Wave Art

In my post of April 11, I mentioned the da Vinci Days STEAM lecture series on “Making Waves.” The “A” in STEAM stands for “Art,” a significant part of Da Vinci's legacy.  As one who's spent many hours at the Oregon coast watching ocean waves and attempting to capture them on film, I was curious how artists can capture this endless movement.  Before attending the lecture, I looked to see what works of art depicting the ocean were in the Benton County Historical Museum collection.

Kenneth Gordon made this pen and ink drawing of wave crashing against rocks and gave it to his friend Bing Francis.  At the bottom it says, “The sea is forever sending it's [sic] greatest strength against the stubborn land.” Gordon was a professor of zoology at Oregon State University from 1927 to 1969.

In contrast to Gordon's realistic drawing, Paul Gunn's oil painting is more abstract. Gunn, who was a professor of art at Oregon State University from 1948 to 1991, painted this “Sea Theme #2” in 1961.

Both use the spray created by water hitting rock to convey the movement of the waves.

Artist Shelley Jordan takes a different approach.  In her presentation on “Making Waves:  An Artist's Journey,” she talked the theme of water in her own life and that of her family. Originally a painter of portraits and still life compositions, she now also creates artistic hand-painted stop-motion animations in which she “re-contextualizes older paintings and layers hundreds of painted images on top of each other on one sheet of paper.”  Thus, we can watch the water move, crash into the shore, and calm.  You can view some of her animated paintings on her web site at  http://shelleyjordon.com/video-and-animation/.

By Martha Fraundorf, Volunteer for Benton County Historical Society, Philomath, Oregon