by: Ellen C. Caldwell
for New American Paintings
Camille Page’s underwater paintings blend a perfect amount of the figurative with the abstract. Painting with a palette knife in a kind of push-pull-combination of heavy applications of paint and fierce scrapings, Page creates large paintings that feel familiar and momentous.
In this series, Page captures her friends and daughter swimming and enveloped with water in order to paint from the images. With an underpainting below and the palette magic on the surface, she captures action, form, color, and light in a way that invokes a sort of contradictory feeling of both timelessness and yearning for time’s past.
On a recent trip to Kaua’i, I was able to visit her gallery and meet with Page, speaking to her about her underwater series, process, and inspirations.
Ellen C. Caldwell: When I first saw your works, they immediately captivated me. You capture underwater movement in such an appealing way. Could you discuss how you came to this series?
Camille Page: Living in Hawaii and being an ocean lover/swimmer/surfer, I knew I wanted to create art that captured the ocean lifestyle, yet I was so tired of the same beach landscape and surf images that seemed to duplicate themselves everywhere you went on the islands. I purchased a 1970’s era Nikonos underwater film camera, and after many trial and error photo shoots, I realized I liked the obscure and sometimes blurry effects I was accidentally getting with film…