Can a Painting Make You Feel as Though You Are Underwater?

Exploring immersion, memory and our emotional relationship with the sea

 

Some of the most interesting responses I receive to my paintings are not really about painting at all.

People talk about how the work makes them feel.

Calm.

Free.

Restored.

Energised.

Sometimes someone will stand in front of a painting and tell me that it reminds them of swimming as a child, a particular coastline, a holiday, a person or a moment in their life.

I find those responses fascinating.

Because the painting is static.

The sea is not.

And yet somehow paint can reactivate the sensation or memory of being near water.

That has led me to another question:

 

Can I make a painting that doesn't simply show the sea, but gives the viewer some sense of being inside it?

 

From seascape to immersion

 

Traditional seascape painting usually gives us a very clear relationship with the ocean.

We are outside it.

We stand on the shore and look towards the horizon.

There is stability beneath our feet.

Recently I have become increasingly interested in removing that stability.

What happens if there is no shore?

What happens if the horizon disappears?

What if the wave fills almost the entire canvas?

What if the viewer appears to be at water level?

Or beneath the surface?

Suddenly the relationship changes.

We are no longer simply observing a landscape.

We have entered an environment.

That is the idea of immersion that I am beginning to explore in my current work.

 

The strange emotional power of water

 

Our relationship with the sea is complicated.

It can be tranquil and restorative.

It can also be unpredictable, physically powerful and frightening.

A calm surface can become turbulent within seconds.

A wave can be beautiful and threatening at the same time.

Perhaps some of the emotional power of the sea comes from that contradiction.

We understand that we cannot control it.

Yet many of us continually return to it.

We walk beside it.

Swim in it.

Sit in front of it.

Listen to it.

Remember it.

For me, that makes the sea much more than a visual subject.

It becomes a way of exploring experiences such as calm, movement, surrender, memory and return.

 

What changes when we go underwater?

 

Being beneath the surface creates a completely different sensory world.

Our hearing changes.

Movement changes.

The body feels weight differently.

The visual world becomes distorted.

Light flickers and shifts.

Things that seemed familiar from above become strange.

The surface itself becomes a moving ceiling.

I'm particularly interested in that boundary between above and below.

It is only a surface, and yet crossing it completely changes our perception of the environment.

In paintings, I can begin to play with that boundary.

Perhaps the viewer isn't entirely sure whether they are looking into a wave or looking out from beneath it.

Perhaps an area of foam can be read in several ways.

Perhaps the painting can hover between realism and abstraction.

That uncertainty interests me.

 

Memory rather than photography

 

This research may eventually take me away from photographic reference too.

A photograph can tell me what water looked like at one instant.

But memory tells me something different.

What do I remember about being underwater?

Not necessarily individual details.

Perhaps it is the greenish light.

The sound.

The pressure.

The sensation of moving upwards towards brightness.

The moment of breaking through the surface.

Memory simplifies.

It exaggerates.

It deletes things.

For a painter, that can be incredibly powerful.

A painting based partly on memory may ultimately feel more truthful than one that perfectly reproduces a photograph.

Not optically truthful.

Emotionally truthful.

 

Researching the feeling as well as the physics

 

As I develop this new body of work, I want to explore both sides of the sea.

There is the physical sea — waves, water, light, depth, movement.

And there is the psychological sea — what we remember, what we feel, why we return.

I'm interested in the point where those two meet.

Understanding how light behaves underwater may alter the colours I use.

Studying a breaking wave may alter my brushwork.

Listening to people's memories of the sea may alter what I choose to leave out.

My own memories may alter the composition entirely.

This is beginning to feel less like painting a subject and more like slowly building a language.

 

The Sea Within

 

That is why The Sea Within continues to feel like the right working title for this developing body of work.

It can refer literally to being within the water.

But it also suggests something internal.

The seas we carry with us.

The places we return to in memory.

The strange ability of water to connect a physical place with an emotional state.

I don't know yet exactly how far these ideas will take the paintings.

And I don't want to decide too early.

I would rather allow the work to change as I observe more, learn more and spend more time around and within the sea.

My hope is that eventually someone standing in front of one of these paintings doesn't simply think:

That is a wave.

I hope, for a moment, they remember what water feels like.