Family and Friends and the Deep Blue Sea

What is it about the flatness of the sea, sky and sand, three bands of colour set in abstraction as a backdrop behind the figures talking and wading that I find compositionally so exciting? As a painter I have always loved drawing people on the beach. Partly, because so much extraneous information is absent one can concentrate on flattish colour, almost like a Rothko or late Diebenkorn painting. The painting becomes quite Indian in the figure and ground relationships. I was also thinking of that delicious French blue Matisse used, and sometimes Duffy, and later Yves Kline (his international Kline Blue) that was developed in the industrial revolution as a cheap chemical substitute for lapis lazuli. It chromatically floods the picture plane and cushions other colours like velvet. And on the beach, with so little to do, with friends we become social and connected, while when we are on our own, it is a place that nurtures deep contemplation and peace, and natural, very static arrangements of figures often last long enough for one to draw - TH