Paddling Out: The Story Behind Ocean's Fury
Annette Price
Ocean's Fury
Paddling Out: The Story Behind Ocean's Fury
A surf day always starts the same way. You stand at the edge with the boat, watching the sets come in, counting. You're looking for the gap. There isn't really a gap, but you tell yourself there is, and then you get in and go.
Ocean's Fury came out of those first few minutes. Not the ride back in, which is the part everybody photographs. The getting out there.
Paddling out
Once you're moving you can't stop, because stopping is how you get pushed backwards by the incoming waves. So you paddle, and the wave in front of you stands up, and the horizon goes with it. There's a wall of water above you and for a moment it's the entire world. It isn't fear exactly. It's attention. Everything narrows to what happens next.
You paddle straight at it. You either punch through it or lift over the top of it, and in that second everything mixes together: boat, sea, sky, spray and the bright colours you're wearing. Get it right and you slice over the crest and land on the calmer water behind with a drop, stomach and all. Then you have a few seconds before the next one is on you, and you spend them paddling.
That is the painting. All of it happening at once, no horizon anywhere, no still point to look at.
When it goes wrong
Get it wrong and you're upside down. The colour goes out of the world. It's dark down there, a grey sandy sort of dark, with bubbles streaming past and the occasional flash of bright colour from the boat. Often you can feel yourself being carried backwards towards the beach while you're still upside-down.
Then you roll up, shake the water off your face, and you're straight back into paddling out again.
Being capsized is part of the fun and belongs in the painting, which is why the darks underneath the bright colours are as deep as they are.
Beyond the break
Eventually you get out past the breaking surf and everything quietens. You sit out there rising and falling on big green swell, getting your breath back, watching the sets and choosing the one you want to ride in on. It's a calm place to be, but you had to paddle hard to get there.
That is a different painting. One day I'll make it. This one is about getting out there.
Why the colours are so bright
Paddlers dress in bright colours, for the obvious reason, so that anyone on the shore or in another boat can pick us out against water. I've never been able to see them as purely practical, though. They're the colours of a decision, the ones you put on when the forecast is marginal and you're going anyway.
In this painting they're the human presence, broken up and scattered across the deep blue and the near-black. Everything warm in the picture is us. Everything cooler is the thing we've chosen to go and play with.
Building the surface
I started with texture paste worked straight onto the stretched canvas, building a surface with real physical movement in it before any colour was added. Churning water has weight and body to it, and a smooth canvas was never going to carry that.
The first layers: warmth and light
Once the texture was ready I worked fast with a four-inch brush, laying yellows, oranges, reds and whites across the whole canvas. I wasn't composing at this stage. I was building a warm ground that would glow through everything that came later, the way sunlight does through moving water, the way the boats and the kit do against the sea.
The speed mattered. Paddling in surf is about responding to what's actually happening rather than what you planned, and the painting needed some of that in its foundations.
Bringing in the sea
The next day I brought in the blues: three different blues plus teal and white. I began with the darkest values, mixing ultramarine with orange to make deep tones with real weight in them, and used those to anchor the piece. Then I built the lighter blues over the top, weaving small amounts of yellow and orange back through so the cool layers and the warm ground read as one thing rather than two.
Those colours sang together straight away. It's not always like that.
The tonal check
Part of my process is stepping back and taking the colour away. I photograph the painting and desaturate it, so I'm looking only at tone and value.
It's a brutally honest test. Without colour, you can see whether the composition actually has enough contrast, and depth and whether the eye travels through the piece or gets stuck. Ocean's Fury held up: a varied tonal structure underneath all that brightness, which is what gives it depth rather than just energy.
Ocean’s Fury in black and white
The gold
Last of all, gold leaf. Not much of it, and scattered rather than placed, because that's how light behaves on spray: a flash in one spot, nothing in the next, gone before you've registered it. Gold also because I think of our seas as precious, and because those times when boat, water and skill become one, are worth celebrating.
What I hope you see
When you're working with the sea rather than against it, you're completely present. Heart going, senses up, entirely inside your own body and skill, and part of something far bigger than you. It builds a bond with the water that's still with you hours after you've come ashore, dried off and had a cup of tea.
You don't need to have sat in a kayak to feel some of that. I hope the painting carries the joy of it, and the respect.
The finished work
Ocean's Fury is an original mixed media painting on stretched canvas, 24 x 24 inches (60 x 60 cm), made with sand, texture paste, acrylic and gold leaf.
What does it make you feel? I'd love to know what you see in it, and I suspect it may be something quite different from what I've described here.
Ocean’s Fury displayed in a room setting.
Ocean's Fury is a mixed-media original painting on stretched canvas, 24 x 24 inches (60 x 60 cm), incorporating texture paste, acrylic paint, and gold leaf. It is available to purchase as an original work.
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