Sail Away

A single sailboat, barely two inches of canvas, rides a thick ridge of cream paint that runs straight across the middle of the picture. Everything else is blue. The paint has been dragged on in long horizontal sweeps with a knife, leaving ripples and ridges that catch actual light, so the surface changes depending on where you stand. That white band does double duty: it reads as a line of surf, or a horizon, or simply as a blob of paint squeezed out and smeared flat. The boat treats it as water, and that small decision is the whole joke and the whole charm of the piece.

Werner Bronkhorst is a contemporary Australian painter who builds his work around this kind of trick, dropping tiny, carefully rendered figures into fields of raw, heavily worked paint. His people paddle through impasto, climb it, sail on it. The scale gap does the work: the sailboat is small enough that you lean in to find it, and once you do, the blue around it stops being a background and starts feeling like open ocean. Look at the boat's sails and you will see they are painted with a fine brush, fussy and precise, right next to knife strokes as blunt as cake frosting. Two completely different ways of handling paint, sharing one surface.