7 Seascapes we’re absolutely loving this week
At Arts to Hearts Project, we’ve never believed that art fits into a single category. To us, art is everything. It’s every subject that sparks curiosity, every medium that invites exploration, and every unique way a person chooses to see and translate the world. Whether it’s a quiet still life, an expressive portrait, or the endless horizon of the sea, each artwork tells us something about the person who made it—and perhaps something about ourselves too.
This week, we found ourselves drawn to the sea. There is something about seascape paintings that lingers long after you’ve looked away. They have a way of making you pause, breathe a little deeper, and remember what it feels like to stand at the edge of something far greater than yourself. Some capture calm and stillness, while others are wild, restless, and unpredictable. But the best ones always leave you feeling something.
For centuries, artists have returned to the sea again and again, yet it never seems to run out of stories to tell. It changes with every hour, every season, every shift of light. The greatest seascape painters weren’t simply painting waves or coastlines they were capturing atmosphere, emotion, movement, memory, and that overwhelming feeling of standing before something vast and unknowable.
Starting from our number seven and working our way to number one. Here is our heartlist for this week.
Our Favourite No. 7 isWave After Wave by Nina Brooke @ninabrookeart
Starting our favourite list this week at number seven is Wave After Wave by Nina Brooke — and what a way to open. The painting pulls you in from above deep teal and turquoise water, white foam lines cutting across the canvas, tiny surfers dotting the surface like punctuation marks, some already riding, some paddling hard, waiting for the next set to roll in. It is the aerial perspective that makes this so extraordinary.
You are not standing on the shore looking out you are looking straight down, and from that distance the ocean becomes something closer to abstract art than traditional seascape, every wave a brushstroke, every surfer a fleck of white against that deep moving blue. Nina describes this as capturing the exact moment of anticipation in the lineup that collective pause before everyone starts paddling at once and you feel it completely.
The deep teal and turquoise, the loose energy of the marks, the way the whole canvas seems to still be moving it is extraordinarily done. Nina is a contemporary artist based on the North Coast of Cornwall, a pioneer of the aerial perspective painting technique whose love of landscape and wanderlust has taken her across the world’s most iconic surf breaks and coastlines.
Give her a follow and explore her full collection her aerial perspective work is unlike anything else we have come across.
Our Favourite No. 6 is Dancing Reflections by Valeria Ocean @valeria.ocean
Our number six this week is Dancing Reflections by Valeria Ocean and this one is all about getting up close. Not the wide horizon, not the open sea, but a single wave crest, painted so close you can almost feel the spray. The transparent green of the water curling at the top, light catching through it and fracturing into a hundred tiny reflections, white foam churning beneath it is intimate and electric and completely alive.
Valeria describes the painting as capturing the sun glistening off the water in a mesmerising dance of reflections, and that is exactly what it does. Valeria is a self-taught Russian artist now based in Belgrade, Serbia, who picked up oil painting for the first time in 2019 and fell completely and permanently in love with water as a subject. For her, the ocean is not just an external landscape it is an internal one.
She paints the subtle transitions between calmness and intensity, stillness and motion, clarity and depth, and uses oil and acrylic to create layered luminous surfaces that feel genuinely alive.
Give her a follow and see the full body of her ocean work every painting pulls you in completely.
Our Favourite No. 5 is Fire in the Sky by Mario Fegan @mariofegan_art
Our number five this week is Fire in the Sky by Mario Fegan, and it is exactly what the title promises. The sky is ablaze deep burnt orange and crimson clouds rolling across the canvas, the sun sitting low on the horizon and bleeding its light across a dark, churning sea that catches the reflection in broken, flickering patches.
The water is not calm here. It is heavy and moving and deeply, dramatically alive, and the contrast between that turbulent darkness below and the fire above creates a tension that is completely impossible to look away from. This is classical seascape painting at its most powerful romanticism and naturalism brought together in oil with the kind of conviction that makes you feel the wind.
Mario Fegan was born in Quito, Ecuador in 1991 and has been painting since he could hold a pencil. His practice is rooted in the idea that landscape is a mirror of the unfathomable depths of the human soul and Fire in the Sky is one of the most vivid expressions of that belief we have seen. He draws from romanticism and tonalism, working in oil on canvas in a classical tradition that feels both timeless and completely alive right now.
His feed is full of seascapes painted with this same dramatic conviction well worth spending time with.
Our Favourite No. 4 is Salt in the Air by Erika Toliusis @erikatoliusis
Salt in the Air by Erika Toliusis lands at number four on our favourite list this week and everything about it gets more impressive the longer you look. Two waves roll across the canvas in deep transparent teal and white, light catching through the water at the crest in a way that feels genuinely luminous the kind of green that only exists in the ocean at exactly the right angle of sunlight.
