This painting Pine Point is my largest to date in this series of "Plein Air" paintings this year. My focus is increasingly on the healing nature of the ocean: the vibrations and patterns of the wind, water and sky on the human body, especially in our moments of sickness and deepest sorrow. Have you ever been to the ocean to heal or grieve? I have done so many times. I have also been there to celebrate often.
The ocean is 'there' for us no matter how we feel, or what we need on any given day. It seems to listen to us and embrace our thoughts and dreams. Yet this reliable phenomenon is also a fragile eco-system, and in grave danger in our era of rapid climate change. Like our own bodies, we can not take its health for granted.
“Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal-each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water.”
― The Sea Around Us LINK
As an artist, I wish to love and honor the ocean that is so present for us freely and without question. I, for one, would feel completely lost without an ocean to contain my human self. How could I thrive without it? I do not see the way. For this reason I am using paint, which I like to call my "liquid light", canvas and wood panels, sustained personal observation outdoors (painting en plan air), and my imagination, electrified when I am on location, to express my gratitude to the sea, my old friend.
"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”
― The Sea Around Us. LINK
Triada Samaras Oct 11, 2022
Originally educated in Fine Art at Smith College, Northampton, and the Museum School of Fine Art in Boston, MA, Samaras has also completed graduate work in art, art education, and interdisciplinary art at Columbia University, New York, and Goddard College, Vermont. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Drawing and Fine Art at Kean University and Art and Art Education at William Paterson University.
