A 20-year quest to capture all the world’s oceans
Danielle Eubank’s 20-year work as an expedition artist visiting the waters of every ocean on Earth culminated with an expedition to Antarctica. This, the Southern Ocean, was Eubank's fifth and final ocean to visit and capped her decades-long quest to paint every ocean on the planet in order to help raise awareness about the plight of the oceans and climate change.
A Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant awardee and a member of The Explorer’s Club, Eubank's relationship with ocean water began as a young girl growing up near Bodega Bay, California. In her travels as a young artist, she was captivated by bodies of water. She focused on painting their forms in their myriad conditions, refining her techniques of abstraction and realism until she was able to render their ephemeral qualities in her own style.
Ocean painter and water painter, her paintings of water led to an invitation to serve as the expedition artist aboard the Borobudur Ship, a replica ancient Indonesian vessel that rounded the Cape of Good Hope sailing from Indonesia to Ghana.
The journey proved to be a pivotal event in Eubank's life as an artist–her paintings of the waters of the open ocean and marginal seas were transformative, and the success of this work compelled her to paint the other oceans of the world.
On her next expedition, Eubank sailed on a replica of a 2,500-year-old Phoenician ship that circumnavigated Africa, a trip first made 500 years before the birth of Christ.
She most recently sailed aboard a barquentine tall ship on an expedition to the High Arctic that took her to the northernmost human settlement on Earth.
In each of these journeys, the vessel she sailed on in the open sea inspired her to view the bodies of water in exciting new ways, capturing each ocean as individual portraits of mood and emotion.
In March 2019, she returned from a rare voyage to the Southern Ocean, the fifth and final ocean for Eubank to visit and capture. This journey completes her landmark series of ocean paintings. Eubank is exploring the consequences of the human footprint on seascapes all over the world. The body of work simultaneously communicates the preciousness of water and the impact of humans on the environment.
There is only one global ocean, and one artist is capturing it all.
Credits, clockwise from top: Mozambique IX, oil on panel by Danielle Eubank; Isle of Mull, oil on linen by Danielle Eubank; Danielle Eubank aboard The Borobudur Ship, photo: unknown 2003; Gallery of paintings: click on each painting for information.