And then you realise there is not a single brushstroke in this painting. Every mark, every ridge of foam, every gradation of colour from deep water to breaking crest was carved and sculpted with a palette knife alone and yet the result is breathtakingly precise. Erika was born in Uruguay in 1969 and has spent decades travelling the world, absorbing coastlines and translating them into oil with this extraordinary technique that sits somewhere between hyperrealism and impressionism.
Her work has been shown in over 30 solo exhibitions across Canada, the United States, Argentina, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin, and is held in corporate and private collections worldwide. For Erika, a wave is a zen motif the same section of ocean producing an infinite number of images, each one worth consecrating in paint.
Give her a follow and spend some time with her full body of work it is unlike anything else out there.
Our Favourite No. 3 is Gliding Under the Surface by Katherine Dunlap @kat.lap
We placed Gliding Under the Surface by Katherine Dunlap at number three this week and we have not stopped thinking about it since. There is no horizon here, no open ocean, no dramatic sky. Just a figure in a red swimsuit seen from above, moving through water that swirls and eddies around her in deep greens and whites, the surface catching light and fracturing it into a hundred shifting reflections.
It is intimate and immersive and completely captivating the kind of painting that makes you feel the coolness of the water before you have even registered what you are looking at. Katherine is a painter born in Gainesville, Georgia in 1990, with a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Georgia, currently working from her studio in South Carolina.
Her practice is rooted in the relationship between our natural environment and our emotional response to it what she calls idealized memories, ordinary moments glorified through colour and light. Her Happy Swimmers series captures exactly that the specific feeling of summer spent on the water, that weightless, unhurried state that only exists when you are submerged in it.
Give her a follow and see everything she has been working on every painting on her page has this same dreamy, immersive quality.
Our Favourite No. 2 is Windswept Pines by Brianne Williams @brianne_williams_artist
Coming in at number two this week is Windswept Pines by Brianne Williams British Vogue featured it, and honestly, of course they did. A stretch of still, deep blue Canadian water reflects the sky and the trees, pine-covered granite rocks rising from the shore, wispy clouds drifting above the whole scene painted with a clarity and stillness that feels like standing there in the cool morning air.
The water in this painting is doing something extraordinary holding the sky and the trees and the light all at once, every reflection precise and yet somehow completely alive. Brianne is a Nova Scotian visual artist who trained at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and has spent her career painting realistic scenes of the East Coast’s oceanfront communities, exploring the distorted reflections and colours cast onto water’s surface.
She works in oil and her practice is rooted in a deep love of water and what it does to light the way it shifts and fragments and turns the world above it into something entirely new. This piece is exactly that a painting that captures not just a place but the specific feeling of being in it, the quiet and the stillness and the cold clean air.
Give her a follow and see the full body of her work every painting on her page carries this same love of water and light.
Our Favourite No. 1 is Mediterrani O25D by Sergi Gonzalez @sergigonzalezart
And our absolute number one this week the seascape that had us completely undone is Mediterrani O25D by Sergi Gonzalez. The image says it all. The artist standing in front of his own painting, and the painting is 450 by 150 centimetres of wave, a wall of white water and Mediterranean blue so large, so completely immersive, that the man beside it looks small. And that is precisely the point.
Sergi was born in El Masnou, a small seaside town just outside Barcelona in 1968, and grew up painting alongside local artists and his father, who loved paint above almost everything else. The sea has been his subject ever since. His waves are painted in oil with a photorealistic precision that is genuinely breathtaking every drop of spray, every fold of foam, every depth of blue rendered with total conviction. But it is the scale that transforms everything.
This is not a painting of a wave. Standing in front of it, it is a wave crashing toward you, filling your entire field of vision, demanding to be felt rather than simply looked at. Some art asks you to appreciate it. This one asks you to get out of the way.
Follow him and go see the full body of his work it is one of the most extraordinary things you will find right now.
That is our heart list for this week. Seven seascapes, seven artists, and a reminder that the sea painted for centuries, studied obsessively, returned to again and again still has so much left to give in the right hands. If these pieces got to you the way they got to us, go show these artists. Follow them, share their work, leave a comment that actually says something.
And before you go The Big Book of Painters 2026 by Arts to Hearts Project is now open. This is a global publishing project built for painters of every kind, at every stage no single theme, no competition, just an open call for painters to submit the work that best represents who they are.
Oil, acrylic, watercolour, gouache, realism, abstraction, portraiture, landscape all of it welcome. Selected artists will be published in a high quality hardcover distributed globally through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the Arts to Hearts Project Shop.
Submissions close July 20th, 2026, with publication following in September 2026. Submit early.
