Thesis

Thalassic: Women, Gender, and the Sublime in Relation to Marine Art

The longing to experience the unknowable – from awe to terror – calls many to the sea. Using the panorama, a nineteenth century form of mass media as a resource, Thalassic transports the viewer to a world that they may never otherwise experience. It is an environment in which women, as well as men, take to a life of labor at sea. The large scale and semi-circular spatial placement of the panorama throws the viewer off balance. The juxtaposition of imagined terror with documented experience forges a connection between reality and deeply threatening thoughts. Using motifs of the sublime and invoking the tradition of marine painting, Thalassic integrates the heroine into a historically masculine seafaring context, thus challenging that context, presenting a woman who is openly combatting nature’s harshest elements and her own innate fears.

Scaled Down Thesis Experiments

This first experiment was done with transfers using the inkjet method, up until this point it was working for me but as you can see it began to mess with the images too much.

The second experiment involved a switch to a laser printer method for the photo transfers. Here I decided to extend the panorama horizontally to make a more drastic illusion of space.

‘From Dread to; This is Where I am Meant to Be’ photo-transfer and oil on canvas, 36" x 95"

Sewing on rope experiment on a small painting sketch.

Storyboard working and the protagonist

Storyboard sketches for panorama-scroll.

Sections of large panorama-scroll.

Photo-transfer and oil on canvas. 37” x 166”

Some Gouache and Scroll Work

Above: gouache on paper.

Left: oil on panel.

Bottom: Acrylic & phototransfer on raw canvas.

The Whaling Panorama of New Bedford

Designed to exploit the panorama craze with tales of the high seas, the Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ‘Round the World by Caleb Purrington and Benjamin Russell, completed in 1848, transported audiences into the shoes of the yankee whaleman who embarks on a journey from New Bedford, Massachusetts across the world via ship in search of whales. The work is painted with distemper on cotton sheeting. Four rolls are over eight feet high and 300 feet long each, creating a work that is 1,295 feet in length overall.

Cruising Cornwall

Those Onboard Velsia

The Water Surrounding Velsia

The Photographs

Racing on Sonny US 50.

Fog & Waves

Rigging 'Velsia'

Tumble through Fistral Waves

August - Journaling a Racing Month

The month of August has seen me racing on a classic sailing yacht in New England and mostly away from my studio space. To supplement my time away from the physical studio space I hoped to use my time 'at sea' as a way to journal, document, observe, and find material for my visual work. As part of a racing crew of about 12, with a female captain, the working dynamics onboard the boat were often very agreeable. Still, having a very mixed gender crew like ours was not the norm with the other yachts in the circuit and the time made for some interesting observations. While out racing, and especially along the Maine coast, I kept my eyes peeled for a type of landscape I would like to replicate in my sketchpad. The heavy fog we encountered in Maine made for surreal sublime seascapes which never really made us feel at ease onboard even with the latest technology. At one moment. a yacht about 40ft larger, popped out of the fog without any warning and crossed about 10ft off our bow, releasing a fog horn once their midships were at our bow, hilariously for insurance purposes only. 

I took those feelings of unease and excitement and journaled about them in my small portable notebook. Not really giving myself more rules than just letting my thoughts of the day's sailing flow on the page with accompanying sketches of the day's scenes, I decided to fashion the journal similarly to those of captain's wives who went to sea in the 19th century. These journals varied, some wives really disliking the whole endeavor while others really took to shipboard life, completing navigational tasks or sometimes taking over because of their husband's health. 

It was good to be apart of a crew again, learning new things and gaining confidence in myself. That is the interesting thing about the ocean isn't it, it rewards us with confidence for our abilities to manage it while also making us extremely humbled by its voracity and power. Now in the UK, preparing to sail again, I look forward to keeping the journal alongside the goauche sketchpad to document what the ocean makes me feel based off these experiences of confidence and anxiety. 

London Research

Michael Andrews 'Melanie and Me Swimming'

This morning we made our way to Tate Britain to specifically see the J. M. W. Turner Collection. I knew I would be blown away by seeing the work up-close and in person but being able to really look at his brush work did so much more than I thought. I was so excited to see Snowstorm  and Shipwreck placed next to each other in the gallery as I had just finished a paper about them while discussing Turner and the sublime seascape. What really struck me about looking at these works, was being able to get close and crop out small semi-abstract scenes in the waves. 

Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Although I do find extreme delight with the museum's overview of British maritime history and their collection of artifacts, I found it alarming that the mention of women was close to none. In the Lord Nelson exhibit about the Battle of Trafalgar there is reference to the letters Nelson wrote to his mistress when out at sea, but I did not find this to be enough, not today. Yes, seafaring has been a primarily male-dominated industry, I am not denying that history, but there are plenty of women to at least mention or give light to. There are the famous female pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny, Lady Sopworth raced against Mrs. Vanderbilt in the 1934 America's Cup making them the first women to compete in the race, and Englishwoman Lisa Clayton became the first woman to sail solo around the world in 1994. With it being the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote in the UK and with so many pioneering British female sailors in the sport today I would have thought more representation of maritime women would have been visible in the museum and readily available in their research libraries. That being said, the Caird Library and Archive is an immense resource for texts on the subject of women and seafaring, albeit that most all the work is offsite. Their two onsite research libraries are filled with texts on maritime tradition and I was again disappointed to not see any reference to women and seafaring while browsing the two rooms. In the piracy section there wasn't even a text on the two famous female pirates. I understand that not all the research tools that they have can be readily available for immediate public view, but it was an interesting observation. I became a member of the the Caird Library and Archive at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich because I was happy to see on their online archive they had a wealth of journals, publications, texts, and artifacts on women and the sea for research purposes. Unfortunatley because they were all offsite in store, none of them were readily available in the research library and not available online. Hoping to make it back to London for a 'research holiday' as the research librarian called it. 

 

 

A Thousand Julys

It seems I wait all year for July to happen, when I am able to immerse myself into the sea. The summer heat allows me to plunge into the refreshing green Atlantic, where I feel like my best self. 

After residency I was able to meet with my new mentor, Heddi Siebel, before she left for a seagoing trip to the Arctic. Among much of her advice for me over the next couple months, she mentioned to try and do copies of some artists I aspire to. I decided to try a Peter Doig (seen in the slideshow below / last image) because of his ability to eliminate the details we do not need to see. I continued to borrow from his palette and technique to try some of my own compositions. 

After working out some ideas on paper I decided to work larger in oil. After completion, I am satisfied adding more details to the waves, rather than my very monotoned version last semester, but I think I would rather blend the boat more into its background, making the edges disappear.

Open Waters - NY Times Article

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The Volvo Ocean Race finished on Sunday, and for the first time since the round-the-world sailing event began in 1973, a woman was part of the winning crew.

Three women, in fact.

“I think this edition of the race has been a major breakthrough,” said Dee Caffari, the British skipper of Turn the Tide on Plastic, “and the fact that every boat is now mixed speaks volumes, and we would never have got that without the rule change. But for me the genuine test of whether this has worked is if in the next edition there are girls actually on crews and if girls are naturally selected, and I am skeptical that would happen if we don’t still have a rule.”

They have won one of the toughest races in sailing, but the race to equality continues.

“We just need to keep this momentum going,” Ehler said. “We need to get to the point where we are being selected for our skill set and not on a gender basis.”

Milestones, sails, & galkyd

A friend gave me an old superyacht sail to experiment with. I knew I wanted to use it as a surface for painting but initially was not sure how to best use the sail in my scheme. I brought the rolled up jib to a meeting with my mentor, Dana Clancy, and there she had some powdered charcoal in her office. We unrolled the jib on the floor and started to pour some of the crushed up charcoal onto the sail. Then Dana suggested why don't we try erasing away what we have put down. 

At home, I cut some decent sized pieces of the sail and used a brush to spread the powdered charcoal across the sail. I then erased away the crests of the waves to create a semi-abstract structural landscape. 

I created a large study of the type of sea I want to make for my final large piece of Erica. Using layers and working on the floor I was able to mix several mediums (galkyd, linseed oil, and gamsol) to pour over my oils and create a washed wave effect. The piece is dramatic, energized, and with the help of all the gouache studies I produced, finally integrating a watery atmosphere into my oil paints. 

I further experimented this effect on the sails but found that the technique has no effect on the material. To better explore my possibilities I tried sanding back some of the oils from the sail but that as well did not produce lasting effects for the piece. 

Dana showed me some Seurat graphite drawings of the figure which are very suggestive in their forms. I wanted to make a similar compositions using the charcoal and the erase away technique with Erica on the sail. Her figure is less refined and reminds me of Poseidon's horses emerging out of waves in classical statues, physically connected to the landscape she is in. 

With this I am exploring the painting as sculptural object and bringing a connection to the boat with a sail that was quite literally ripped off from the pressure of the wind. 

