I've always been interested how artists build a vision that's convincing and coherent even when it doesn't look much like the real world at all. Seascapes are particularly intriguing for this; Dutch and Flemish painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remade the look of the ocean without the benefit of photography. The results are a spectacular invention. Similarly Japanese and Chinese artists came up with representations of the sea that only distantly reflect its actual appearance. I decided to have some fun with these approaches to build a group of oceans all of my own. These paintiings formed an exhibition, "Oceans and Seas," at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York in 2023.
