The unlimited ways that bodies of water can appear has been an attraction for me with these coastal paintings. Previously I had not spent a lot of time reducing something like a view of the ocean to its basic form, so this has been a good personal exercise in detaching context from a familiar environment and simply seeing the light, hues, and shapes as they are. In doing that I’ve finally started recognizing the really interesting and unexpected color combinations that appear when water, sunlight, reflection, shadow, and subsurface elements collide.

There is a particular cast to Gulf water west of Mobile Bay. It’s not altogether unique, but familiar in the northwestern Gulf Coast and different from the celebrated pthalo of the panhandle. Watching my kids out on a submerged sandbar on a sunny day, I started looking at the shallow span in between that was free of breakers but full of motion. Two absolutely distinct colors were on display - the bright periwinkle of the reflected surface and olive wavelets revealing the mixed hues of the water and sand. Seeing such different colors alternating side by side is interesting. The combination clashes happily in bright sunlight and does a lot to give the impression of movement when you paint it.

The paint color for the olive will vary depending on water depth, time of day, and what beach you’re standing on. I’ve gotten a pretty serviceable Mississippi Sound olive with a base of burnt umber, yellow ochre, and Prussian blue, maybe a cadmium yellow boost if it’s sunny. For a convincing periwinkle I’ve been mostly happy mixing a sky blue from Prussian blue and white, then adding alizarin crimson to taste and then black or raw umber to muddy it up. I was finding that starting with pink pushes the mix too much toward purple and away from how the natural color looks. I don’t know why it should matter but for some reason starting out with the light blue helps me avoid that.

Olive and periwinkle. You won’t see this combination too much between Pensacola and Apalachicola, and you probably wouldn’t pick it for your living room, but it conveys a distinct Gulf Coast vibe all the same.