Painting the Ocean with Light and Color: A Demo

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For artist Rick Bennett, painting the ocean is a radiant meditation on light and color.

By Daniel Brown

In this article, Daniel Brown places artist Rick Bennett in a historical context, then eloquently ties his work to music and meditation. Don’t miss Bennett’s demo, with detailed steps in his own words, below.

A Shifting Subject

Seascapes in American art history tend toward the stormy, the romantic, the dramatic. Winslow Homer is surely the master of this genre, with his waves crashing against rocks, the storm at sea, the ocean representing nature. Yet we, the viewers, see the seas from a safe and dry distance.

Rick Bennett approaches painting the ocean entirely differently from this rugged American norm in his sensuous acrylics. In historical context, Bennett’s seascapes are the yin to the yang of paintings like Caspar David Friedrich’s icy, storm-filled shipwrecks. Yet both of these artists are realistic Romantics — one represents the dark and brooding classical Northern romantic sensibility, and the other the life-affirming Mediterranean.

Painter and Philosopher

Bennett’s work is as much about aesthetics and metaphysics as it is about paint, formalist properties, and properties of light and color. Each Bennett painting is a high-wire act between representation and abstraction, between movement and a Zen-like stillness, between the ocean as transcendent metaphor of birth and the elemental feeling of sun and water on skin. Bennett as artist paints the sea as abstracted color harmonies, abstracted. As philosopher, he portrays the sea as a mystical, mythological birthplace of life.

“The paradoxes and mysteries of life are all present in the sea,” Bennett says. “The individual waves live and die but they are also part of a continuity and a seemingly eternal rhythm; everything conforms to simple, repeating patterns, yet there are infinitely complex individual variations.”

Tropical Colors in Motion

Bennett’s paintings are variations, as in music, on a theme. While the pictures differ in size, emphasis, and detail, each one interprets the rhythms of nature as a part of a grand symphony, just as Albert Einstein examined light, energy, mass, and movement but believed everything he studied represented one unifying principle.

Bennett’s oceans are always tropical, nearly perfectly still. They always examine the way colors move into or away from one another, particularly with light on the ocean’s surfaces. How appropriate, then, that his medium is water-based acrylic. “I switched from oil because the new acrylics and additives give me the look and the handling of oil, along with other possibilities for texture and layering,” he says, “and the cleanup and studio environment become ‘greener.’

Referencing Late Monet

Abstract Expressionism lurks in Bennett’s work, as we see in his experimentations with horizontal bands of color in shades of blue and teal, rose and lilac. These experimentations are actual studies in color theory, some derived from late Monet, whose last paintings dealt specifically with the dissolutions of form.

Because Bennett’s paintings begin water, or form dissolved, he can skip the specifics of form’s dissolution in favor of interpreting light and color on water and as water. In Sand Bar III and Islands 27, St. John, above, we see these elements at work with differing horizon lines and similar colors. Bennett’s paintings clearly begin at the top and move toward the viewer. Some of Bennett’s loveliest and most detailed brushwork occurs in the foregrounds, where the light allows water’s translucency to reveal patterns of sands and dunes.

Shadows and ‘Lightows’

“When the water is clear,” Bennett says, “there are a number of variables: changes in the depth of the water that create varied nuances of color — the reflected light from the sky, the reflections of sunlight, and the refracted light that is focused onto the sand through the prismatic effect of the wave contours.” Using calligraphy brushes, Bennett focuses, in the foreground of his pictures, on these prismatic effects.

“A few years ago my youngest daughter, Olivia, coined the term lightows — as opposed to shadows — to describe these undulating patterns of light,” Bennett says, “and I’ve used the term from then on. In fact, the lightows are in some ways the focus of my work. Along with the other variables is the fact that all of these patterns are continually changing, and the sand underneath the water has its own ripples and variations.”

Painting the Ocean’s Essence

Bennett alternates between looking through, and looking at, water. He could, theoretically, produce an infinite number of such paintings, as light changes in water all the time. Puffs of clouds or islands appear in the distance as grounding devices, as if to remind us that they are seascapes, not color field paintings.

Bennett has also looked to Japanese screens and Chinese brush painting, as well as to ceramic artists like Toshiko Takaezu and Jun Kaneko. Like Asian artists of the past and present, Bennett seeks essences rather than likenesses. His blend of Eastern and Western ideas make his works transcendentally sophisticated, simple yet elegant — in short, sublime.

A Series of Divisions

Pictures that have so much in common with pure abstraction, while still conveying a seascape, grow from a series of divisions. “I start by dividing the canvas into horizontal bands using a chalk line,” says Bennett. The process evolves, dividing space into latitudes: sky, horizon, water, shore.

