The Water Was This Color, Calanques de Cassis

Painted from a rented boat in the Calanques de Cassis — the ancient limestone inlets between Cassis and Marseille, accessible only by sea. The turquoise water is so crystalline that fish were visible several feet below the surface. The limestone cliffs turn purple and blue as the light changes. This is what it looked like.

There are places in the world that the camera cannot do justice to. Not because the lens is inadequate — but because the experience of being there involves something beyond the visual. The heat of the rock. The smell of the sea. The silence inside the inlet broken only by the sound of water against the hull.

This painting was made from memory as much as reference — from the vault of light experiences that accumulates over a lifetime of looking, and that opens at the easel when the photograph has said everything it knows how to say.

The title is not a description. It is a testimony.

This is what the water looked like. And no photograph has ever quite said it the same way.