I received my first fins and mask in 1974. I had begged for them, inspired by the work of Ron and Valerie Taylor. I disgraced myself totally on my first outing snorkelling. Nothing could have prepared me for the cold, murky environment of the Derwent River - so vastly different to the scenes in the Taylor’s imagery. That day I also discovered an abiding and irrational fear of seaweed that plagued me for a long time.

I went on to work underwater, as a dive instructor and as a designer installing Australia’s first underwater nature trail. I saw firsthand the benefits of marine reserves, and the devastation wrought by fish farming. I have had the privilege of becoming intimately acquainted over many years with many underwater environments. And I have seen the changes in them.

This body of work is intensely personal. It has been developed over five years, but the experience and emotion behind it are that of a lifetime.

The science

Despite having spent so much of the last thirty five years underwater, I have seldom painted underwater scenes or subjects. I felt that I lacked the techniques and skill to capture the viscosity, weight, and presence that the underwater environment has. It has been my lifelong love, my place of solitude, and where that I have faced my own mortality on more than one occasion. I felt the sensation of being underwater was something I couldn’t visually do justice to.

One of the wonderful things about water is its properties. It is the physics of water - and the way it acts - that is what we see in these paintings, rather than the water itself. It is the science of optics and physics that informs these works. There are many aspects that make them incredibly complex - the sensations, the patterns, the fluidity - and I wanted to find a way to try to capture all these.

Principal amongst the properties of water are refraction, reflection and absorption.

Underwater absorption of colours is really an extreme form of the principles of atmospheric perspective. This has been understood since antiquity, and explored by artists since the Fifteenth Century.

Leonardo Da Vinci wrote in his ’treatise on painting’ - “Colours become weaker in proportion to their distance from the person who is looking at them.”

It occurs much more rapidly underwater. It is often the reason that casual visitors to the reef declare it dead and colourless. Most people don’t realise that reds are lost within the first few metres, and all subsequent colours disappear by roughly 15 to 18 metres. Blue is the last remaining visible wavelength. But even this is colour is hugely variable, as I have discovered.

Reflections in these images are all in reverse orientation. On land, reflections are always below the object. Underwater they are above. The reflections seen here are further distorted in the ‘puddles’ of images caused by the convex surface. This is caused by the undulating movement of the sea surface, and where there is movement of water around an object, ripples are also visible. All of the familiar ripple and wave shapes seen on the surface as we look at water are in the inverse here.

Refraction plays a major role in these images. It creates a phenomenon known as Snell’s window. This is often used in underwater photography to frame a subject. It is named after the Dutch mathematician, Willebrod Van Roigen Snell. While he was a professor of mathematics at Leiden University in the 17th century, he discovered the law of refraction known today as ‘Snell’s law’.

When looking upwards underwater, refraction concentrates the sky into a 97 degree ‘cone’. This allows the viewer to see a circle, spanning the horizon. (This same phenomenon is the one that affords crocodiles such a good view of anything approaching a waterhole.)

The area surrounding the visual cone of Snell’s window is either dark, or reflects the subsurface. This is another refractive phenomenon - known as complete internal reflection. This is exploited in optical fibre.

In the Corning Museum in upstate New York, there are some great illustations of complete internal reflection.

“Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see.” - Paul Cezanne

It was during this visit to Corning that I saw the 150 year old Blaschka collection of glass marine invertebrates. These exquisite pieces are perfectly and painstakingly rendered. They are so accurate, they are now used to help assess the effects of climate change on invertebrate species over the last century and a half. I was fortunate that my visit coincided with a major exhibition of the collection acquired by Cornell University in 1885.

There is a book on display, “A Sea of Glass”, from the Blaschka exhibition if you are interested.

The role of Golden Artist Colors

I was in The United States as I was privileged to have been selected for a month long residency in New York at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation in 2016.

Sam Golden started his paintmaking career in 1936 at Bocour Artist Colors with his uncle Leonard Bocour. In 1947 he developed Magna paint, the world's first artist acrylic paint. He returned from retirement in 1980 to found Golden Artist Colors Inc. based in New Berlin, New York, with his son, Mark.

Sam and Leonard began by producing hand ground oil colors for artists in Manhattan as the New York School of Painters was coming into its own. New York City was becoming the arts center of the world. Artists like Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman and Morris Louis were regular visitors at the Bocour shop on 15th street. They would set up their drawing pads or easels and draw or paint in the tiny shop.

Sam worked directly with artists using the products he developed. in this unique collaborative approach, he found the inspiration for his entire paint-making career. He is credited with the development of the first artist acrylic. Sam is credited with many other firsts - the first phthalocyanine artist paints, iridescent artist colors, stable alizarin and zinc white in acrylic, and the development of water tension breaker.

Golden Artist Colors remains a world leader in paint technology. Mark and Barbara are continuing Sam’s interest in what artists are doing - and want to be able to do - with their paint. This is the philosophy behind the residencies offered by the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation. They bring together artists from all over the world with technical experts in paint production. The accumulated knowledge of the staff at Golden is incredible.

Another of Golden Paint Colors innovations has been used to analyse the colours for this exhibition. This online resource allows images to be uploaded and spot checked for colour mixing. The number of paint colours can be adjusted, and the exact ratios are provided. I was continually surprised by what I was seeing. I am used to analysing colour in air, but found that the cast provided by the underwater environment was immensely difficult. Light is scattered underwater, and shadows and colours are very different. Even after using the virtual colour mixer, I had to adjust the outcomes, as these works are done using transparent colours to achieve the effects. It was invaluable tool, and I commend it to anyone struggling to mix the right hues.

Pushing the materials and pigments to this end has also not been without its problems. This exhibition was postponed for a year due to the complexities of producing the works. I owe a debt of gratitude to Golden once again, and Oxlades and Langridges for their help here. Pene, in particular. Thank you.

I hope I have done justice to it all, in the end.

Jane James.