Tidal Pools is a crossover work in which David Heatwole combines representational painting with an abstract visual language of points, lines, movement, and energy.
A solitary fisherman stands upon a realistically rendered rock, surrounded by an immense, turbulent field of water. His relatively small scale creates a striking contrast with the environment around him. What might ordinarily be a quiet scene of someone fishing becomes something far more expansive.
The water is constructed from hundreds of individual strokes that surge across the composition in waves of blue, turquoise, green, black, and white.
Throughout this movement are fields of colored dots and long intersecting lines, suggesting trajectories of energy passing through the landscape.
Above the fisherman, a brilliant central source radiates outward through concentric rings of colored points. Energy appears to emanate from this source and move throughout the painting—across the sky, through the water, and around the human figure below.
The representational elements anchor the viewer in a recognizable world, while the abstract elements suggest forces that cannot ordinarily be seen. The fisherman appears almost suspended within a vast network of movement and information, quietly participating in an environment considerably larger and more active than himself.
In Tidal Pools, water becomes more than landscape. It becomes a metaphor for energy in continual motion, while the lone fisherman offers a human point of stillness within that extraordinary flow.
