At last month’s Dauphin Island Paint Out, a plein air event whose boundaries extended to Bayou la Batre, I did two studies at Master Boat Builders in Coden. Ellen Langford joined me for the second day and I also saw the event judge at work nearby. But I was there first! In the middle of the first day, a couple of the shipyard workers came over to see what I was doing. It was a lot of fun to hear their reactions and enthusiasm for the scenes. The next morning when I showed up there were 6-8 workers looking my way from the rail of the center tug. I waved at them and they all waved back and then we went to work- solidarity! I finished these up and submitted them to the wet paint exhibit at Dauphin Island Gallery. I really enjoyed doing these. Still, I was feeling cramped about the small size canvas we were required to use - no larger than 16” x 20.” Sharing these online let me connect with Pat, Cody, Ricky, Colton, and other boat yard folks. This was my favorite thing about the experience.
I wanted to stretch out on this scene. So, when I returned home I pulled out two 3’ x 4’ canvases, sketched out the scene from a reference photo, and took it over a couple of weeks later. If I could complete this it would be the largest view I have tackled to date.
When I got back on site, the middle tug was no longer there, so I painted the scene from life and worked on the missing tug from memory, the field study, and a reference photo. The workers and I had short, shouted conversations and waves hello and we got to work. There was an older man fishing right at the entrance of the channel, but he left when they weren’t biting. Also, a man came up and walked past me to watch a shrimp boat slowly coming up the channel. Its bow was crushed and bent upwards, like a broken nose. The man said the captain had left the wheel and the helmsman had drifted off to sleep until it hit a rig.
It is wonderful to paint from a well-developed drawing. It let me leap straight into the fun parts, picking the right colors, getting the right brush strokes, and “playing” with the paint. I am especially happy with the sky and water in the left panel. Things like that are the equivalent of a song captured on the first take. The left panel overall had the great advantage of standing alone successfully as a painting. Not so for the right panel. Although I liked the soft colors and brushwork of the foreground and the vivid sky, in both cases, the right panel came up short when put up against the left panel.
I put this project aside for about 10 days to deal with other things and then a window of good weather opened up ahead of my trip to NC, so I went back a second time on site. I had to take shelter behind my vehicle against heavy winds that would have blown down these large canvases. Once more, progress was better on the left side than the right. I liked very much how the buildings and foreground had shaped up. I also very much liked the light on the propellers. A word about these propellers. They are rudder propellers pivoting powerfully in a wide swath, just what a tug needs to maneuver a much larger vessel into close quarters. On the right panel, I sketched in the cranes with an unsteady hand and an uncooperative brush. I knew later I’d have to start that over. I brought the right panel’s water more in line with the left panel and attempted to link up other elements between the two, such as the tree line and the boatyard ground. But I ended up running out of time so I packed up and promised myself I would finish it in NC.
paintings, plants, and pet packed in my car en route to NC
About this time Christina sent me a link to a Washington Post story about communities coping with flooding that ended with drone footage of this very boat yard taken a few months earlier. It was simply thrilling to see this bird’s eye view of the scene I had been painting that pulled back to reveal the empty lot where I had worked on the scene.
In NC, I had several days by myself where I made good progress and then Christina joined me up here and I continued to work on it for about a week. There were a lot of details to iron out on both panels. I was committed to adding some figures doing work on the vessels, even though they would be minute. I was so struck by the pride the boat yard workers took in their work. It makes me nostalgic for the WPA era of industrial and agricultural art themes.
So I worked from reference photos and the studies to get the two pieces more in harmony and iron out the kinks that I usually overlook or quit caring about. I wanted this to be better than usual. I reworked the right panel sky starting with a big pile of blue sky paint that was a blend of cerulean and ultramarine blue with zinc white and some other ingredients, and then I had a period of reverie painting that sky. It was a wonderful afternoon. I took some of that blue and blended it into the sky of the left panel so that they linked up. I tightened up details in the left panel, added the stairs, and put in some worker figures. At that point, I was pretty well done with it and very happy.
The right panel continued to be my challenge. I tightened up the cranes at either side of the tug, touched up the wheelhouse, deepened the hull colors, and got the propellers in better shape. I added a welder at the bow and a few workers at the rail. Moving over to the hull, I repainted the entire thing, working from a deep blue/crimson ground out with grays to create the sheet metal and steel ribs. I repainted the cranes behind the hull and reworked the water more times than I can count, never satisfying me, and then I went one more time with a much larger brush and got the look I wanted. Use the right tool for the job, the welder would say. I added some work sheds and a set of stairs to climb onto the hull. All this was done with small bright brushes.
About 2-3 weeks later, I turned back to the right panel, intending to add more shape and detail to the foreground, improve the water surface and reflections, and strengthen the cranes behind the overturned hull. Also, I needed to raise the boatyard ground to be in better perspective with the left panel. The water took the longest to get right. I finally resorted to a more simplified color scheme and a palette knife to get sharper edges in the reflection. I added a section with the texture of wind rippling over the water surface just above the tugboat reflection. I decided to take out all the cranes on the right side of the right panel and let the eyes land on the hull and the sky. This worked out better than I expected.
I am very happy that I could carry this project to conclusion holding on to the perceptions from plein air painting while bringing the rigor of studio painting where it’s needed. It’s the biggest painting I have done, so far.
