Seascapes — oil painting by Ray Patrick
Surf breaking over a dark reef below a pale bluff, with boulders scattered across the foreground and turquoise water beyond.
Three registers — sky, bluff and headland, then water and reef taking the lower two thirds. The surf runs in a broken white band across the middle, and the black rocks beneath it are the darkest mass in the picture.
Turquoise and viridian in the open water against rocks of near-black and indigo. The bluff is ochre and bone; the foreground carries olive and umber with pale chalk-white stones.
Knife-laid and square, the rock scraped on in flat planes with hard ridges and the surf dragged across in two decisive pulls of chalk white. Nothing is blended anywhere.
Oil on canvas paper with an unpainted margin. Photographed on the studio table.
Lower left, raypatrick, scratched into the wet paint in blue.