30 x 30” oil on panel, 2025. Available from the Artist $11000
Accepted into the 2025 Oil Painters of America show - Winner of Best Maritime
The plein air version of this scene was painted at the Galveston Plein Air event in 2024. I was really happy with how this piece turned out and even happier when judge Thomas Kitts awarded it Best in Show.
The curve of the guard rail, the sweeping, airy masts, the drooping mooring lines, and the massive yet buoyant hull resting on softly rippling water all come together to create a sense of calm weightlessness. That feeling of buoyancy was the central idea behind this piece.
For this studio version, I switched to a larger, square format to include even more rigging. When I'm painting something that has a lot of detail like this, I aim to tell the truth, but not the whole truth. The rigging started out, as with the plein air piece before it, as a mass of tonal color, out of which, I pulled the negative shapes (the air around the objects) that would reveal the main structure of masts and rigging. I continued then to paint the objects themselves being careful to not loose the lost and found quality of my initial figure/ground strategy.
Elissa, 16x20", oil on linen, Sold. This is the plein air piece that inspired the studio piece.