Why Painting the Sea in Oils Is Harder Than It Looks:And Why That’s a Good Thing
- Martin Kinnear Studio
- Jul 21
- 4 min read
A blog from the Martin Kinnear Studio
Let’s start with the obvious: the sea is impossible. It’s always moving, rarely the same colour twice, and has an annoying tendency to change mood and lighting faster than your average teenager, which is precisely why it’s such a marvellous thing to try and paint.
Now, I know what you’re thinking—why would anyone in their right mind take on something as wilfully uncooperative as the ocean? Well, for starters, because it teaches you everything you need to know about painting. And I do mean everything: light, colour, movement, value, temperature, composition, texture, patience, mild exasperation—the lot.
At the Martin Kinnear Studio, we don’t occasionally teach marine painting because we’re sentimental about sea spray and canvas deck chairs. We teach it because it's one of the single best ways to sharpen your oil painting skills, whether you’re tackling Turneresque skies or the edge of a chipped old teacup.
I’ve been painting sea studies this week—which sounds wonderfully serene until you actually try it. There’s nothing quite like attempting to wrestle a credible wave onto canvas to remind you how little control you have over anything, least of all oil paint. One minute you think you’ve got the light just right, the next it looks like a frothy mess with a sunburn. Still, there’s something oddly satisfying about chasing the shifting light and trying to capture the sea’s slippery moods. It’s maddening, beautiful, and oddly addictive—rather like oil painting itself.
The Glorious Madness of Marine Art
Marine painting has a wonderfully bonkers history, full of brilliant eccentrics and obsessive geniuses who thought nothing of rowing out into storms just to get the waves right. One of the greatest of all time, Ivan Aivazovsky, reportedly painted thousands of seascapes in his career and once declared that he “only had to close his eyes to recall the sea in all its moods.” Modest chap.
Then there’s the Anglo American tradition—perhaps a bit less poetic, but no less impressive. Think Hemy, Carmichael, E. John Robinson—stalwart painters of the bracing British coast, and sunny California, respectively. You can practically feel the salt air on your face when you look at their work. These were painters who knew how to handle atmosphere, edge, and tone, and who understood that the trick to a believable wave isn’t a lot of blue—it’s light, movement, and good old-fashioned skill.
What the Sea Teaches You (Whether You Like It or Not)
Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool seascape painter to benefit from learning how to tackle the ocean. Marine painting forces you to wrestle with every key technical challenge oils can throw at you—and that’s exactly why we love teaching it.
At the Studio, we cover the full range of sea-savvy techniques:
Modelling – You’ll need to learn how to carve form out of shadow and light like a sculptor with a brush. Waves, as it turns out, have bones.
Glazing – Those magical translucent colours that look like sea glass and moonlight? That’s glaze. We’ll teach you how to layer them like a Venetian master.
Temperature and Range – It’s not just warm and cool colours—it’s how you balance them to evoke time of day, weather, and drama without turning your painting into a fridge magnet.
Scumbling – For when you want to suggest mist, motion, or the vague, slightly melancholy feeling of an abandoned Cornish harbour.
Composition – The sea is basically one big, wobbly abstract field. Making that convincing takes clever design, not just wishful thinking.
All of which is to say: learn to paint the sea well, and you’ll be a much better painter—whatever you decide to point your brush at.
But Don’t Take My Word for It
Martin Kinnear, founder of the Studio, has done a fair bit of this sort of thing himself. A self-taught painter who earned his Master’s at the Royal College of Art (yes, that one), Martin has exhibited internationally, won the Médaille d’Argent at the Paris Salon, and shown at The Bowes Museum and other intimidatingly important places.
He also happens to be a working-class, one-armed painter who survived a stroke, built a life in art, and now runs a studio dedicated to making oil painting accessible, rigorous, and occasionally more fun than it has any right to be. He’s the kind of tutor who’ll teach you fat-over-lean without sounding like a chemistry professor, and who genuinely enjoys showing people how good they can get with a bit of structured effort and a healthy respect for pigment.
So What’s the Next Step?
Simple. If you’re just getting started with oil painting—or if you’ve had a bit of a bash at it but want to finally understand what you’re doing—then The Oils Program is the place to begin. It’s structured, practical, and gets results without asking you to remortgage your house.
There’s a brilliant sunny beach study wrapping up on The Oils Program this week—a perfect antidote to all those stormy skies. It’s a two-part, two-hour on-demand project designed to sharpen your brushwork, boost your confidence with light and colour, and get you painting with clarity and purpose. TOP members get a full 12 weeks to complete it at their own pace, so whether you’re diving in now or coming back to it later, there’s plenty of time to absorb the skills and make it your own. Get inspired—and get the tools to make your paintings shine.
If you’re already painting and want to move into more ambitious territory—glazes, scumbles, full compositions that don’t fall apart at the corners—then Advanced Oils will stretch and support you in all the right ways.
Either way, you’ll come out the other side with a firmer hand, a sharper eye, and possibly a sudden desire to visit Whitby in February with a pochade box.
Come paint the sea with us. It’s not easy. That’s the point.📍 www.martinkinnearstudio.com
And remember: if you can paint a believable wave, you can paint just about anything.
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