March

March, where shall we begin. It was a whirlwind of a month that included two sides of the Atlantic, two mediums of paint, video, photography, and the passing of my dear 93 year old grandmother, yiayia Mary. Everything combined caused for more inward reflection and I think finally some recognition of the self, something I have been quietly denying with the portraits of fellow yachtswomen. But in truth, by championing my friends in the industry I am telling my own unfinished narrative. 

This video was taken on a beach in Cornwall after a massive winter Atlantic storm blew its way through the English countryside. For me the sounds of the sea crashing and eroding away the shore translates to many times felt while onboard. With this short clip I am exploring the theme of the sea as masculine and the self as feminine in confrontation. 

Oil / Oil! Felsh tones / flesh tones! With the advice of my mentor and almost everyone at residency I am really trying to get a handle on my flesh tones and decide which style of paint application works with me best. My mentor wished for me to move away from using photographs as reference so much so the first is a WIP self portrait using her suggested palette of viridian green, quinachradone red, cadmium red, and lemon yellow. The second is again using a similar palette and working in an oil sketch for a much larger painting I wish to do of this theme. In this composition I want to show the conflict between the feminine and masculine realms but, ultimatley the two need to work cohesively in order to survive. I plan to revisit this composition in a few more variations before moving on to the larger piece. The third is a revisit of a past theme from last semester mostly to work on some flesh tone variations. Here I did an underpainting in burnt umber then glazing my flesh tones over (cadmium red, cadmium yellow, and ultramarine). The effect is dramatic yet slightly grey in tone.  

In my gouache sketchbook I continued to paint images that are around me while working on boats and inner feelings and thoughts. Using the gouache book as a type of visual journal has been very freeing for me this semester and really loosened my often tight paint handling. 

Again, continuing from last month I attended as many live model nights as possible while in Cornwall. These have become extremely valuable to me and I hope to find somewhere to continue this practice locally. 

Mizzle: is basically Cornish for light rain/drizzle. While on the train from London to Falmouth the tide was out. We passed boat after boat just laying slightly to their sides on these expansive mud flats. The boats had all the capabilities of sailing; mast, rudder,  rigging, sails. But sitting on what seemed to me like a mud desert and mirrored with the mizzle the boats seemed sad, incapable to perform the tasks they were created to do. 

She of the Sea. 

While in Cornwall taking a walk by the Helston with Stella, a friend and fellow yachtswoman, we were discussing the possibilities of creating a closed facebook group for women in the yachting industry. We thought it would be a good platform and safe space for women to post concerns, questions, and insights. We thought about the appropriate ways to go about this and upon research into the idea Stella stumbled upon the very recently launched website, She of the Sea. The site does everything we would have dreamed of providing and more. 'She of the Sea' provides tools and a space for women in yachting and other maritime industries to build fulfilling, rewarding, and inspiring careers by offering a community platform for questions, advice, and inspiration. The sites creator, Jenny Matthews, calls it a platform used to connect and champion each other to excellence. For me, I am much more fulfilled knowing that there are other like-minded women in the industry already moving forward and creating resources such as this and am very excited to see what this online community can achieve. 

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January/February

Since residency, I have dedicated the first 6 weeks of the semester to working on my painting technique. I began by reworking some of my older oil paintings from last semester, paying attention to flesh tones and using glazing. Here are two oil paintings after glazing. The originals can be see further down on my blog. 

Continuing my desire to work on my painting technique I decided to challenge myself with portraits of women in the yachting industry, as the portrait has always been something I have struggled with. I tried a grisaille and glazing technique new to me and have really fell for the process. I am looking forward to working in this way with my large scale paintings.

After meeting with my mentor, Dana Clancy, she suggested that I try working from life and painting from life rather than using pencil and painting over my pencil marks. These timed poses are done in goache, a medium Dana suggested I use while abroad in the UK and to do painting sketches.

Keeping a large sketchbook, I decided to really explore my feelings about the ocean as a powerful masculine landscape. Preparing for working waves into my large scale work I explored abstractly all the times the ocean has genuinely made me afraid for my life. 

Again working in goache (and in the case of the ropes, ink and bleach) here are my beginnings of documenting the objects I see and moments remembered while working and being around women in the marine industry. I have chosen the pink backgrounds to continue my exploration of flat space and the packaging of women. 

 

And just for fun here is my version of 'The Shape of Water' meets Judith and Holofernes. 

Women Who Sail

A collection of paintings which were completed during my first semester and displayed at my second residency. Oil, graphite, and charcoal on canvas.