These sea-green shallows are from a rocky beach in California.
My ‘inspiration oil’ is one of my very early impasto paintings, painted in 2017 after visiting the Algarve in Portugal. We were there a bit too early in the season. It was much colder, much more stormy than I expected out of a trip to Portugal.
Here’s the paintings side by side for easy comparison.
And here’s a close up detail.
Interesting hey?
They are very different in feeling and effect – but, I see the same impatient gestural hand at work. My painting-brain is the same, even if the surfaces are day and night.
In the watercolor, I love what the floating pigment creates. Blooms of lighter weight pigments, versus the sedimentary effect – the settling of tiny grains of sand, dropping out of the water, accumulating in the low spots in the paper. It’s almost a model for the real sea.
In the oil, I’m enjoying the freedom to make flecks of sea spray or jagged bits of rock, without having to play the careful dance of negative painting. The leaving out of highlights – all that thinking ahead like a chess player. With this particular painting, I remember coming back and re-working it a few months later. Something that’s impossible with watercolor.
Yet somehow, a watercolor can be a light and breezy sun-washed thing, that so far, doesn’t happen naturally for me in oils.
I realize there is nothing stopping me from making high-key oil paintings. But, it’s this question of what is the natural strength of each media. I have been striving in my personal work to make watercolor more dramatic. More moody, with greater intensity. Perhaps, that’s going in the wrong direction! Maybe the watercolor should stay here, in this happy place, and leave the stormy seas for the oil paintings.
