Seascape with Rainbow

This amazing turbulent sea takes up about three quarters of the painting . . . and the paint is shovelled on in spadefuls! But every streak of paint builds up a coherent structure of the plunging waves. Dad used to study the sea endlessly when he was in his early twenties visiting cousins in Weymouth. He certainly saw rough seas crashing down on Chesil Bank. He said he would try to keep his eye focussed on one area of water and follow it to see what its journey was.

Later in life he corresponded with Edward Wadsworth also a marine artist. They had an argument about how big an area of the picture plane should be given over to just the sea. Wadsworth maintained it shouldn’t be more than a seventh of the surface area. Dad wrote back : ‘What about Turner and Claude?’ Wadsworth replied: ‘What about them!’

The 60s were for Dad a time of throwing off the shackles of years spent fulfilling commissions which required research and painstaking detail. You can feel him here revelling in the freedom to do his own thing! He painted this wonderfully wild picture in 1966 and exhibited it at the Royal Academy Summer Show the following year. By now he had been a full RA for 13 years and enjoyed the camaraderie even though he wasn’t a very sociable man. He believed in its possibilities and was keen to help elect the best artists and phase out the rather stodgy image that it had acquired after the war.