When I was first introduced to the concept of linear perspective, I was fortunate because it wasn’t in a dry, boring geometry lesson but in an art history class, where it was touted as a feat of the High Renaissance and associated with some of the most incredible art and architecture in the world. And while there are complex explanations of how to use three-, two-, and one-point perspective, it all pretty much comes down to one thing: drawing and painting the way the human eye sees the world.

As an artist who has painted the natural world for over 20 years, Adam Straus has a complicated connection to his environment. In the 1990s, he painted Oil Slicks, a series of paintings that referenced the oil spills that happened at the time, and the relevancy of these paintings has been asserted again and again over the years.

For a period of time, the artist also painted seascapes that contained a sense of foreboding, often jarring to viewers who expect serene images of waves crashing along the shore. The works lent themselves to that 19th-century understanding of the sublime. In many of his paintings Straus demonstrates that nature, although welcoming, still has power to match that of any manmade structure. “Nature is a powerful force and can destroy what we build in a matter of minutes,” the artist says. “Haiti and New Orleans are examples of that.” Lately, the artist has reduced the environment depicted in his paintings to its most elemental. Seascapes compositionally winnowed down to water, air, and the horizon line that joins the two.