The story of my underwater art
Some years ago I discovered the fascinating world of plankton. Tiny creatures that live in our oceans. They are so varied and weird, so strange and interesting.
At the same time I was reading about coral reefs. Because of the sea’s temperature rising in certain areas, ancient coral reefs teeming with exotic marine life were dying and becoming white like dead bones, all the colour bleached out.
I started experimenting with plankton type creature art. I don’t know why the underwater world fascinated me so much. I looked at artists who had made art with underwater themes and apart from illustrators, only one really interested me.
Yellena James influenced my work enormously. I still love her work and have a print on my wall, a circular painting which I love.
Here’s some of my first experiments in underwater art. I also was fascinated by the art work of Ernst Haeckel.
These vary in quality as I was finding my way. It’s often easier to improve something not good than just doing something great to start with. My style has always been chiseling my work out of nothing. Doing something that I have to work on.
This one is very experimental. Not great, but exploring language of shapes and some pretty gaudy colours
This one is starting to get somewhere. I used alcohol inks for the background and the shapes are getting more confident
Eventually I started to like what I was doing. I felt more confident and started finding my own visual language to play around with. The alcohol ink was great fun to use and made gorgeous effects which I worked on with acrylic on top. I also used gouache on some works too. A lovely medium.
This one is on black card. It’s got the feel of a weird fabric design.
This one was Covid inspired. Suddenly, viruses were the talk of the town. They certainly infiltrated my designs..
I have to say here that the paintings I did during this time were not really planned or sketched out. I just did them. Mostly floating alcohol ink over the surface and then responding to the surface and drawing and painting on the surface. I continued to research corals and reefs and sea creatures and weeds but didn’t want to make it like an aquarium with fish inside. They were essentially more abstract and imagined. I loved using colours that were happy, cheerful colour ranges and jolly images of bright places. I see now that I avoided any sense of real space or depth, almost a designed surface with very little depth.