Motion

Our artists suspend moving water, paint the wind, and capture wild or delicate gestures in these works whose central theme is movement.

Marcia Burtt's Littoral Drift focuses on a crashing wave. Blue streaks of wet sand emerge from it. Green dashes inside the trough point to it. And an army of advancing waves angles toward the frenzied splash of white brushstrokes. Burtt hasn't suspended time — she has captured it in a loop.

In Meditation IV, Susan Petty renders the split second of a cresting wave with thousands of carefully cross-hatched lines—a methodical rendering based on a photograph that portrays scraggly shapes of kelp and white water frozen in a cascading descent. Petty's title points to her intention: a study of her creative process. 

Bill Dewey reveals how a camera can distort our perception in his photograph Wave 14. He freezes time with a fast shutter speed, revealing details and patterns obscured by motion. The rushing wall of water becomes sculptural, forming glass ripples, bubbles, and ridges.  

As words tell a story, clouds emerge and drift over an island while the river below runs towards the opposite corner. Erling Sjovold's diagonal composition and flock of clouds in his canvas Belle Isle Overlook imply a breeze and show the flow of water. Delicate brush strokes blur edges, conveying the spontaneity of painting outdoors from life.

Sheets of water stream off a pearlescent boulder into a creek's calm pool; white ripples echo in the emerald-green water. In Downstream Tahquitz, Randall David Tipton shifts from dark to light and from transparency to opacity, creating an action painting that’s all about serenity.

Marilee Krause's swift strokes scrape over the paper's textured surface in East Mountain Drive. Speckled color emulates morning overcast breaking up and burning off in the paper's white glare. Krause's minimalism reveals her skillful mark-making and creates space for the viewer to fill in the evolving sky.

Looking down at wet sand, Patricia Doyle observes a magical upside-down world of color in Dawn Changes Everything. Ripples in the sand create curved mirrors that change shape with each wave, reflecting moving lights and forcing buildings to collapse and reappear. Doyle documents the shoreline at low tide in colorful pastel squiggles, dashes, and slashes—a landscape and artist in motion.