Seascapes — oil painting by Ray Patrick
A cold grey sea breaking onto a wide pale beach under heavy cloud, with low green rocks at the right — lying on a book about the painter Edgar Payne.
Horizontal registers throughout, with the cloud taking the upper half and the sand the lower. The surf runs in as one unbroken white band across the middle; nothing rises above the horizon.
Lavender, dove and periwinkle through the sky, over water in teal and ultramarine. The sand is a pale violet and bone, and the one passage of emerald on the rocks is the only strong colour.
Thick and scumbled, the cloud dragged in broad horizontal strokes with the colour beneath showing through, and the surf laid as one loaded pass of chalk white over the dark water.
Oil on canvas paper with an unpainted margin. A studio photograph resting on a book, which is not part of the work.
Lower centre, raypatrick, scratched into the wet paint in ochre.