LIFE BEYOND FIRST CLASS
ARTS & COLLECTIBLES
THE
UNCONTAINED
SEA
Ran Ortner has spent decades painting water at its most seductive and unsettling. For his newest commission, ten monumental interpretations of Soundings No. 3 will leave the studio for an unlikely destination: the interior of a yacht moving through the very subject he paints.
REBECCA ETORIA
Ran Ortner is standing in front of several yards of angry water with a paintbrush that looks almost comically small in his hand. The first thing one notices while watching him place the finishing touches on the painting is the disproportion between artist and subject. Ortner is close enough to the surface that the ocean has ceased to read as an ocean at all. It becomes pigment, minute adjustments of color, a white line dragged across another white line. Step backward and suddenly there is weather.
This has always been the trick of Ortner’s paintings. From across a room, they command attention through scale and movement. Up close, their obsession reveals itself.
That distinction becomes particularly interesting in his latest commission. Dutch Design, the studio behind the forthcoming 140-foot Sea Rover, has asked Ortner to create ten individual interpretations of Soundings No. 3, one for each of the ten vessels planned. Each will measure 36 by 132 inches and take the form of a triptych installed along the principal wall of the yacht’s central living space, where the family room, dining area and galley come together. The works begin with the same composition, but each will be painted independently. There will be siblings, in other words, but no twins.
"There is something dreamlike in being held by a vessel, and still surrendered to the sea’s greater rhythm.” - Ran Ortner
There is an obvious danger in putting an ocean painting aboard a yacht. Marine art has had several centuries to become polite. A horizon, a sailboat, a glint of sunlight on water, and suddenly the sea has been reduced to something reassuring enough to hang above a sofa. Place such an image aboard a luxury vessel and it can disappear almost completely into the architecture, another beautiful object among many beautiful objects. Ortner’s work refuses that role.
Soundings No. 3 is too large, too close and, crucially, too restless. There is no tidy horizon offering escape. Instead, the viewer encounters the water head-on. Dark cavities open beneath the waves. Foam skitters across their surfaces. The eye searches for somewhere stable to land and finds very little. What could have become an elegant maritime reference instead feels like an interruption.
That is particularly apparent in the rendering of the work aboard Sea Rover. The surrounding interior is composed, pale and disciplined. The painting is none of those things. Against the clean geometry of the room, Ortner’s water seems almost unruly. It stretches across the wall like a window onto weather no architect could control. That tension is precisely what keeps the work from dissolving into the interior around it.
Ortner has built a career around this refusal to sentimentalize his subject. His large-scale paintings have repeatedly returned to the movement and psychological pull of water, a preoccupation that has taken his work to Marlborough Gallery, the Phillips Museum and Robert Miller Gallery in New York. In 2009, Open Water No. 24 won first place at the inaugural ArtPrize competition. None of that quite prepares a viewer, however, for the physical effect of the paintings themselves. Reproduction favors their realism. Encounter favors their scale. The Sea Rover project makes that physicality more complicated.
These paintings will not be made on conventional canvas. Ortner is working instead on honeycomb aluminum, chosen for the structural demands of a marine environment. Approximately 50 layers go into each work, creating the depth and dimensionality required for the project. It sounds, on paper, like an engineering decision. In the paintings, it becomes something more intriguing: a highly controlled industrial support carrying an image of a force famous for resisting control.
Ortner himself describes the ocean in musical rather than pictorial terms. “I’m captivated by the symphonic complexity of the ocean,” he says. “There is something dreamlike in being held by a vessel, and still surrendered to the sea’s greater rhythm.”
“Surrendered” is the revealing word. Luxury yacht design has traditionally been very good at eliminating surrender. Climate is controlled. Light is managed. Movement is softened. Materials are selected and refined until nearly everything aboard behaves precisely as intended. The ocean outside remains the one participant unwilling to cooperate. Ortner brings some of that unruliness inside.
The collaboration itself did not begin in a design meeting. Sea Rover founder Scott Blum had known Ortner’s work for years and became a collector long before the vessel existed. The attraction, according to Blum, was Ortner’s ability to capture both the “energy and tranquility” of the ocean. When the yacht took shape, the artist’s inclusion grew from an existing relationship with the work rather than a search for something to complete an interior. That matters more than it might seem.
Collectors know the difference between acquiring art because a room needs something and making room because a work has become necessary. The second tends to produce more interesting interiors. It also produces more interesting commissions. Ortner’s painting has not been asked to behave like an accessory aboard Sea Rover. At nearly eleven feet wide, behaving discreetly was never really an option. Nor should it be.
There is something faintly odd, and rather wonderful, about carrying a monumental painting of the sea out to sea. When Sea Rover reaches its anticipated delivery in April 2028, the comparison between Ortner’s ocean and the real one will follow the work everywhere. Outside, water will alter by the second. Inside, another ocean will remain suspended at the instant Ortner decided to stop painting. But frozen is not quite the right word. His waves never appear still.
Watch Ortner again as he works across Soundings No. 3. The brush touches one small passage of foam. Around him is an ocean assembled through hundreds of decisions so precise that, from a distance, they disappear.
Perhaps that is why the paintings hold attention. Ortner has not conquered the sea or even attempted to explain it. He has simply spent enough time looking to understand that its power lies partly in the fact that it never resolves. And aboard a vessel designed to move across it, that unresolved feeling may be exactly what belongs on the wall.
Join our mailing list to receive curated updates, special features, and invitations to events that define the world of the discerning few.
Sign up today and never miss what’s next.