The Living Ocean

"Carp"
4.6 x 7.1 inches
etching
FOR SALE







I’ve always been fascinated by the thought that there are worlds out there that we humans don’t participate in. There’s the air, the domain of the birds, the deep woods, where all sorts of animals privately live out their lives, there’s the microscopic world and the world of radio waves, but the one that I find most intriguing is water. It is the shroud of the medium makes that world so evasive.

When you go to the shore and you look out at that vast body of water before you, you speak of it in its collective term, “ocean” because that’s all you see, that large reflective surface that goes on seemingly forever. “Ocean” is a collective term, because there is so much below it. On the shore the refuse of shells, crab carcasses, starfish and seaweed spewed out by the surf; slivers, remnants and signs of what hides beneath.

A parasitology lecturer at university once made the invisible world concrete. “The eelworm, a tiny nematode”, she explained, “is so numerous, ubiquitous, in fact, that if we were to remove all physical objects from the world except the eelworms, their shapes would remain visible”. Writhing, squirming eelworm ghosts. That’s how I try to imagine the ocean, drained of all its water, its inhabitants in place.

Picture the whales hovering like zeppelins kilometers above the sludgy ocean floor, where sickly, light-deprived monsters and living dust prey and are preyed on. Tuna flash like race-car drivers between schools of silver herring. Reefs form humps and bumps nearer shorelines. Stingrays like kites overhead and jellyfish like Mary Poppins’ umbrella; jungles of seaweed coming from the ocean floor. It would be a teeming, moving scene full of life, life that is reflected and hidden by the surface of the water.

Maybe it’s because of this fascination that I had a goldfish in my first university year. It taught me how foreign the world of water is to me. The goldfish did not live long; after a week in my care it turned upside-down, paddled around a bit, and in trying to get it right-side-up again, I changed its water once, then twice and even three times a day, thinking perhaps I had gotten a bowl too small and that its own waste water was making it ill. The fish died after a few short weeks.

How could I have known that the secret to its life lay not in the water but in the air? The mouth of the bowl was too small, the fish drowned in the very thing it needed most and through the absence the one thing it could not live in. I still feel guilty to this day thinking that I had caused it to suffer.

That was the end of my goldfish-keeping days.

At lunchtime I sometimes go to the nearest body of water to think about the life in it. There’s a pond in the nearby botanical gardens with a school of over-sized and lazy Koi carp in it. They drift to the sides of the pond when they notice a human presence, and especially when the shadow of a bird overhead passes over their water, I am aware of their world and ours.

A quick sketch turned into an etching.

The First Paintings

"Sunflowers"
2.5 x 3.5 inches
watercolour
SOLD





"Bowl & Chopsticks"
2.5 x 3.5 inches
watercolour
SOLD

Live Lusitanos

"Musical Ride"
2.5 x 3.5 inches
Watercolour, collage &
imitation gold leaf
For sale

"Levade"
2.5 x 3.5 inches
Watercolour & imitation gold leaf
For sale

"Backlit"
2.5 x 3.5 inches
Watercolour &
imitation gold leaf

For sale

It promised to be a beautiful and warm day, the day of the Lusitano show. I had been planning to go there for months; it’s so rare to see Lusitanos in Holland, let alone a lot of them.

What is a Lusitano? A Lusitano is a Portuguese breed of horse. It’s a very old breed, and if you’ve ever seen copper engravings of horses from the 17th and 18th centuries, or even old paintings from that era, it’s very likely you’re seeing a Lusitano or the related breed, the Andalusian. Think of a painting by Titian. Flowing manes, a short, rounded body, a cresty neck, a roman nose: these characterize the Lusitano. They are strikingly baroque, all curves and flowing lines, like gold ornamentation, gilded chairs, velvet wall “paper”, mountainous periwigs and the Brandenburg concerti by Bach.

A train trip of around an hour brought me to Houten, a town near the centre of Holland. A bit of biking, a wrong turn and then a right one, and I saw a small sign in the grass with on it “Lusitanos” and an arrow pointing the way.

Five or six mares and their riders were circling around the main ring. Grey, bay, and a striking golden-dun coat; slender, arched noses and necks and a springy stride that does little to hide their fiery nature; one by one the mares passed by the judges. The Lusitanos proved to be remarkably quick and agile. A sudden move from someone in the audience could cause them to raise their forelegs in a brief levade and wheel round away from the frightening movement. Where an Arabian horse is all forward movement and long, low, flowing strides, the Lusitano is up and down and coiled like a spring.

Nothing was more beautiful and breathtaking than two young stallions that were obviously quite new to the show ring. They darted about their handlers, rearing, plunging, calling out, snorting, their heads raised and necks crested with impetuous and youthful maleness. I think the most glorious moment is perhaps when a young and nervous stallion stands still, raises its head almost horizontally and with distended nostrils looks out from below a voluminous tuft of manes just before it recommences its dance around the handler.

Later these stallions become the very model of civilization and education. In their youth their coats are a dark and steely grey and they bleach out to a silvery white, learning meanwhile to dance to the aids of their rider. In the far ring on that sunny day in Houten such a model of equine learning danced with its baroque-costumed rider to flute concerti of several centuries past.



I spent the afternoon in Houten sketching and turned these sketches into ACEOs. Since gold leaf combines so beautifully with these baroque horses I applied it to these ACEOs. Unfortunately the scanner doesn’t pick up the gold colour well and turns it brownish. It’s unfortunate, because in real life the gold-covered portions of the images are light, and not darker as they appear here.

Bowl & Lemon

"Bowl & Lemon"
2.5 x 3.5 inches
watercolour
SOLD

Red Rooftop

"Rooftop"
2.5 x 3.5 inches
watercolour
For sale
I work in the city of Leiden in one of the university buildings. The building I work in is a standard grey '70s brick building, but I look out at a building that's popularly known as the "Arsenal", from the days when arsenal for the military was stored there. These days the department of Sinology and Asian Studies is housed in this brown brick building.

Older brick buildings in Holland usually have a tiled roof. If you look out over the city of Leiden, which has an old city centre, from a high point, you see a lovely quilt of red-tiled roofs and green trees.

I love looking out at this rooftop. It changes with the weather, and it makes a lovely frame for the sky. On brilliant sunny days it's a stark and scorching red. Under rolling clouds its red becomes a more muted ochre colour. Seagulls use it as a place to perch.

It reminds me of paintings by 19th-century Dutch paintings by painters like Weissenbruch.