I’ve spent the last six years or more painting water (among other things) — or more accurately, painting what happens on it, around it, and at the edges of it. Twenty-seven plus paintings later, I finally put a selection of them together into one virtual exhibit, and looking at them side by side made me realize something I hadn’t before, while I was in the middle of making them: I’m not actually that interested in water itself. I’m interested in what people do to it, in it and around it.

Kayakers threading down a river in a dozen different colored boats. Bathers wading into the surf under a Ferris wheel. Traffic streaming across a bridge, dwarfed by green cables and an orange sky. Sailboats bobbing in a harbor in front of a row of houses painted in candy colors. That’s the real subject of this series — water as a stage, and all of us as the cast.

Why I paint it this way

If you’ve seen my work before, you know I’m not chasing realism. I never did. I like my skies orange when they “should” be blue, my perspective a little tilted, my color turned up past where it’s comfortable. I strip out the academic modeling — the careful shading and gradients that make a painting look “correct” — and replace it with flat shapes, bold patterns, and compositions that don’t quite behave the way your eye expects them to.

That’s on purpose. I’m not trying to document a beach or a bridge. I’m trying to build my own version of it — an imagined urban, suburban, and coastal world that runs on its own rules of color and geometry. Realism would actually get in the way of what I’m after. All the work in this series is acrylic on stretched canvas.

Where this is headed

Six years and more than 27 paintings in, I don’t think I’m done with water. There’s always another bridge, another beach, another harbor town worth reinventing. If anything, putting a portion of this whole body of work together in one place has just shown me how much room I still have to keep pushing the color and the geometry further.