably know that our beach cities are oftentimes shrouded in a morning fog, a fog so thick that absolutely everything is leached of 'color' and it all becomes a matter of grayscale tones.  

Jones, classically trained as an artist, puts that time to good use in "Manhattan Beach" and yet brings his sense of humor to it as well.  His "Study in Gray and Black" (his "Whistler's Mother" in other words) is compositionally adept (an inverted triangle) with its round umbrella shapes mimicking that of the hooded young boy and his half-buried canine companion digging a hole in the sand providing a counterpoint to the lack of colors other than gray, black and white.