Where Grain Becomes Tide

Where Grain Becomes Tide began somewhere unexpected: in a furniture showroom.

One day, I wandered into imiho interior while strolling down the streets of De Pijp in Amsterdam. I was looking at furniture, but what stayed with me were the beautiful colors and flowing grains of the different oaks around the showroom.

I kept seeing waves in them.

The long lines of the wood looked like currents. Knots and changing tones began to resemble eddies, foam and waves. I left wondering whether I could make an ocean without using the colors we normally associate with one... no turquoise or deep blue, but cream, sand, oak, umber, brown and touches of gold.

I began experimenting with fluid acrylics, building a palette from warm oak and earth tones. Using pouring and Dutch pour techniques, I pushed, pulled and blew the paint across a 90 × 90 cm canvas, allowing the colors to move into one another rather than trying to paint individual waves.

The scale was new for me.

Working across 90 centimetres of wet fluid paint turned out to be far more physical and far less controllable than I expected. Paint ran out. Mixtures had to be remade. Areas I tried to repair became something else entirely. At one point, frustrated with a section that wasn't working, I dragged and wiped the wet paint with my hand.

It created some of the most convincing wood grain in the painting.

That accident became part of the language of the piece.

Instead of trying to make the painting return to my original plan, I began responding to what was already there: preserving some currents, disrupting others, and letting marks sit somewhere between timber and water.

While moving house and imagining this new piece, I kept seeing an enormous whale moving across a giant canvas — on a scale I had never attempted before. There was something almost spiritual about its size and presence.

I kept the whale as simple linework rather than painting it as a solid figure. I wanted it to feel as though it already existed somewhere inside the currents and had only briefly become visible.

From a distance, the painting can remain almost entirely abstract. Come closer, and the whale begins to emerge.

There was another transformation happening while I made this piece.

Moving house gave me a brand new space:... My own attic!

For the first time, I had a large studio of my own. Somewhere I could make a mess, experiment, work bigger and allow paintings to develop without having to fit them into the spaces I had before.

After ten years working in the tech industry, my return to painting had already been a gradual process. But something about moving into this home, climbing upstairs into that studio and attempting a canvas larger than anything I had previously made felt like crossing another threshold.

I had started the painting by wondering whether wood grain could become ocean tide.

Somewhere in the process, I realized I was asking a similar question of myself.

Where Grain Becomes Tide became a painting about transformation.