121.92cm X 121.92cm acrylic, spray paint on Italian canvas
I have made many paintings of the sea. It is in my blood; I am Dutch after all, deep down. Generations of my ancestors have fought the water. Though I have been living in India for 40 years and am sometimes burned to a crisp in the furnace of the hot sun, water is my foundation!
I am fascinated by water. It is where life started, everything depends on it. Water is also magic, its form changes, never to be repeated again, ever. Water hypnotises me as I look at it. I am fascinated and never get bored.
In this painting you can see water in many forms. As dark, light, bright, moving, rising, falling and changing. It changes just as the weather and the moods in our heads. All the nets were painted with great effort and concentration so this feeling of movement would be emphasised. That is the story that you see in this painting.
All the colours of the rainbow are presented in these waves. The darkness in the painting represents bad dreams and experiences. The lighter colours represent the better dreams and happier times. I have mentioned the different meanings that colours have for me elsewhere on my website (Saurabh, insert hyperlink).
How we want to catch joy in our nets of time, for joy to last forever! But catch, you cannot. The nets are not big enough to catch everything and they tear. Time slips away, taking the good and the bad with it.
I have used different methods to achieve this effect in this painting. I first planned exactly what colours I would use and where I was going to apply it. You can see that I played with shadow in this painting. I tried to use shadow to make you, the viewer, feel as if the net floats on top of the painting. Some of the waves also have shadows to give the feeling that water is also flowing beneath the surface of the wave
I used spray paint cans to completely cover the canvas from top to bottom. This was all done within about 10 minutes, there could be no room for mistakes. Next, I used airbrush in different colours to paint over the surface and I kept layering it, including when adding the shadows. I supplemented some of the waves by applying brushwork well.
My mother, who is a tapestry weaver, really liked this painting. She made a beautiful tapestry based on it that is just the same size as the original. It is included here.