Original artwork description:

"A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale."

Herman Melville, Moby Dick 1851

Materials used:

Oil on Canvas

Tags:

#american novelist #whaling #seascape #oil painting #modern #ocean #clouds #waves #abstract seascape #impasto #dark #grey sky #light and shade #death #dramatic skies #thick paint layers #new #story #crashing waves #whale #drama #turner #novel #dark sea #disaster #jmw turner #moby dick #herman melville