Paul Valery wrote, “The sea, the sea always begins again.” For the past 3 months, I’ve been working on a painting of the ocean and each time I set out to paint felt like I was beginning again. The canvas is 12 feet long and the inspiration for it came from the much smaller painting above – which was done about 4 years ago in the late fall while I was living in Point Lookout.
For the past 25 years, I’ve lived within a half mile of the beach and have spent countless hours in and around the ocean in every season. It’s by the sea that I am most at home. Such a large canvas (nearly the width of a two-car garage) provides an opportunity to capture and express the ocean’s body and soul in spectacular fashion.
Because the sea is always beginning again, always changing, and because the states of mind and moods that I bring to the beach have run the gamut of human emotions, the question became which beach to paint? The small painting above was painted during a bleak moment by the shore. I’m reminded of something that Ishmael says in introducing himself as the narrator in Moby Dick: “Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet…then I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.” So while this painting has beauty, it is for me that melancholy glow of wearied romantic in a damp, drizzly November in the soul.
This color palette and the rhythm of the paint are very much of the North Atlantic Ocean that surrounds Long Island. Here the Atlantic is a moving mix of grayish blues, sod greens, smatterings of indigo and of course foam that ranges from a sandy tan to the white of snow. These are mature colors, seasoned, and even at it’s most inviting there’s a reservation to it all. On the brightest, most placid summer day, it will still whispers of raging winters. All that being said, the North Atlantic is the ocean I know and the one I set out to capture on canvas.
2 months into the work, something unexpected happened. My family and I took an impromptu trip to the west coast. For 9 days, I lived next to the Pacific Ocean, from Monterey to Big Sur to Cardiff-by-the-Sea. Long, lovely days on beaches, cliffs, balconies, piers – always with my eyes upon the Pacific. What beautiful colors! Turquoise, aquamarines, sun-drenched cyan, navy intermingling with denim and a dash of the sky. A tapestry of azure that had a warm sweetness to it, vs. the cold, salty beaches I call home.
This Pacific rainbow of blues came together in long, rolling waves that sculpted themselves as avalanches of elegance careening to the shore. As we surfed and watched others surf, the thought occurred that water as a symbol of god’s presence is never more acutely felt than from a board in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by waves of water. It reminded me of the great Philip Larkin poem that begins, “If I were called in to construct a religion, I should make use of water.” Each day the color and the rhythm of the Pacific became more palpable and deeply absorbed. I took it home with me and began again to paint.
The large canvas is now complete, the image appears below. It’s a love song for the sea, where eternity begins and ends with every wave, and where an infinite rhythm reminds us that the living moment is everything.
