More about foam and run offs in seascape

Above is another Waugh. Notice the nice cool tonality that pervades the whole piece. Tonal atmosphere like this was referred to by artists of that generation as "envelope". That would be accented like in French, I suppose it was a studio phrase from when so many of these guys and their teachers generation studied in Paris. Waughs father however was an English portrait painter, Waugh emigrated to this country and spent the last years of his life living in Provincetown.I am going to continue writing tonight about some of the things that go on in the foam. This is usually your foreground or middle ground and will often be an important element in a seascape.

Here is some of the same foam detail as in the picture above. In order=m to paint this you will need to understand the whipped cream ropey look of it well enough to invent it. You will never have just the photographic references you need. You need to analyze how it works and be able to conjure it up using form expressed in values.

Here is another Waugh showing one of the important elements of seascape. After the wave crashes over a rock, it spills off. These run offs are beautiful and provide great compositional devices to lock the sea and rocks together, soften the sea's edges and describe shapes.

Here is a photographic example of the same thing. I will do some demos of how to make these passages in paint. But not tonight!

Here is a good shot of water running off a rock, This is excellent raw material for a seascape. Notice how the water runs down revealing the form of the rocks, and then the foreground rock occludes the view giving it depth and recessing the runoff into the middle ground. Again the skill required is to study stuff like this until you can make it up. You need to understand the principles by which it operates to do that. Then you can build patterns out of it. That is what Waugh is up to in those studio paintings above. This is a vocabulary of effects to be arranged over an abstract substructure.

Here is another great run off shot from Gloucester on the Bass Rocks often called the back shore, Generations of seascapist trained and worked their. It is now all private and virtually all is posted. That is one of the reasons I no longer live in Gloucester, Rockport. I moved their partially to paint seascapes and it has become nearly impossible get to the water anymore. Although Halibut point is still good.