Seascapes, Surfing — watercolor painting by Ray Patrick
Around twenty small gouache and watercolour surfing studies laid out on the floor — women carrying boards, paddling out, walking the nose, and standing on the shore.
The sheets are spread in loose rows across cardboard, overlapping at the edges. Almost every study puts a single figure against water with a high horizon, so the group reads as one subject worked twenty ways.
Teal, turquoise and olive water throughout, against sand in ochre and bone. The boards carry the hot notes — scarlet, cadmium yellow, coral — and are what the eye finds first in every sheet.
Small and fast, each figure two or three loaded strokes with no outline and no face, and the water dragged in horizontal pulls behind them. None is worked beyond the first statement.
Gouache and watercolour on paper, around twenty works. A studio photograph of a body of work laid out on the floor, not a single picture.
Lower edge of several sheets, raypatrick, in pale letters widely spaced.