A musician himself (he plays jazz saxophone), Bennett says he also “thinks of the paintings in musical terms, where color combinations create dissonance and harmonies.” In keeping, too, with the rhythms and cadences he finds in music, he prefers the Caribbean. Seeing it as paradisiacal, an area of natural, hot color and stillness, a kind of spiritual birthplace for life, it’s a concept to which his paintings seem dedicated.

From the Orderly to the Random

As a painting progresses, Bennett works and reworks the patterns of the waves and the underlying sand dunes. “In order to keep the painting from looking too mechanical, I build up textures and nuances in color by applying crumpled papers to the paint,” he says, introducing randomness amid repeating movements and deliberate patterns.

Indeed, his general process goes back and forth from the orderly to the random. “In earlier stages,” the artist says, “I make a lot of assessments and corrections, but if I’m too methodical in completing a painting, I can’t evoke the energy and movement that I’m looking for. In the final stages, I have to work quickly and intuitively … This process can be frustrating, but because traces of each underlying layer continue to show through, the paintings actually become richer and take on the complex surface of a palimpsest. The best work is often the most hard-fought.”

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Looking Through Water: A Demo

In this painting demonstration, Rick Bennett describes his multi-layered approach to painting the ocean in detail. “Although the paintings in this series may look similar, each one is a new adventure to me,” Bennett says. “Each one requires its own specific approach. In each case I look for a balance between simplicity and complexity, motion and stillness, abstraction and illusion.”

The Artist’s Toolkit

• Paints: Daniel Smith acrylics, Golden Artist Colors Open acrylics, Liquitex Basics acrylics
• Mediums: Golden acrylic medium extender; Golden mica flake gel; Liquitex Slow-Dri blending gel; Daniel Smith Ultimate acrylic medium extender; Daniel Smith acrylic matte medium; Golden acrylic glazing liquid; Golden Open acrylic thinner
• Brushes: Daniel Smith Platinum Series hog bristle brushes — rounds and filberts; Chinese calligraphy and ink brushes; scrub brushes and toothbrushes.

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Step 1

Design: Using a chalk line, I start my seascapes by dividing the canvas into horizontal bands that establish a horizon line and the progressive layers of water, depth, and color. The bands are also an important aspect of the composition. I’ve always been interested in design, and I look for a specific proportional relationship.

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Step 2

Geometric Abstraction: Next I paint in a rough approximation of the colors with Golden acrylic thinner added to the acrylic. At this point, all my paintings look like hard-edged, geometric abstractions. During this stage I work with colors and proportions, as if I were going to finish the painting in this hard-edged, geometric style.

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Step 3

Unblended Colors: I do a rough sketch of the water and sand patterns. Then I build up layers of opaque and transparent acrylic color (transparent over opaque). I work quickly, using large bristle brushes. (I leave the marks unblended in order to create textures and spontaneous patterns. I’m working, at this stage, with intense colors, while I exaggerate the combinations of warm/cool and light/dark tones.)

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Step 4

Letting Layers Show Through: As the painting progressed, I narrowed the range of colors but always let some of the previous layers show through. This process results in a more natural local color through the phenomenon of optical blending (our eyes mix the colors). Letting some of the previous layers show through also creates vibration and reverberation. These are analogous to the movement of the water — and the resulting shifts of color, reflection, and refraction.

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Step 5

Reworking the Patterns: I worked and reworked the patterns of the waves and the underlying sand dunes. While these patterns conform to the laws of perspective, there are always variations. To keep the painting from looking too mechanical, I build up textures and nuances of color by applying and mixing the paint on the canvas with crumpled paper, plastic bags, and scrub brushes.

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Step 6: Final

A Complex Surface: The final marks describe the reflections and refractions in this evocation of the southern Caribbean Sea. I used acrylic paint thickened with Liquitex Slow-Dri blending gel, dragging the paintbrush over the surface textures. In addition, I used paint thinned with Golden Open acrylic thinner. A Chinese calligraphy brush for that thinned paint allowed me to vary the line weight and make longer continuous marks.

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About the Artist

The first picture RICK BENNETT fell in love with was Matisse’s Studio, Quai Saint-Michel at the Phillips Collection. “I began to understand the language of painting and to appreciate painting for its own sake as opposed to seeing what was represented,” Bennett says. He earned an MFA at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a BA in studio art at Centre College in Kentucky. A professor of art and art history at Hanover College in Indiana, Bennett also teaches philosophy and literature. He cites The Book of Tao Teh Ching and Teh by Lao Zi as influential. To learn more, visit rickbennettart.weebly.com.

Daniel Brown is the editor in chief of the online journal of art and ideas, AEQAI.

A version of this story appeared in Artist’s Magazine.