Scuba Portrait- Bonaire Series

This is part of my new series of paintings about Bonaire, Netherland Antilles. As I stated in one of my previous posts, Bonaire is known for its unparalleled reef system. So I thought it only fit to paint a scuba diver.


During open water scuba certification, one of the things you learn is that as you descend, the visible color spectrum is filtered out. First, red is lost, then orange, and so on as you go deeper. The final color to disappear before total darkness is blue. I tried to portray this color sense using a very limited palette. While preparing my paint, I mixed blue with every color I mixed- a very hard thing for me as I usually mix a wide range of color when painting portraits.

This scuba portrait is 16x20, painted with oil.