Stephen Wright | Undercurrent

About

Southern California beaches are iconic for calling up images of sun-drenched living. There is something so famously “L.A.” about the sun and sand, but as you leave the sand and wade into the ocean, you leave any preconceptions about where you are and enter something that is natural and powerful. I imagine the surf as a place where Nietzsche meets Hollywood – a place where surface, light and image get crunched up in the waves and merge with something deep and profound. The desire to let that transformative feeling cross over into the rest of my life is why I paint waves.

Water does not have a form; it adapts to forms created by energy. There is something kind of futile yet exciting about capturing the effect of water in a painting. There is no start or end point, just a fragment of an experience contained within a square or rectangle. To feel closer to that experience, I use an open-ended painting process, starting at a single point or corner of the canvas and moving across it. My eye is always moving back and forth between light and form, always trying to decide which is more important as I move along. Sometimes these extended moments of decision-making elicit an expansive feeling. Sometimes it feels everything is getting lost in formlessness, and then there's a struggle to bring it back.

Occasionally I will add a pelican, a bit of land or a boat so the painting can be anchored and the viewer has a chance to exit the surf. But usually I want the feeling of the excitement of being swept and thrashed around by something way bigger than us. In this sense, my paintings are less about capturing the traditional beauty of the local beaches, and more about the energy and transformational qualities of the Southern California surf.