08 February 2010

The Ocean Sea Effect

Colors Lab is making calls for entries on "The Sea". Most of the submission are contemplative and undoubtedly tinged with a sense of magic realism. Stories and images of the sea always seem to convey a sense of another world that is almost part of ours, but not quite.


Years ago, I picked up a gorgeous book titled "Ocean Sea", by Alessandro Baricco. It was one of those books you had to read slowly and feel as you sank your teeth into it, only to find that the bite was elusive but nonetheless present. The only way you know you had bitten into it was the linger aftertaste. In his words, it was just like the seashore. 'Neither land nor sea. It's a place that does not exist.'

At the end of the novel, there is an index of all the paintings made by one of the characters, the Artist Plasson, who is on a metaphysical quest to find where the sea begins and how to capture the her essence on canvas. He spends a good few years of his life standing where the ocean meets the land, with his paints and easels, trying to achieve this. An entry from this index of paintings might read:
Untitled 01
36" by 42"
Oil on Canvas
Description: Un-primed, covered in blue save the corner on the bottom right. There is a bright red spot suspended off center.
It goes on, pages and pages describing the paintings the Artist has made, it works because by the end you really want to answer how the artist has captured such an elusive thing as the ocean. The novel also has another memorable (and highly original!) character, the Professor Bartleboom, who is penning "The Encyclopaedia of Limits", whose quest is to find where the ocean ends...

In the real world, Hiroshi Sugimoto has managed to capture this elusive concept of our relationship with the sea in photographs. In these photographs, it's all about the horizon, how it moves, how it changes, and when it disappears.


Is most famous piece is "Boden Sea" taken on the Lake of Constance, which is more famously known as "No Line on the Horizon", the cover for a U2 album of the same name.
In an interview, he said,
"That's the effect of seascapes," he said, before explaining that a view of a boatless ocean is one of the only things left in the world that we can experience in the same way that our primitive ancestors would have experienced millenniums ago. "The works are really connected to the very deep roots of the human mind,"

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