A coastal landscape

The sea has been Spilliaert's companion during most of his life. Numerous are his seascapes between 1901 and 1910. After that period he occasionally paints them at intervals, until they reoccur with a wide variety of colours between 1920 and 1935.(...) From 1920 on colour becomes more important, initially transparent, later in a thicker gouache. His subject is no longer man and the sea, like in the earlier seascapes, but the sea and the sky, constantly weighed against one another. Here Spilliaert's tendency to abstraction shows again. This time gauging space (...) is translated in strips suggesting depth through a alternation of colours. (F-C. Legrand, Leon Spilliaert, Tielt 1981, p. 150)