William Trost Richards

detail

The slightly pink sky, probably of early morning, sets off the emerald hues in the waves - a  color scheme the American marine painter, Trost Richards, used many times. The sky color is brought into the troughs of the waves where they reflect it.

Diane Mannion

Gulfscape #1, 6 x 6 inches.

This delightful wave study is by the Florida-based artist Diane Mannion.
Read her notes on painting the Gulf of Mexico, on her blog

Textured supports

Konstantin Westchilov (Russian), Rocky Coast.
Some of the art auction houses have zoomable images of the lots. This allows you to see the brushstrokes up close, and is very instructive. By looking closely at the distant cliffs, this painting looks as if it's been done on the rough side of masonite; a texture I find distracting. I prefer the look of canvas. But Westchilov seems to have applied the paint thickly enough to cover it.
As a general rule, the thickness and texture of the paint should be reduced from foreground to background. This helps create the illusion of distance. The distant cliffs in this work have been painted thinly and this is where the texture of the support is quite visible, to the point where it becomes a bit of a problem (see cliff in bottom detail). There are some paintings where the artist has deliberately chosen to express the texture of the  support, but this is usually in an area of the painting where is simulates the weave of fabric in clothing, for example.
Some say that masonite contains acid and eventually degrades, potentially destroying a painting, but perhaps it depends on the manufacturing quality. The more thoroughly the masonite is primed the better, to create a barrier between the oil paint and the wood acids in the masonite.
I love Westchilov's brushstrokes in the waves.

Hugo Schnars-Alquist

Marine, 110 by 181cm
German, 1855 - 1955

Horace Champagne

This pastel piece, by the Canadian artist Horace Champagne, keeps superfluous elements to a minimum in order to focus on the power and beauty of the surf. A glimpse of neutral grey rocks and sky, a single sea bird, is all that's needed to set the stage for the drama of waves and spray. White at the top is balanced by white at the bottom, linked via a zigzag path of foam.

Josette Nicolle

Top: Affrontement, 80 x 80 cm
Bottom: La Vague Folle

Josette Nicolle is an a painter from Brittany, France. This is a coastline which has inspired many artists for two hundred years or more.

Foam and spray are chaotic but still have form and shadow. Most of it has been suggested with expressionistic brushwork but there are also small areas of precise detail which give the impression of reality. It's not necessary to reproduce photographic detail over the entire canvas. In fact, doing so usually destroys the sense of a real, moving subject.

In the top painting the random nebulousness of the spray is nicely contrasted to the crisp, defined edge of the wave as it runs up the sand.
The medium is acrylic and oil. Acrylics are used in the initial layers of the painting. You can't paint acrylic over oil. Acrylic paint is often used as an underpainting as it's cheaper and much faster drying.

Shane Couch

Shane Couch is an English painter of nautical scenes and seascapes, born in 1963.

website

Wave Abstraction

Nate Ronninger, Facing West from California's Shores, Oil on Linen, 12 x 12 inches
























Sidney Goodman- The Elements - Water, 96 x 76 inches

Zooming in close to a wave can produce interesting semi-abstract compositions.

Frederick Judd Waugh

E Phillips Fox - Australian 1865 - 1915

Birthday 12 March

Note the reflection of the white foam in the wave. Also the progression of colour from warm tones in the sand to light emerald and light ultramarine in the nearest wave, to dark blue middle distance, and violet in the distance. To create the impression of recession in space, landscape artists use warm hues in the foreground, and cool, desaturated colours in the background.

Unfortunately this is not a very good reproduction of the painting and doesn't convey the iridescent effect the artist has produced by interweaving strokes of different colours.

Celebrating a Colour

Atlantic Rollers

A painting celebrating the colour white.
The renowned artists of the past often designed  their paintings to celebrate a single colour, repeating it throughout the entire composition, and adding only secondary hues and tones that support and complement it. White clouds, give unity and strength to the image. A bright blue sky would have detracted from the wonderful detail in the white foam. Tiny amounts of yellow in the foam bring out the blue in the waves.
It probably seems strange to chose a white painting to illustrate the use of colour, but in oil painting, white and black should always be considered colours. There is no such thing as a neutral or non-colour, every colour is altered by those around it.

Jensen M?

27 x 41 (inches?)

A horizon line located in the middle of the image, dividing it in two equal halves, can produce an uncomfortable duality, especially if it's dead straight. In this work the seabirds and white wavecrests, though insignificant in terms of the painting area, provide a unifying third element. Of course, there may be instances where a painter wants to create an unnerving, unresolved visual tension in a painting.

I posted this work because of the rich emerald and jade hues in the waves, and the fine brushwork. It came from an auction website with very little info.

Ivan Aivazovsky - Armenian/Russian 1817-1900

The beauty of this work lies in the union of simplicity and complexity. The subject is really just waves (the ship and sky are almost lost) but their structure is rendered with intricate, realistic detail. Simplicity of subject matter alows the artist to concentrate on the abstract qualities of the painting.

Aivazovsky was born to an Armenian family in the Crimea (the family Russianised their name). He was renowned as a master painter of vast seascapes and tempests, Romantic subjects very much in fashion in his time. Delacroix spoke of him with reverence, and Turner considered him a genuis. Aivazovsky's depiction of mariners struggling for survival in turbulent seas has been read as symbolic of the struggle of the Armenian people, caught between warring powers, to maintain their identity.

Ralph Feyl - American

Morning Waves,
20 x 24 inches

The spray looks convincing because the artist has worked in a variety of hues to produce a pearly, rainbow effect, as light is refracted in the supended drops of water.
click here for more works by Ralph Feyl

David James - English

Blown on the Wind

James preferred to create studies of the sea itself, rather than paint seascapes in the sense of topographical reproductions of a coastline. There is a purity about this approach to the seascape that has been taken up by many contemporary painters in the genre.

Frederick Judd Waugh, American

The Open Sea,
57.8 x 82.6 cm

Wave Studies

Lake Superior

















Seascape, 1935



These wave studies by Jeffrey Larson (top) and Norman Wilkinson (bottom) have a pleasing simplicity.

Ruskin Spear

The Wave, Gorran Haven, 1960's

Gustave Courbet - French

The Wave

Inglis (USA)