Immersions

Daniel Barber. Horizon. 1990. Pencil, watercolor, gauche, charcoal, on paper. 12 x 16 in. (30.48 x 40.64 cm)

For all at last return to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.

—Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (1951)

For decades I’ve made parallel bodies of work investigating similar ideas through various forms of representation and abstraction. Contemplating my current explorations of the ocean—visually, gesturally, physically—I thought of this mixed media work from 1990. A calm ocean, the flatness of Chicago where I then lived, Lake Michigan, the edge of space, the desert, an effort to embody meditation, observation, non-self and breath in a little study. At least that’s what I recall thinking at the time. Horizon. 1990 was part of an extensive body of work I made on paper just as I was dramatically reintroducing life-size figures in my expansive oil paintings. I have kept this one and a few others from that time, the rest are scattered about in various collections. It resonates with me still, echoes of it found in my current work, such as Plunging Breaker at Staircase Beach, Malibu. 2021.

The Rachel Carson quote is the final sentence of her essential book, The Sea Around Us. It resonates with my own immersions in the sea, particularly along the coast of California, from San Diego north through Malibu and on to the cold waters of Big Sur and Point Reyes. I bring such somatic memories of swimming into my studio, embodying them in marks and colors and gestures all the while deeply aware of our responsibility to know and experience wild nature, and to protect her as essential to our being and the vital interconnectedness of all living things and our local and global ecologies.

Rachel Carson again:

To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.

—Daniel Barber