Wave art

What's with all the wave pictures?

For many years, my favourite picture of a wave was Hokusai's The Great Wave. It is filled with tension: is the boat seconds away from being smashed to bits? To me, the foam on the wave seems to have talons like a sea witch; it is about to pounce on the boat; there is no escape. The popular appeal of this image is probably due to the pleasing symmetry between the crest and the trough: they seem to wrap around each other, like a two armed spiral, or a ying-yang.


Like a favourite song played to death by a local radio station, this picture has been destroyed for me. Its prolific use at wave energy events suggests a certain lack of adventurousness. A solution perhaps is to gently expose marine renewables engineers to other pictures of waves. Then it will come as less of a shock if Hokusai's Wave is absent from the next event. With the punters primed for variety, I can proceed to step 2 of my masterplan: campaigning for a different picture (shocking, isn't it?) for each marine renewables event!

Look no further for an engineer-friendly Virtual art gallery :

Ai Weiwei's wave

Botticelli's Venus: nice goddess, pity about the waves
Liberazione di Andomeda: they don't make art like this anymore
Outstanding waves from Escher
Mysterious waves on a living room wall 
It is human to model
Beautiful and wild 
What cost renewables? -interview with Sue Jane Taylor 
Launching the boat 
What would today's 'Temeraire' be flighting? 
Automaton Waves

January Sails
I listen to the ocean
Memory and fate