Water

About

Water is hard to draw: it has no fixed shape, reflects everything and changes by the second. Leonardo da Vinci filled notebooks with studies of eddies and currents, comparing swirling water to curling hair, and late in life drew visions of a world-ending deluge (c. 1517–18). Utagawa Hiroshige's Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (1857) renders a downpour as fine dark lines slanting over hurrying figures on a bridge.

Modern artists found new ways to catch it. David Hockney's A Bigger Splash (1967) fixes the white spray of an unseen dive against a flat California sky, and Kim Tschang-Yeul painted single drops of water with startling illusion for nearly five decades from the early 1970s. Roni Horn photographed the surface of the River Thames for Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1999), scattering tiny numbered footnotes across the images. Look for light on the surface, ripples and droplets.