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Tag: painting water

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Monday Morning Art School: Painting the ocean

Breaking storm, 48X30, oil on canvas, $5,579 framed includes shipping in continental US

“How do you paint water?” is probably the most common question I’m asked. It reminds me of that old joke:

“Where does an elephant sleep?” 
“Anywhere he wants.”

Water is so immense, slippery, and mercurial, that it is impossible to nail it down into a schtick. And thank God for that.

Instead, the painter of water must rely on observation. Reflections are a distortion of the surrounding environment. That’s true whether you’re painting them on the ocean, or in a glass of water. These reflections are never going to be consistent but they will follow the laws of physics.

Camden Harbor, Midsummer, oil on canvas, 24X36 $3,985 framed includes shipping in continental US.

Imagine an ocean that is perfectly flat, and that you can walk on water. Looking at your feet, you can see straight down into the water. It’s not reflecting anything. Looking at a rubber ducky floating ten feet away, you’re looking at the surface at about a 26° angle. You’ll see a reflection of the ducky, the sky, and a glimpse of what’s under the surface. As you look farther away, the angle gets smaller and smaller, and all you see is the reflected sky.

Reflection involves two rays – an incoming (incident) ray and an outgoing (reflected) ray. Physics tells us that the angles are identical but on opposite sides of a tangent. This is why the reflection of a boat needs to be directly below the real object in your painting. You can add other colors into that area, but the reflection can’t be wider than the object it’s reflecting.

Water is transparent, but it has a shiny surface. Some rays of light make it through and bounce back at us from the sea floor. Reflections in glass work the same way. You can see through the glass in the surface that’s facing you, but the curving sides reflect light from around the room. Because glass is imperfect, these reflections will be distorted.

Drying Sails, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed.

The ocean complicates matters by being bouncy. Even on the calmest day, the surface of water is never perfectly flat; it’s wavy or worse, just like a fun-house mirror. Waves are a series of irregular curves. How they reflect light depends on what plane you’re seeing at that nano-second. It seems like the easiest thing to do is to capture it in a photo and paint from that, but what we see in photos is sometimes very different from what we perceive in life.

Instead, sit a moment with and watch how patterns seem to repeat. They’re never exactly the same, since waves are a stochastic process (think random but repeating). But they’re close enough to discern general patterns.

Solid objects can also trip you up in their reflections. Consider the humble spoon. It’s concave. That distorts its reflections. There’s no point in trying to predict what you might see; it’s best to just look. Likewise, a mirror only reflects straight back at you if you’re in front of it.

Fogbank, oil on archival canvasboard, 14X18, $1594 framed includes shipping in continental US

There are times when the ocean makes no reflection at all. Only smooth surfaces reflect light coherently enough to make reflections. That’s why burlap has no reflections. Sometimes, when water is being wind-whipped, it doesn’t have reflections either. To paint such a sea, keep the contrast low. A grey, windy day, or a turbulent sea will have a surface too broken up to reflect anything but the most general light.

It’s always best to paint the reflections at the same time you’re doing the rest of the painting, rather than adding them as an afterthought. They’re a fundamental part of the design.

Some people say that reflections should be lower in chroma than their objects, but I don’t think that’s true. Often, the ocean seems to concentrate color. Sometimes, the water will be lightest at the horizon; other days there will be a deep band there. However, the farther away, the more its colors shift toward blue-violet.

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On painting water (and other traps)

Water Mill, 1892, Frits Thaulow, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

The most common question I hear is, ‘how do you paint water?’ The answer—if you’re smart—is, ‘how it looks at that moment.’ Water, like the sky, is infinitely variable. Yes, there are some fundamental truths, such as that reflections are symmetrical across a horizontal axis, or that water will reflect the sky color. But other than that, all bets are off. I’ve heard artists say, with authority, that the sea is always lightest at the horizon, or that the chroma is lower than the sky.

Those things are usually, but not always, true. The sea is bigger than you or me; it does whatever it wants. If you want a more scientific explanation, moving water is a massive, constantly-changing, fractal-featured mirror. It doesn’t stay the same for a minute, let alone over time.

At Quimperle, 1901, Frits Thaulow, private collection

That complicates painting from photos, because the surface usually changes faster than the human eye can perceive. The long ellipses or droplets in space captured in a still photograph are not what we ‘see’. My friend Brad Marshall experimented recently with painting a waterfall using a continuous loop video instead of a still photo. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s on my to-do list.

Frits Thaulow was a Norwegian landscape painter, roughly contemporary to that brilliant trio of Anders Zorn, John Singer Sargent and Joaquín Sorolla. In that company, Thaulow might have faded into obscurity except for his ability to paint roiling river surfaces. Typically, he laid down the bones of the reflections in very thin paint, and then scumbled the traceries of water over the top. That was frequently in a neutral tone, because he was painting in far northern Europe where the skies were often grey.

Detail from Area of Venice, 1894, Frits Thaulow, courtesy Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

Roiling water was Thaulow’s particular talent. Beside it, his buildings seem sketched in as an afterthought. It would be easy to dismiss him as a one-shot wonder, someone who figured out a cool effect and then repeated it until he was a caricature of himself. But it was more likely an obsession.

I say that because Thaulow also got excellent water effects in watercolor, where the brush technique is entirely different. That, by the way, is something he had in common with Zorn, Sargent, and Sorolla, all of whom handled watercolor with equal facility to their more famous oils.

The marble step, 1903, watercolor, Frits Thaulow, source unknown.

I once painted something for a plein air event that I longed to call Everything but the Kitchen Sink, because I literally threw in every cliché about the area that I could think of. Having already started down the road to hell, I brushed in the vertical reflections and then I overbrushed them horizontally with a large, dry brush. This is something you might learn at a sip-and-paint as ‘how to paint water’, but it seemed appropriate for that absolutely still water.

Naturally, it sold.

I was being fanciful and farcical, but learning one ‘way to paint water’ and then grinding it to death is not a technique I recommend. Brilliance lies not in sleight of hand but in observation. Worry less about your brushwork and more about what’s in front of you. If you learn to see, your hand will naturally follow your eye.