While many of the recurring motifs or symbols in “The Painter” are tied to one or more of the repeated words of the sestina form, the sea stands as an important symbolic element of the poem despite its exclusion from these six words. From its first line, the poem contrasts “the sea and the buildings” (Line 1), with each gaining symbolic weight as the poem develops. The painter’s passion project is “painting the sea’s portrait” (Line 2), but he does so without initially even lifting his brush. The painter is drawn to the “angry and large” (Line 11) elements of the sea, whose existence far exceeds his or any person’s ability to truly depict. Ashbery develops the sea, then, as a symbolic stand-in for what he calls “nature, not art” (Line 14).

The painter, drawn in by the sea though still somewhat connected to the world of the buildings, loves trying to paint the truth of what is “vast” (Line 16) and unknowable. The sea sits at the border of the buildings, far exceeding their reach and size. Both the location of the sea and its largeness represent the infinite otherness of nature, with nature referring to all that exceeds the narrow limits of “the people who lived in the buildings” (Line 8).