Underwater Light Play

This canvas no longer exists in this form.

In August 2026 Underwater was painted over and became Neelkanth, a five-foot square in oil that keeps the format, the medium and the blue, and changes what the blue is doing. Water became a throat. Both are blue because of what is suspended in them; both ask you to look through rather than at.

This page remains as the record of what is underneath.

→ See Neelkanth

Underwater (2024) is a submerged reverie — a painting that swims through color, rhythm, and sensation. This 60 x 60 inch oil on canvas from The Pulse of Life Collection explores what it feels like to see, move, and remember beneath the surface.

The canvas is a current of sea-glass blues, turquoise, and deep green, punctuated by soft coral hues and tiny air-pocket whites. Glazes build translucent layers, while streaks move diagonally like shafts of refracted light. Texture is gently disrupted — as though the image itself is dissolving in water.

I painted Underwater after a dive off the coast of Baja. I wasn’t trying to capture the ocean — I was trying to capture how it made me feel. Weightless. Blurred. Held.

This piece recalls the floating sensation of Helen Frankenthaler’s soaked canvases and the water-infused palette of David Hockney’s pool series. But unlike theirs, this work holds no bodies. Only immersion.

Underwater is not about swimming. It’s about surrender — to color, to motion, to memory that moves like light through water.