Here is another full sheet watercolor study by Elmer L. Ham. The pictures don't do it justice. It has an almost abstract quality about it. It strikes me as another on location study. Faint pencil lines block in both the major masses of rocks (Feels more like California than Maine to me) as well as of the wave action - see below.
The sense of movement is captured and the white of the paper also is utilized effectively to capture whitecaps as well as foam from waves crashing on rocks. It all implies to me a familiarity with the ocean as well as this particular location. That is only reinforced by the deft strokes of a loaded brush throughout the painting.
This strikes me as a rapidly executed sketch (you have a max of a couple of hours before the light changes too much - and my reality of painting along the coast is that you tend to have a shorter window). But everything is contained within this first pass to allow the artist to go back at any time to finish the painting or to use this as a basis for a finished painting.
I will show more of his completed seascapes in future posts but I enjoy sharing some of my interpretations of the artists thinking. They are not complete but , for me, the sense of movement is there and I can hear the surf (it could be the tinnitus but I prefer to think it is the surf)
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