Seascapes — oil painting by Ray Patrick
Surf running over a reef, reduced almost to abstraction — bands of green, white and violet water with dark rock breaking through at the edges.
Entirely horizontal, built from six or seven stacked bands of unequal depth. There is no horizon and no sky to speak of; the picture is read as a sequence of strata rather than a view.
Emerald and teal through the open water, cream and bone in the surf, with the rocks in indigo and near-black. One small passage of rust at the right is the only warm note.
Thick and knife-laid — the foam is scraped on so the colour beneath shows through its broken edges, and the rocks are flat dark planes stamped over the water.
Oil on canvas board. Strong impasto; photographed on a spiral sketchbook of pencil drawings, which is beneath the work rather than part of it.
Lower left, raypatrick, in orange over the water, letters touching.