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5 days ago4 min read
5 days ago4 min read
The ocean from within: why we always paint the surface 🌊
- SCJ
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
We've been painting the sea for centuries. But almost always from the outside.
Turner painted it furious, with waves crashing against ships. Sorolla painted it luminous, with children running along the shore. Winslow Homer painted it threatening, from the cliffs. Three seascapes, three different ways of looking at exactly the same thing:
the surface.
What you see from land, or from the deck, or from the beach.
What lies beneath is another story.
The problem with painting the ocean 🐠
The ocean floor is one of the richest and least known ecosystems on the planet. 80% of the ocean remains unexplored. But even the part we do know — the coral reefs, the tropical depths, the waters of the Pacific — has a visual complexity that traditional painting took centuries to want to record.
Ernst Haeckel tried in the 19th century with his scientific illustrations of jellyfish, corals and radiolarians. They were more botany than painting, more taxonomy than emotion. But they were honest: they showed that down there were forms the human mind wouldn't have invented on its own.
Jacques Cousteau brought it closer to everyone with the underwater camera. But a camera and a brush do different things.
What interests me about the ocean floor 🪸
I started diving in Málaga. Then I went to the Maldives, Bali, the Philippines. And the same thing always happens: the intensity. That saturation everything has down there, which feels unreal even when you're in it. As if someone had turned the contrast all the way up and then animated it on top.
That's what I try to bring to the canvas — not the documentation of the ocean floor, but that feeling of seeing something that shouldn't be this beautiful, almost unreal.
In Mako and the coral reef I tried to capture exactly that: the mako shark — one of the fastest in the ocean — turned into a blue, mauve and pink balloon, crossing a reef that pulses with its own color. The most agile animal in the sea, suspended. The contrast felt necessary (and fun).
Big W and the corals came from the same question in reverse: what happens when the largest animal occupies the same space as the smallest beings. A whale among luminous corals isn't an ecologically realistic image. But as an image, it works. The artificial and the real in 130x100cm.
Coral and the problem nobody wants to look at 🌡️
Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor. And they harbour 25% of all known marine species.
That alone is absurd enough. Absurd and wonderful. The sad part is that we're losing them. Coral bleaching happens when the water gets too warm and the coral expels the algae that give it colour and life. This has already affected more than 50% of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
I don't paint it as a denunciation. I paint it out of fascination — because it's a world you can't always see, and it deserves to exist as an image, and to keep on existing.
Naturaleza Plástica
|take care|,
everything gets recycled,
even the summer
Hippo the seahorse and the corals was born from there. The seahorse is one of the most vulnerable animals to changes in water temperature and among the first to disappear when a reef starts to deteriorate. In this work, Hippo appears as a metallic balloon, suspended among corals that glow with a bluish intensity — it looks like nothing weighs him down. At a certain depth, corals lose their colour and yet they're still the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. That's what interests me: that something can be fragile and luminous at the same time.
Jellyfish are something else 🎐
Jellyfish don't suffer in the same way. On the contrary: they thrive when the ocean warms and when their natural predators disappear. They're the inverse indicator. The more jellyfish, the worse the ecosystem is doing for everything else.
And yet, there they are. Resisting. While plastic and pollution devastate nearly everything, they carry on. That doesn't make them guilty — it makes them the only ones left to fight.
That's what fascinated me when I started working on the Jellychutes series.
A jellyfish as a parachute is an image that makes sense in many ways at once. Not as a lifeline, but as combat: the ocean must fight.
Jellychutes I and Jellychutes II are the two works in the series. The second, large format, was exhibited at JustMad 2025.
The Botanical Aquarium: the sea as a garden 🌸
The watercolour series was born from a different question: what would happen if marine fauna and terrestrial flora occupied the same body?
It's not a new question — nature has been asking it for millions of years, with corals that look like plants and plants that look like animals — but it was a question I wanted to answer with watercolor and Hahnemühle paper instead of DNA.
Each fish in the Botanical Aquarium has its fin transformed into a specific, documented flower: the pyjama cardinal fish with a Japanese camellia, the needlefish with a Cattleya orchid, the pufferfish with a Japanese anemone. The botanical documentation was important. I didn't want them to look like decorative inventions.
| When fauna becomes flora, an ocean blooms |
There's something about the ocean that painting has always wanted to capture and has almost never fully managed: the feeling that down there the world operates by different rules. That scale is different, that time is different, that light is different.
It may be impossible. But in the meantime, I keep trying.
♡♡♡
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