BLUE CAT WATERCOLORS
How I learned to stop worrying and love watercolor painting
I've been painting most of my life, but not how you might expect it to be described on an artist's web page. Houses, boats, docks, sometimes fences. It began as my summer employment during high school. The last time I painted anything intended to be art was in fourth grade. I frequently enjoyed sketching (mostly boats), and took a few architecture courses as electives in college, but a dual career in the military and in higher education left little time for capturing the visual world around me on a piece of paper. Those jobs came with good challenge, but neither really involved creating tangible works, so I found that outlet in renovation projects on the various houses we owned over the years, and in restoring an antique wooden sailboat. I retired as a Coast Guard Captain in 2016 and as a college vice president a few years later. Shortly thereafter, seeking to create something different in my newly-acquired free time and eager to explore a life-long fascination with watercolor painting, I wandered into an art supply store and purchased brushes, paints and paper.
Much of art has a history--a background story--that can be important in fully appreciating it. I get my inspiration from three sources: Photographs, things that I've seen in person, and ideas that are in my head. And, as you can see in these pages, I have an affinity for things that are maritime, animals, or involve people and their intersection with music and story telling.
It might be helpful for me to describe what motivated me in a few examples of my work:
Leucothea...dust off your Greek mythology. She was goddess of the sea and protector of sailors. If you look up paintings of her, many of them look like they were done by the same guy who painted Eve, or Dolly Madison; plump ladies with alabaster skin, rosy cheeks and coiffed hair, wearing satin gowns that are a bit too tight. The other versions are all sparkly, spray-painted things that fell out of an astrology magazine. That's so far from her story! First of all, she's a Greek goddess, so it's a given that she's freakin' beautiful. Hauntingly so. Second, she's powerful. She's the chick who cast her veil upon the sea to quiet the waves and saved Odysseus from drowning. Thus, as I imagine her, Leucothea is emerging from the sea, dripping wet and covered in seaweed, her penetrating gaze fixed on a shipwrecked sailor, a look of compassion and fierce protectiveness on her lovely face.
Postscript to this story: A few years ago a couple visited my booth at a show in Laguna Beach. The man was immediately taken with Leucothea and her story as I've described it here. They did not purchase the painting on that visit, but his wife emailed me that night to share with me what her husband had not: Two years previously, he had nearly drowned in an accident at sea. "Your painting", she explained, "had quieted his soul." They drove back up the following weekend to take Leucothea home.
Sardine Carrier is now derelict, but still proud. She's up on a mudflat and weeds are growing in her shadow. Her hull is holed in some places. The market for her cargo has left her behind, yet her rig stands tall, still ready to sling nets full of fish up from her hold and into crates on the dock. She's strong in her bones. Maybe she's waiting for someone to give her a new life as a yacht.
Sentinel is an intentional departure from my usual handling of watercolors as light washes supporting a similarly soft rendering of the subject. The heavy use of concentrated pigments, sometimes mixed with a titanium base for additional opacity, let me capture the fury of a coastal storm at night...and left some observers asking if this wasn't an oil painting instead of watercolor.
In Storm Gathering, anyone who has watched bad weather roll in at sea will understand the brassy color of the sky and the oily smoothness of the water's surface. Some may know the feel and sound of the steady push that the small trawler is making toward safe harbor; the thrum of the engine, the quiet ripple of the water as the hull slips along, the raucous clamor of the gulls following for scraps as deckhands dress the catch that will soon be delivered to market.
Girl on a Beach is one where I did not set out to convey a particular feeling, although I knew it would evoke a variety of reactions. The painting ultimately was defined by what happened next: I share my new works on social media for friends to see, and almost immediately after posting this I received a message from a former student of mine asking if she could buy it...as a gift for a friend who was going through a tough divorce. I packed it up and shipped it directly to the friend, with no note of explanation as to its origin or why she was receiving it. A few days later I received a copy of the text message exchanged between these two young women in response to the painting's arrival: "Did you send me an art?" "I did send you an art. Is it a satisfactory art?" "I love the art! Thank you so much. It's dreamy and also where I want to be."
Paris Café is an earlier work and I was having fun capturing the glow from the café windows, its reflection on the wet pavement in the evening light, and the notion of people dressed in black and white crowding on the sidewalk outside. But what pleased me most about the finished product was the perspective created by the competing vanishing point lines of the building, trees and adjacent street, and how that technical inaccuracy gave a quirky balance to the scene.
Harbor at Midnight is a memory from my younger years growing up in a small New England harbor town. Late at night, I would walk with my dog down to the water's edge and we would sit together on the sea wall. The only sounds were the gentle splashing of waves in the marshy intertidal at our feet and the tapping of halyards on the masts of boats on their moorings. As we watched the scene before us, she would shift her weight and lean against me. Years later, looking at this painting, I can still feel her pressing into my shoulder.
