Painting Winslow Homer's Stormy Seas at Prouts Neck, with David Dunlop

Winslow Homer liked the fog, but he didn't paint the fog out here like we're doing it. It's too difficult on the paints. They don't like to adhere when it's this wet. He painted those pictures in his studio up there. But we're going to try something really audacious, providing my glasses and the camera lenses don't fog up too much. Real simple palette again. Ultramarine blue and iron oxide. And this blue-green. Let's get the turbulence, the motion, the feeling of the water. We'll just block it on real quickly. Because we're just after the psychological effect of this experience. Yeah. The rocks, just trying to get some footing here. The rocks form an interesting shape off of here. And then the ocean is all out of there. So we'll do that and we'll even come down and let it come right off into the corner. This time with less iron oxide and more ultramarine blue. We'll see how we can get this gray sea to move up. against and over and the fog obscure the rocks. This is really comical. The glasses need a windshield wiper. Let's get that gray going. I'm using ultramarine blue and iron oxide and maybe a little bit of this blue green to give me a neutral gray that's going to cut in and eat up these rocks just like the fog is cutting in and eating up these rocks. It's this turbulence And this is a spontaneous sketch in line with how he might think of doing the watercolor. That quick one. Flip the brush over and right on up into here. When you're going for just that effect, you want to get the overall rhythm and energy. And still, the interesting shapes. You notice I'm making them smaller and smaller so it's more and more about the sea, the waves. You can hear it through the microphones. This is real. The fog is so thick and wet, we really just have a few minutes. Dark, dark, dark. Because, see the blue and the brown? Rich, dark, one more of that brown. And something to hold on the corner right here, so we have a chute. Okay, that's the dark brush. Reserve it for dark things. As Turner liked to say, you can make a light dark or a dark light by what you put next to it. I'm adding a little more oil to the paint. To get the feeling of the white so it doesn't mix too much with the colors that are underneath. And I'm creating edges. See how that created that edge? One side is closed, one side is open. The rock side is closed, the open side is to the water. It's slushing up in here. Remember that dark brush? I need it back. Those waves are dark on the front side and they're light on what we call the top or back So they're lighter back here. Now here's where the values are close. And as a sea painter, Winslow Homer was very good at this connoisseurship, this ability to discern the nuance between values. You see how it's light on the top and darker on the bottom side to let it feel as though those waves are coming here. They're shadowed underneath. So we're a little bigger in here and more numerous. And I'm running my brush laterally, all rolling this way. And paler and smaller and that's just the perspective of space to get that motion to come in. We can even let a little bit of this fly right over this right there or maybe right here and here and then there's some kickback right in here and then it when it swirls every piece of white that you see is composed of millions of bubbles. That's how this works and so it fractures And this we can thank Mandelbrot's Fractal Geometry for understanding. Keeping a sliding, undulating surface, it's basically S-forms, because the circles break up into fractured patterns of ellipses, trying to find their true identity. The undulations. Now, you see, we've got an undulating experience here. We'll just tighten up an edge, go a little browner so the contrast is even richer. Browner, I said. Look at that complementary color effect, really jumps. My glasses have fogged up again. We're fighting Mother Nature, just as Winslow Homer would have wanted us to. I'm going to rip the tape off of this very quick. But remember, psychological effect, that's the destiny, that's the importance. It isn't mimicking, it isn't copying, it isn't transcribing nature. It's getting the sense of the power and the movement. There's a 15-minute painting. But I think we sense the motion of the waves here.