I worked on two plates today, and by the time I was finished it was quite apparent that I’m ready to move onto the horizontal compositions. I was starting to feel like the images were becoming more repetitive, so I switched gears and focused on trying to achieve a more specific sense of movement in the figures. Up until now, the majority of the figures I’ve been painting have been very still. As a reaction to this, I worked on one figure today whose gesture and ripples in the water suggest a forward movement. Not only was the construction of the figure more different, but the patterns in the water changed quite a bit as a result of the movement.

When I was shooting images on site at beaches and ponds a ways back, it was obvious that the kind of movement you get with people in water is either very still or highly active. The majority of people I observed were either standing perfectly still for long periods, or they were moving rigorously in the water. In fact, as I went through my reference images today, in several photographs which featured large groups of figures, I’ve been noticing that a few figures that remain in the same position across many photographs. Despite the tremendous amount of activity created by the figures around them, these figures are almost frozen into their still gesture.