A Sailing Artist – Seascapes

It never ceases to amaze me when I realise the talented members that I have on the Lovesail site. Brendan Chandler is one such member.  Here is a little piece about this sailing artist and a gallery of his wonderful seascapes.

I began sailing as a boy about 50 years ago in Cork. After a career in The City, I began ocean sailing 12 years ago, and now a sailing artist. 

I have always been fascinated by the sea and whilst living on a yacht in the North Atlantic my fascination kept growing. I now have a second career, delivering sailing yachts on ocean passages and spend months each year at sea, studying the sea, waves, their colours shapes and sizes all of which change from minute to minute.

As a Buddhist, I am conscious of and frequently meditate on the impermanence of everything and watching the sea hour after hour is a reminder of impermanence and the source of my obsession with waves and my attempts to capture the changing forms and colour.

The Buddha said ‘Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form’ and when I look at the ocean which combines emptiness and form I am awed by the emptiness of the oceans and have tried to capture this in some of my paintings.

I have never had the good fortune to study painting or art until my obsession led me to approach Jeremy Rugge-Price, a wonderful Suffolk sailing artist, an ex-mariner who is also obsessed by the sea, last year. He seems to have adopted me as a student and we spend hours discussing the sea and waves as he teaches me how to capture the essence of the waves.

My friend, the artist and art teacher Brigett Hill taught me what she considered some of the basics of painting.

The artist Megan Anderson sailed with me from the Azores to the UK this year and we spent many hours observing and discussing the sea, the waves and the colours of sea and sky. After our safe arrival in the UK, despite ‘blowing out’ the mainsail we spent some days in the 15th-century Scottish castle she lives in teaching me the art of ‘glazing’.

Recently I began to paint what I thought would be a series of 4 paintings depicting the same area of sea in each of the seasons. So far I have completed 6 in with seas in green, blue, turquoise, silver, orange. Four of the series are on display here and I have come to realise that each of these could be painted with a variety of skies and with an infinite number of sea states so it seems that I have enough subjects to keep me painting seas for several lifetimes.

I hope you enjoy my efforts.

Many thanks to Brendan for allowing us to reproduce his fantastic work.  If you have a talent that you would like to showcase on the blog, them please get in contact with me via the contact page found at the bottom of the Lovesail Homepage.

Erica