Glas Waves - Original Painting by Rachel Bennett

Watching the waves for hours is a favoured past time of mine, and I am forever trying to capture their magnificence in a still painting. 
‘Glas’ means blue in Welsh, and so the title is not a typo; I also tried to encapsulate the transparency of a crashing wave in this piece, like glass! 

The meaning behind this piece is the symbolism of letting go and starting anew- a wave never lingers on the past or dwells on what was, it crashes and starts over and again. 

“but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Wickliff's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.” A favourite quote from Melville’s Moby Dick. 

Painting this was extremely cathartic and I find myself lost in the waves when viewing it in hindsight, I hope you do too! What does this piece mean to you? 

I used a mix of acrylics, gouache and watercolour for this piece, and brought out the trust palette knife for a pieces of it too. 

Technical bits;

This painting is on raised canvas, varnished and with sides painted black to give the slight illusion of a floating frame.