top of page

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 was 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 tangible in my newly-acquired free time, I wandered into an art supply store and purchased brushes, paints and paper. 
 

I don't paint with the goal of creating something that looks like the real thing.  First, I don't have the technical skill to do so.  I view that as the realm of photography, not painting.  I have great respect for those who can create this kind of painting, but it's not for me.  I've begun to settle on a style that lives somewhere between realism and impressionism.  Much of art has a history--a background story--that can be important in fully appreciating it.  Like many painters, I get my ideas and inspiration from three sources:  Photographs, things that I've seen in person, and ideas that are in my head.

 

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.

 

"Write about what you know."  Hmmm...paint what you know, and working boats are what it's all about.

 

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. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Purse Seiner, tied up dockside, resting.  Waiting.  Her mottled hull and deckhouse convey the hard work she puts in dragging huge nets through the water.  She's sturdy and sound, despite her well-worn look.  She's reliable, and her lines are those of a vessel that will handle well in any kind of seas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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. 

 

Birds are particularly fun to paint for the opportunity to find beauty in their subtle motion:

 

 

Terns in flight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ruffled feathers of a Raven.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The suspenseful motion of a Great Blue in mid-hunt. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What does a painting sound like?   What other senses does it trigger?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Harbor at Midnight and Summit are both basically monochromes--intentionally, to allow room for those other senses.  Is there a scent of salt water, of low tide in the harbor?  Is the air still, or do you hear wind blowing?  Is it cold on the summit?

IMG_3574.jpeg
bottom of page