🥝 Bula, Fiji!

A ‘wide life’ and the challenging task of drawing water

Apr 06, 2024

You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. — Bruce Lee

Paddleboarding in the sea. View towards Fiji. Drawn from memory

It’s been roughly a month since we left Auckland and beautiful Aotearoa New Zealand to make our way back home, but it actually feels like time has expanded once more. I had that same feeling when road-tripping around the South Island last Christmas.

Life is wide when traveling. Time expands. Days felt longer there in the Pacific Islands (even though night fell quite early). Our daily routines revolved around food and tide times. Life slowed down.

Some time ago I read a great article on the notion of time passing and life needing to be wider rather than longer. It suggested packing more experiences in a day but also bringing more awareness by enjoying the present moment instead of rushing to what’s next: it doesn’t matter how long life is, but how wide it is.

I believe life also widens every time we draw.

No importa lo larga que sea la vida, sino lo ancha. — Camilo José Cela

Palm trees and small houses on the island we visited by boat

Paddleboarding deep into the sea, view towards Fiji and rain. Drawn from memory

We spent a few days in Fiji with friends before heading back to London (via Australia - but that’s another story!). We stayed in a private villa off the Coral Coast with direct access to the sea. The air was so humid that it felt like being submerged in water all the time. The Pacific waters were surprisingly warm.

What was interesting about the spot where we stayed was that there was a coral reef barrier some distance into the sea, so the waves only crashed further away, while the sea inside de barrier remained calm and shallow. Hearing the waves crashing in the distance was quite an experience.

One of the great things about sketching is that it connects you to a place. When traveling and sketching, I allow myself some time to soak in the essence of the place before I grab the pencil. Only then, when I start drawing, I notice how my mind changes focus or pays attention to specific things.

A couple of photos from our trip to Fiji. Look at the colour of the water!

During the trip to Fiji, I became interested in the challenging task of drawing water. As Christoph Niemann says: ‘Water is a bit like the human face: the more time you spend with it, the more variety you discover. It is both transparent and reflective.’

I strongly recommend reading this small interview on one of the covers he did for the New Yorker magazine.

Another artist interested, almost obsessed, with illustrating the essence of water is David Hockney. Puddles and swimming pools are recurring themes in his artwork. He states: ‘In the swimming pool pictures, I had become interested in the more general problem of painting the water, finding a way to do it. It is an interesting formal problem, really, apart from its subject matter… because it can be anything – it can be any colour, it’s movable, it has no set visual description. (…) Painting water presents a graphic challenge. How do you paint the transparency of water? How do you paint the transparency of glass?’