John Marin is especially noted for his representations of the Maine coast, a place for which he felt a particular affinity. In 1933, Marin spent his first summer on Cape Split in Addison, Maine, a remote, sparsely populated, and rugged area far removed from tourist traffic. The following year he bought a house there. Situated on a rocky promontory overlooking Pleasant Bay, the location afforded a uniquely personal view of the sea, which was only about 25 feet away. Marin spent a considerable amount of time on his front porch painting this view in 1938.

Grey Sea, one of Marin’s most evocative marine images, is not rendered in watercolor, the predominant medium of his career, but rather oil, a medium he began to explore more extensively beginning in the late 1920s. His exuberant, expressionistic brushwork has allowed him to achieve an astonishing variety of textures, ranging from thick twists of heavily applied paint seemingly squeezed directly from the tube, to short, straight brushstrokes, to smoothly flowing passages, and even, by way of contrast, to a reserved area of raw, untouched canvas at the bottom center of the picture offset by the swirling pigments around it—effects that could not have been achieved with watercolor. The vigorous technique conveys a vivid sense of a primal, elemental clash between sea, sky, and land. The ocean’s waves are rendered as stylized, triangular configurations that assume their shape as they emerge from the ocean, only to be broken into formless, churning whitewater after striking the rocks on the shore. Imparting a rhythmic sense to the composition’s surface, Marin derived these abstract forms from his observations of natural phenomena and his visceral connection to the dynamic, underlying forces of nature.