I am a realist.
Not only in my personal life, but in my artwork as well. When I began
painting in oil, I was very interested in all types of approaches
to various subjects. I painted abstracts, I experimented with impressionism.
It was all a very good learning experience.
In my 30 year career as an artist, I painted
oil portraits in an impressionist style, still, they were accurate real
likenesses of the sitter. I painted traditional landscapes, and wonderfully
believable animals in them. I, too, went through the red-barn
phase, and rendering mountains above curving streams. Real trees
appeared in real forests from my paints and brushes. When I took
up watercolor painting, my florals were sharp and clear, although their
backgrounds were muted and non-objective.
"I painted traditional landscapes,
and wonderfully believable animals in them."
The time came, that I decided to focus on seascapes
in oil. I wanted to convey the light and movement associated with
the tumbling, breaking waves. I wanted my viewers to experience the
awe and excitement that I felt when standing at the edge of the sea.
To me this would best be accomplished by rendering the subject as realistically
as possible. That meant a very thorough knowledge of the water;
how it moved and why it moved the way it did. I needed to know the
anatomy of the wave; from its depths to the breaking foam at the translucent
top. I wanted to learn the reasons for the foam patterns to act the
way they did. Then, I painted the scene so that it was as though
the person looking at the painting was right there. That meant detail.
I studied the subject by using binoculars.
This brought up the depth of field to put me in the action where the waves
were breaking offshore. I would concentrate on the foam patterns
that rose up on the face of the wave. Another time I watched, for
hours, the way the breaker reached its apex, then tipped over into a spill.
I memorized the activity. And, in my studio, I painted
those details. The |
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materials I chose were designed to give me the
ultimate in fine detail.. I used (and still do), high quality portrait
linen for its smooth surface. That allowed me to acheive the details
to convey realism. My paints, as always, were the best quality
for ease of application and longevity. I used a palette knife to
portray the rugged surface of the Pacific coastal volcanic rocks.
When it came to the trickles of water running off the rocks, I chose brushes
with a small tip to stroke the narrow rivulets across the texture of the
rocks.
"The materials I chose were designed
to give me the ultimate in fine detail"
My husband was my best critic and encouraged
me to do the ocean scenes in accurate detail (He wears glasses and told
me, if it looked "fuzzy", it seemed as though he needed to
get his prescription changed!). So the challenge was, from
the beginning, to paint the sea in as accurate and fine a detail
as I could. The process was time consuming. That was o.k. with me!
I enjoyed the challenge and spent the time totally absorbed in creating
a seascape that could be perceived as "alive", full of motion, looking
as though you were about to get wet! To convey such an
impact, my canvases were generally larger sizes from 24 X 36 and up.
I began to sell my paintings, and get great compliments from people who
saw them at galleries and shows. My favorite story is the time a
boy of about seven years stood before a large painting, drawn magically
into the scene. Finally he turned to his mom and said, simply, "Wow!"
I have had many of those "wow" reactions to my seascapes over the years.
The positive comments always please me. I am encouraged to do the
next one better, more dramatically, larger, wetter, more realistically
than ever before. Perhaps the results will be made manifest in the
striking clouds of a coastal sunset. Maybe the intimate ripple of
the closeup view of a swell rising in the glittering sun will be the theme
I choose. As always, I will strive to make the seascape painting
to be as real as it gets!
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