Before my trip to Turneffe Flats my first plan was to paint a sky with great depth. Then I thought an abstract direction. Taking on a completely new direction because I loved the texture of a hand prepared canvas.the painting would be about paint and fabric. Then I thought this could be an underwater scene with a ray swimming.
After returning and seeing a number of rays swimming gracefully, This jagged swim line for the ray is wrong. I thought of Duchamp's nude descending a stircase. I then rejected the angularity of cubism. In Belize I was more fascinated by bubbles rising from snorkels and how they wiggled and reflected a calidascope of the surrounding colors.
Photographs do not show the movement over time like my perception.
When I painted the bubbles rising to the surface. The surface is darker in this painting. If I am going to be accurate about my memory of the surface plane, it would be lighter and more broken up reflecting colors of the sandy bottom. It occured to me that I could turn the painting upside down. Or I could put more swaths of sky blue and smaller swaths of the warm tones at the sandy floor.
