The magestic Luzzu & colours of the waves

For awe-inspiring seascapes you don’t have to turn to the old masters, there is a host of contemporary artists just as enthralled by the ocean. Of course, it’s not hard to see why anyone with a love of boats and oceans would be interested in artistic representations of them, but the market for such paintings from the golden ages of marine art (18th -19th centuries) has somehow faltered over the past decades.?

Very few painters surpass their auction estimates. A good example is the 19th century Armenian-Russian painter Ivan Aivazovsky with his record sea painting - View of Constantinople and the Bosphorus, which was sold for ￡3.2million against an estimate of ￡1.8m. But the fact that Christie’s last held a sale dedicated exclusively to “maritime painting” way back in 2014 and Sotheby’s no longer holds themed sales of seascapes suggest the specialized market is sluggish. Instead, the auction houses include seascapes in a variety of sales of period and sporting art which are quite traditional. But if your tastes incline to the contemporary, I suggest visiting the Art Basel Miami Beach. There are quite a number of high-profile artists for whom the sea is a recurring theme.

I still remember visiting the Tate in Spring, when it re-opened its St. Ives outpost in Cornwall UK after its extensive refurbishment, whereby they did an exhibition of the british artist Jessica Warboy`s Sea Paintings. This is a series of large-scale works made on the Zennor coast of Cornwall and on Dunwich beach in Suffolk, for which she applies raw pigment directly to the canvas and then submerges it in the waves, so the water distributes the colour.

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Marc Quinn was also an inspiration to me, in his 2015 series of paintings,?The Toxic Sublime, and of eroded seashell sculptures,?Frozen Waves, the last works?he showed at London’s White Cube. The paintings were colour-saturated seascapes, illuminated by Caribbean sunrises he had photographed and printed on to the canvas. He then spray-painted them through templates made from flotsam and jetsam he’d collected. Finally, the canvases were sanded, before being mounted?on aluminium, so that he could distort them into three-dimensional forms. Quinn’s contemporary Tacita Dean has also long made use of the sea, sky and indeed of boats in her films, photographs and drawings. For her most famous series,?The Roaring Forties: Seven Boards in Seven Days?(now in Tate’s collection), 14 drawings in chalk on blackboard, like film storyboards, were based on old photographs to construct a seven-part narrative about a sailing ship traversing the South Atlantic.

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There is also no shortage of up-and-coming artists who are painting boats and the sea. Unfortunately, I missed the recent show done by the young Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda at the David Zwirner in London for example, which I`ve read it was full of evocative seascapes painted from memory and almost abstract in form. ?I was fortunate enough to visit Celia Paul’s exhibition at Victoria Miro when I visited Venice entitled?The Sea and the Mirror. Up to my knowledge, the Latvian-American artist and printmaker Vija Celmins has also made some extraordinary hyper-realistic monochrome paintings of the ocean’s surface in oils. She also works in dry-point and in pencil, making hundreds of thousands of marks in order to produce a level of detail that fools the eye into thinking it’s a photo.

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The ocean also appeals to photographers too. such as the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto began photographing it creating 200 meditative monochrome seascapes, shots all over the world, from the Atlantic to the Tasman Sea; the Black Sea; the English Channel; the Norwegian Sea and so on. ?Creating a very dark, almost geometric abstracts, in which the horizon bisects the?image exactly at its midpoint. In contrast, Charles March, whose series?Seascape?was shown at Hamiltons Gallery in London, prefers to focus only on the Atlantic. His prints have an impressionistic painterly quality – he has said he tries?to use his camera as a brush. He agitates the camera during long exposures, amplifying the movement of a subject that is perpetually in motion. The Atlantic features in several works by Wolfgang Tillmans too. As an artist who brings out extraordinary qualities in even the most familiar sights, his large-scale inkjet prints have a kind of heightened reality, with every drop of water, every tiny speck of spray in focus, and a palpable energy.

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If the sea endures as an eternally appealing source of inspiration to artists, not just for its beauty but also its metaphorical possibilities, boats themselves are a rarer subject these days. One notable exception is the Greek painter T Kyriazatis, who works in oils, producing richly heavily colored textured canvases, based on sketches he makes, observing maritime life in harbours. He aays: “My first impression of the sea was a feeling of freedom. Ships represent the endless human quest and I want to communicate some of the awe and the sense of greatness they evoke.” Stylistically his works may be a world away from his compatriot Volanakis, but you can’t help sensing he shares something of his 19th century compatriot’s sensibility.

I was inspired by the Luzzu (pronounced Loot-su), a typical colourful Maltese fishing boat which has been in use for centuries and I hope it will never disappear in the midst of the modern world. This is by excellence one of the traditional symbols of the Maltese islands. They are brightly painted in shades of yellow, red, green, brown, white and blue. The local boat which is quite a sturdy fishing boat is built from wood by the local fishermen. The bow is normally pointed with a pair of eyes which originated from the ancient Phoenicians. They are also referred to as the Eye of Horus or Osiris.

The above painting which I`ve painted way back in 2012, was done in acrylics in a fishing village of Marsaxlokk which is famous for the large number of colourful luzzus. The name of the village consists of "Marsa" which comes from the word "port" and "xlokk" which means south-east. This word which is Catalan in origin (xaloc) also refers to the dry sirocco wind which blows from the Sahara.

Alex Caruana