The Ways of Water

Inverna Lockpez
Paintings

The twenty-two paintings of “The Ways of Water” are a contemplation of water as environment, as setting, as a point of departure. Not a thing unto itself, but a kind of process: a source of life and motion and possibility and the connections between them. Across half a dozen groupings that function a bit like chapters, or, perhaps, more like themes in a symphony that are introduced then absorbed into the whole as another theme comes up, the paintings shift in tone or approach or subject from one to the next each capturing different aspects, facets of the relationship to water, how it’s viewed and used, both literally and metaphorically. It’s curious that water is the only geographic feature we describe as a “body,” we speak of bodies of water, suggesting something living and supple and organic. Inverna’s sensibility is very much in line with that. One after the other, the paintings come to seem almost like a set of life studies of the shores and waters she repeatedly visits and paints. 

This is art that requires—and inspires—calm and focus as you approach it, a particular attentiveness to take in. It’s the same attentiveness one brings towards nature when you open yourself to it, in order to open yourself to it. The tone is set by the title sequence, “The Ways of Water I – V,” five paintings, each six feet by four feet, the largest of the show. Images of horizons, some near, some far, seen across water. Sometimes a coast in the distance, sometimes just sky. Presented, mainly, in alternating horizontal fields of periwinkle, azure, ultramarine, turquoise, other blues, grays, greens, all the possible colors of sea and sky—at times, more realistic, at times, abstract. Commanding, yet subtle interplays of abstraction and representation, simultaneously open and mysterious. These are a beckoning. The horizon line that draws us forward. The effect is of suddenly finding yourself at the sea, blue hovering, nearly pulsing, expanding outwards. 

Many of the paintings involve birds, resting in groups or alone on otherwise empty boats or solitary waders, standing paused or hunting for food. Water birds of the coast, herons, egrets, cranes, gulls, and others, individuated and recognizable, captured with precision, but also going beyond representation to something like presence. Each poised in action, motion barely contained by the plane. Whether the explosions of lines and curves of a blue heron, its wings splaying upwards, or the stillness of a Snowy Egret after catching a fish (stillness is also motion), they are charged with energy, a sense of actual being. Here, the human is almost incidental, appearing solely through artefacts, boats and details of boats, the platform for other life. A part of the world, not its center. The world as we could know it, Inverna suggests, if we allowed ourselves to look and keep looking. 

HARRY NEWMAN

Winner of the 2025 Gerald Cable Book Award in Poetry.