Abstract ocean waves drawing how to#

His work reflects a fusion of abstraction and the surreal, resulting from a subconscious inspiration from magical realism, in particular the late Gabriel García Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude. In Breakwater (2023), for instance, Otero depicts a wave breaking over chair with a lifeboat and small fans attached to it, creating a surreal, dreamlike narrative. He inflicts these gestures after scraping the oil skins and sticking them onto the canvas, building and collaging images of these items on a new, multilayered composition, alluding to how the construction of memory is dependent on building on what came before and assimilating a variety of experiences, symbolised by materials, into one narrative based on both fact and sentiment. Beds, couches, chairs and other pieces of furniture or household items he remembers from his childhood house in Puerto Rico become details, which he paints and then proceeds to mark through erasing and scraping. The intimate idea and memory of home is accentuated in his paintings through depicting everyday, familiar items as subject matter. “I’m not in pursuit of the idea of it as part of a landscape or location, but rather the way it serves as a metaphor for bringing and taking, hiding and revealing,” the artist says, describing how a wave’s fluid nature lends itself well to acting like both a barrier and a channel.īoth Otero’s work and his process reflect the subjective, imperfect nature of memory and its ability to distort reality. Otero puts his heavily layered paintings through various processes that obscure the context and subject, include scraping, collaging and chiselling, but simultaneously reveal selected aspects of said layers, functioning in many ways as a wave does. “If you want to understand more about, you have to work backwards.” “You have to start with all the information and work in reverse, just like history,” the artist says as he chips away at the surface of one of his waves in progress. So the background, frequently inspired by historical abstract masterpieces, is painted last. Works on view in Hong Kong such as Caribbean Symphony (2023) and Moonriver (2023) reflect this abstraction and demonstrate Otero’s reverse technique, by which he paints the foreground scene and then works backwards. They are then layered onto the canvas to make entirely new images and patterns, often in ways that reference important painters in art history, such as abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning.

These “skins” are scraps of dried paint made from layering oil paint onto a plexiglass surface and then peeling them off when they’re partially dried. His proclivity for abstraction and paint as a medium is further exemplified in his use of “oil skins”, an innovation he’s become known for. The artist spoke with Tatler at his Brooklyn studio three weeks ahead of the exhibition opening, giving us an exclusive look at his laborious painting process, which includes building up layers of paint and scraping bits off them, yielding a distorted, often abstracted image. Most recently, waves feature in new paintings the artist has made for The Sea Remembers, an exhibition currently on view at the Hong Kong gallery space.

The ocean has long been an important part of Otero’s life-he grew up in Puerto Rico-and water and aquatic themes are ubiquitous throughout his work. “It’s these things I hold onto when I’m thinking about art-my early beginnings as an artist and my connection to my past.”

Abstract ocean waves drawing how to#

Waves were one of the earliest standard motifs the artist was formally taught how to draw-he recalls being told to write to write the letter “C” and build from that, adapting the curved lines to make swelling bodies of water.