The Unquiet Sea – November Project

Advanced Oils Newsletter

This November will be a great start to our new Advanced Oils year. The standard of work coming through from the last cycle has been outstanding—ambitious, experimental, and increasingly confident in both design and execution. You’ve moved from building foundations to shaping language: learning not just to apply paint, but to speak through it.

This month’s project, The Unquiet Sea, continues that trajectory. Painting the sea has always been a paradoxical act: to represent what cannot be held still. Its shifting forms, mutating colours, and liquid ambiguity make it one of the most powerful metaphors for painting itself. For that reason, the sea is the natural seat of abstract art—a motif whose very nature resists description and demands interpretation.

We’ll work towards an ambitious technical study in the manner of William McTaggart, using the sea as a testing ground for the gestural, atmospheric, and structural skills refined in recent abstraction projects. Where earlier exercises explored painterly autonomy—colour, rhythm, and mark divorced from representation—this one reconnects those freedoms to a natural subject. The challenge lies in allowing the sea to remain unquiet: not to fix it, but to find form in flux.

McTaggert

The sea offers a painter everything: movement, colour, space, and metaphor. It is never one thing for long.

For Turner it was the theatre of light and motion; for Eardley it was raw emotion and elemental resistance; for McTaggart and Tabner, it was a proving ground for technical invention. Across centuries, the sea has drawn painters who wish to find freedom through structure—to express, not describe.

Turner’s Late Sea Paintings

J.M.W. Turner’s late seascapes remain among the most radical works of the nineteenth century. By the 1840s he had abandoned the polished precision of his early career for whirling atmospheres in which sea, sky, and light are indistinguishable. In works such as Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842) and The Slave Ship (1840), Turner transformed the act of painting itself into an event. Paint became weather; gesture became motion. These canvases are not depictions but re-enactments of the sea—painted storms that unmake the conventions of representation.

Turner’s late work stands as a kind of proto-abstraction, where line dissolves into energy and description into sensation. For contemporary painters, it remains a reminder that technique is not the enemy of feeling—it is its instrument.

Turner

Joan Eardley: Emotion and Element

Joan Eardley, working from the Scottish fishing village of Catterline, took the lessons of Turner and forged them into something intensely personal. Her Sea paintings of the early 1960s are not views from the shore but encounters—paintings made in gales, in salt spray, with wind and pigment colliding. Her brushstrokes are urgent, muscular, and rhythmic, often merging oil with pastel or sand to bind the image physically to its environment.

Eardley’s work blurs the line between representation and abstraction, between memory and moment. What she achieved was not the likeness of the sea but its pulse: the experience of standing before it, buffeted, alert, and alive.

Eardley

Len Tabner: Gesture and Immersion

Len Tabner’s North Sea paintings extend this lineage into the late twentieth century. Working often in watercolour and oil under open skies, Tabner paints with an immediacy that feels inseparable from weather itself. His compositions are loosely structured yet rhythmically precise, with paint dragged, splattered, and blown across the surface.

Tabner’s seas are immersive, their energy born from process rather than design. Like Turner and Eardley, he understands that gesture is not decoration but consequence—the visual record of engagement with the world.

Tabner.

William McTaggart: Light, Labour, and Liveliness

William McTaggart, our key reference for The Unquiet Sea, stands as the link between Impressionism and modern expression. His seascapes of the 1880s and 1890s combine close tonal harmony with animated brushwork, translating observation into sensation. Paint becomes the carrier of weather; structure emerges through motion.

McTaggart’s method offers a disciplined route into expressive handling. His forms are built through controlled fragmentation—marks that cohere at a distance yet remain alive and independent up close. For painters today, this duality between precision and freedom remains invaluable.

Technical and Aesthetic Aims

AO is always about skills facilitating creativity

From a technical perspective, seascapes are formidable tutors. Without fixed geometry, they force painters to construct space through tone, rhythm, and edge. You’ll learn to balance opacity and translucency, to manage chromatic vibration, and to build compositional tension without traditional drawing.

Aesthetically, the sea provides a framework for exploring ambiguity—the painter’s most fertile territory. Its shifting light and amorphous forms demand interpretation rather than transcription. The result, when done well, is a painting that feels alive: one that oscillates between description and suggestion, between world and imagination.

Fred Cuming RA

This is precisely the kind of work that speaks strongly to open competition juries and commercial galleries. Abstracted seascapes bridge the gap between accessibility and innovation. They invite recognition without cliché, offering enough visual anchor for the viewer while rewarding close looking with depth, energy, and individuality.

Strong sea paintings tend to sell and exhibit well because they embody both mastery and risk—they demonstrate technical command of medium and surface, yet convey emotional charge through looseness and ambiguity. In a crowded field, that combination stands out: disciplined, expressive, and unmistakably personal.

In Summary

The Unquiet Sea is both a technical study and an artistic inquiry. It challenges you to make marks that move, to structure through sensation, and to balance freedom with form. By looking to Turner’s sublimity, Eardley’s immediacy, Tabner’s gestural honesty, and McTaggart’s luminous structure, we’ll explore how abstraction grows from observation—and how the act of painting can hold the restless energy of the world itself.

Contemporary Context

The continuing fascination with the sea in modern and contemporary painting reflects what art historian Rosalind Krauss termed the “expanded field”—a move away from fixed categories of representation toward processes that reveal painting’s own fluid ontology¹. For Turner, the sea became a theatre of perception; for Eardley and Tabner, it became a mirror of bodily engagement; and for contemporary artists such as Peter Doig and Sean Scully, it remains an arena for exploring memory, repetition, and abstraction.

Doig’s Canoe Lake (1997) hovers between image and reflection, its watery surface both subject and metaphor for painting’s ambiguity. Scully’s Landline series, with their horizontal bands of sedimented colour, translate the sea’s horizon into pure rhythm. Both artists share with their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors a conviction that meaning in painting arises not from imitation, but from process—what David Joselit describes as the “network of transpositions” through which modern art circulates².

By engaging with the sea as both motif and metaphor, we join a long lineage of painters for whom material and meaning are inseparable. The act of painting the sea becomes a meditation on painting itself: a conversation between control and surrender, between the tangible and the ineffable.

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— Martin

¹ Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 281–289.² David Joselit, After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 64.