EveGriffinArtWork

Green Hill Surf

Oil on four Alumacomp™ panels

28 x 88 inches

2023

 

Green Hill Surf is unlike anything I have done before. Although I have painted a few small landscapes in oil, none of them is at all like this in perspective, size, detail, or monumentality.

 

I designed this, originally, to go into the sun porch/dining room of our family home in Green Hill, Rhode Island. I wanted to do something to bring the nearby Atlantic ocean’s presence into the room, and I wanted certain colors the local waters showed on sunny days.

 

I went to "our beach," as we say in Rhode Island, and took photographs for inspiration and reference. While perusing them on my computer, the idea of doing a painstakingly detailed, photo-realistic rendering of a highly “zoomed in” close-up of the surf occurred to me. Then, when I plugged the image into photos of the sun porch using Photoshop™, I arrived at the large size for the painting.

 

In the end, life's upheavals changed the destiny of this painting. There were a couple of deaths in the family, the house went to another branch of the family, and I returned to Skagway. But by then, I wanted to do the painting anyway. Working on it over the course of a couple of years following these losses was a way of mourning for me.

 

Working on "Surf" was an especially interesting endeavor also because throughout the very long process of painting it, I was more unsure than usual of whether the result would be successful or not. This was largely due to the fact that the painting was such a technical challenge: I was never quite sure whether the subject would even be recognizable, and by painting with multiple transparent oil glazes, I was trying to impart luminosity.

 

I also wondered why I was convinced that somehow, this laboriously hand-painted, remaking of the photographic image would be more effecting than a simple blow-up print of the original photo. I think it is because there is something moving in traditional oil painting that has to do with the fact that it is done by hand and eye. There is an immediacy of communication that affects us in ways images that are produced more mechanistically cannot. The great degree of detail draws the viewer in to a contemplative frame of mind. Or something.

 

I like this painting because I think it succeeds as per our original intent: it brings the ocean’s presence, and our experience of it, right into the room, and it has great colors!