Thomas Jacques Somerscales - English 1842-1927

Off Valparaiso, 965 x 1803 mm











A Barque Running Before a Gale, 1910, 40.7 x 56 cm

Edward William Cooke

A North Sea Breeze on the Dutch Coast, 1855

Albert Bierstadt

Seal Rocks

National Maritime Museum

Herbert Everett, The Deck of the 'Birkdale' in a Storm















From the collection of the National Maritime Museum of Britain.
I've added a link to the online collection in the links bar.

At Pocock Fine Art Gallery

Source: Pocock Fine Art Gallery

Judd Waugh-Frederick, American, Evening Tide, 16 x 22 inches.






Alexander Dzigurski, Serbian, 1885-1967, Crashing Waves at Sunset, 16 x 20 inches.






Robert Gruppe, American, born 1944, Tropical Beach, 30 x 36 inches.









Stanley Woodward, Tropical Seas.

Frederick Judd Waugh

Space

Fishing Boats at Sea, 50 x 60 cm

German Grobe - German 1857-1938

The shapes of the boats are interesting in themselves, but also the shape of the space between them. It's an interesting exercise to compose a painting with the spaces between objects in mind. Paying attention to the "negative space" around objects is a good way of making sure you are drawing or painting the real shapes of objects, rather than the mind's stored, habitual preconception of what a boat or a wave looks like. In the composition of paintings, spaces between objects are just as important as the shapes of the objects themselves.

In these two works, the German seascape painter German Grobe has filled the narrow space between two boats with bright foam, helping to make the negative space an element in its own right.

A common mistake is to leave to much boring empty space around the objects in a composition so that the negative spaces are lost. The work above shows a good balance between positive shapes and negative spaces. In the work below, Grobe has decided to make the space outweigh the objects, which gives a sense of the sea's power over the fishing boats. The complex textures in the waves and reflective sand make the relatively large space around the objects interesting enough to avoid the problem of lost negative space.