One of my interests/obsessions has been to try and paint water. Not paint with water(color) but paint a fair representation of water. It’s very challenging – water moves, it’s either transparent, translucent, reflective or all of the above all at once.

Our experience of water is complicated by the changing focus of our eyes. One can focus on the surface of the water, on the bottom of the pool (if it’s visible) or on reflections in the water, which might be nearby trees or as far away as the sky. And a representational painting is a moment frozen in time, with no changing focus. That’s an issue with a normal landscape painting, too, whether you’re aware of it or not.

As you look out at a view from a hill, for instance, as you look at the mountains in the distance, the trees close to you (if you pay attention to them at all) are fuzzy. But as your eye rolls around (it actually jumps around) your brain stitches together a smooth, focused narrative of what you’re seeing. And in a painting, as opposed to a photograph, all those things are in focus at the same time, because that’s how we perceive them. So even the most boring representational painting is abstract in this regard. So a pool of water represents a special challenge, because one has to balance different focal lengths to portray one’s experience of the pool.
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Blah blah blah. All that to explain why, when I get bored painting pictures of scenic views of the mountains I am obsessed with trying to turn out a picture of water that is satisfies what I see, feel and know about water. I haven’t made one yet that I am really satisfied with, but the works above are a couple of recent attempts.