From Looking at the Sea to Entering It

How my paintings are changing — and why I have started looking beneath the surface

 

For a long time, I painted the sea from the outside.

I was drawn to horizons, shifting skies, reflected light and the extraordinary sense of space that exists where water meets sky. The sea became a place I returned to again and again in my work — sometimes calm, sometimes turbulent, but always carrying a sense of movement and emotional possibility.

Recently, though, something has started to change.

I have found myself moving closer.

The horizon has become less important. The waves have become larger. The viewpoint has dropped towards the surface of the water.

And increasingly, I don't simply want to paint what it looks like to stand on the shore and look at the sea.

I want to know what it feels like to be inside it.

Moving beneath the surface

My recent paintings have become increasingly focused on waves: the moment before they break, the translucent wall of moving water, the explosion of foam and, more recently, the view from beneath the surface.

That change in viewpoint has opened up an entirely new world for me.

When you remove the horizon, a seascape begins to behave very differently.

There may be no obvious sky.

No beach.

No recognisable coastline.

Instead there is water, light, movement, transparency, distortion and depth.

Parts of the painting begin to move towards abstraction even though the source is completely natural.

I find that incredibly exciting.

It has also made me realise that there are things I want to understand rather than simply observe.

Why does one part of a wave appear deep blue while another suddenly glows turquoise or green?

Why can light seem to pass through the lip of a wave?

What creates the fleeting patterns of brightness beneath the surface?

What happens visually in the instant when an ordered body of water becomes turbulent white foam?

The more closely I look, the more questions appear.

 

Painting as a form of investigation

 

I'm not interested in becoming a scientist, nor do I want my paintings to become illustrations of scientific ideas.

But I am becoming increasingly interested in what might happen if I understand the sea more deeply.

My first research question is very simple:

 

What happens to light inside a breaking wave?

 

I'm going to spend time observing that question.

I'll photograph and film waves. I'll make sketches and colour notes. I'll experiment with small paintings. I'll look at water from above, at surface level and from beneath whenever I can.

I also hope to speak to people who understand waves and underwater light from very different perspectives — oceanographers, marine researchers, underwater photographers and others who spend their lives observing water.

I want to know what they see that I don't yet see.

Because perhaps understanding something differently will allow me to paint it differently too.

 

The Sea Within

 

This research is becoming part of a larger body of work that I am currently developing around the idea of immersion.

I keep returning to the phrase The Sea Within.

It describes both the physical experience I'm beginning to explore and something more emotional.

The sea has an extraordinary ability to make us feel both very small and completely absorbed by our surroundings. It can be restorative and frightening, quiet and immensely powerful, familiar and unknowable.

I am interested in that tension.

Perhaps that is why waves are becoming increasingly central to my work.

A wave exists only briefly.

Its exact shape can never be repeated.

For a few seconds, light, water, gravity, movement and air combine to create something extraordinarily beautiful — and then it disappears.

Painting allows me to hold that moment for longer.

 

A new chapter

 

I don't yet know exactly where this research will take the paintings.

That's part of what makes it exciting.

I hope the work becomes less about describing the appearance of the sea and more about conveying the sensation of being surrounded by it.

Perhaps the paintings will become more abstract.

Perhaps the horizon will disappear completely.

Perhaps my understanding of colour will change.

Perhaps studying the physics of a wave will change the way I paint movement.

For now, I am allowing myself to be curious.

After years of looking towards the sea, I feel as though I am finally beginning to enter it.