Title: Malalo Ka Kai (Under the Sea)
Artist: Richard Guy Walton
Date: 1976
Medium: Oil on canvas
Credit Line: Collection of the John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art, Gift of Vivian Walton

Item description: In 1976, Walton had an exhibition of works inspired by Polynesian culture in the then gallery space of Moana Nursery. Earlier that year he and his wife Vivian had traveled to Hawaii, where Walton snorkeled and discovered the underwater world—not so much what exists there as how one sees there. The ambition of capturing underwater vision cured him of the malaise about painting brought on by the failure of his 1969 letterist show. Henceforth he would develop, both in painting and in writing, his ideas about the shortcomings of linear perspective as practiced since the Renaissance for representing how we actually see.