Sailing · 2025
Sailing Sensations (2/5) is a painting I created in Naples during the visit of the Amerigo Vespucci.
The subject
Pure sensation: a boat under sail dissolving into colour, drawn in ink and then flooded with watercolour. One of my ’Sensation’ sheets, where I chase the feeling of a thing more than its likeness.
The scene is the Gulf of Naples — a sail out on the bay under its famous light — but the point is not the view. It is the rush of being out on the water: wind, glare, the heel of the hull, all of it thrown onto the paper in rainbow washes over a quick ink skeleton.
I let the colour run and splatter; the drawing underneath keeps just enough of the boat to hold it together.
It is the second of a set of five variations on the same idea.
I wasn’t drawing a boat so much as the thrill of sailing one — colour first, boat second.
The ink is fast and loose; the watercolour is faster, allowed to bloom and bleed across the sheet.
Of the five, this is the one that leans hardest into pure colour — sailing as a feeling, not a photograph.
See also · Sailing A Classic Wooden Sloop under Sail · The Elegance of a Classic Wooden Sailing Boat · A Lighthouse Among the Waves