What Happens to Light Inside a Wave?
The question behind my newest paintings
There is a moment just before a wave breaks when water seems to become illuminated from within.
The body of the wave may be dark blue or green, but its thinnest edge can suddenly become translucent. Light passes through the moving water, colours shift, shapes distort, and for a fraction of a second the wave appears almost luminous.
I have painted this moment many times.
But recently I realised something.
I was painting what I could see without really understanding why I could see it.
That has become the starting point for a new strand of my work.
Looking more closely
When we describe the sea, we often call it blue.
Of course, it is far more complicated than that.
The colour we perceive changes constantly depending on depth, light, weather, the angle from which we are looking, the contents of the water and the movement of its surface.
Inside a breaking wave, all of those things are changing simultaneously.
Water bends and scatters light. The surface reflects some light while allowing some to travel through it. A moving surface continually changes the angles through which we see.
Then the wave begins to break.
Air becomes mixed with water.
Smooth areas become turbulent.
Transparent water becomes white foam.
For a painter, it is an extraordinary visual event.
And it happens incredibly quickly.
Slowing down something that doesn't stay still
One of the strange things about painting waves is that you are trying to make something permanent from something that is never still.
A photograph freezes an instant.
A painting doesn't have to.
It can contain several observations.
It can exaggerate one quality and suppress another.
It can take something that existed for a fraction of a second and allow us to remain inside that moment.
That is becoming increasingly important to me.
Rather than copying a single photograph faithfully, I want to understand what is happening well enough that I can interpret it.
Where is the weight of the water?
Where does transparency begin?
Where does the colour change?
Where does the eye need detail, and where can the paint dissolve into something much looser?
These questions change painting from reproduction into investigation.
Colour beneath the surface
I'm especially interested in the colours that appear inside water.
Turquoise has always been present in my work, but I want to understand it more carefully.
Sometimes a wave appears intensely blue-green because we are looking through a relatively thin section of illuminated water.
Elsewhere the same wave can appear dense and almost opaque.
Beneath the surface, colours and forms begin to behave differently again.
Edges soften.
Light breaks into shifting patterns.
The world above becomes distorted.
Foam viewed from below can appear almost suspended.
There is an entire visual language beneath the water that we rarely experience from the shore.
That is the territory I want to explore.
From observation to paint
Over the coming months I am beginning a series of small experimental works.
Rather than making each study with the expectation that it will become a finished painting for sale, I want some of them simply to answer questions.
What happens if I paint only the illuminated edge of a wave?
Can I create the sensation of transparency without painting every detail?
What happens if the horizon disappears entirely?
How loose can the painting become before the viewer stops reading it as water?
Can an almost abstract arrangement of blues, greens and whites still carry the physical sensation of a wave?
Those studies may never leave my studio.
But what I learn from them may find its way into much larger paintings.
Understanding without illustrating
I don't want to make diagrams of wave physics.
I don't want the science to sit visibly on top of the work.
What interests me is subtler than that.
If I understand more about why a wave behaves as it does, perhaps I will notice things that I previously overlooked.
And once I have noticed them, I cannot unknow them.
They become part of the way I see.
That, in turn, becomes part of the way I paint.
This is the relationship between art and research that interests me most.
Not science translated into an image.
But knowledge changing perception.
And perception changing paint.
The question continues
So, for now, I am beginning with one deceptively simple question:
What happens to light inside a breaking wave?
I suspect there isn't going to be one neat answer.
Instead there will be dozens of observations — about transparency, colour, movement, reflection, foam, depth and distortion.
And each one may lead to another painting.
The sea has always given me subjects to paint.
Increasingly, it is giving me questions to pursue.