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Exercises are so much more fun in the abstract

Goes right into the slush pile…

 Last week, I wrote about my troubles painting lobster traps. Bob Baines, a lobsterman from S. Thomaston, ME, kindly lent me a trap to study. As a teacher, I know the only answer to confusion is close examination of the troubling object. As a student, I donā€™t like hard work any more than anyone else. Exercises are good for us, but so much more exciting when theyā€™re still in the planning stages.

Bobā€™s trap weighs as much as a fresh bale of hay or a kindergartener. Now imagine shifting 800 of the things. My respect for lobstermenā€”already highā€”rose another notch.
The trap is four feet long, a generous foot deep, and almost two feet wide. It has two ā€œparlorsā€ā€”the space where lobsters wait for their fishermen visitorsā€”and one ā€œkitchenā€ā€”the space where the bait is hung.
The real deal weighs as much as your kid.
Speaking of language, you may have heard that the expression ā€œthe bitter endā€ is a nautical term, referring to the inboard end of a chain, rope or cableā€”in other words, the part that gets wound around a bitt or bollard. Thereā€™s also a part of a lobster trap called the ā€œghost panel.ā€ It allows lobsters to escape if a trap is lost. According to Maineā€™s state regulations regarding lobstering, buoys should be attached to their lines with so-called ā€œweak linksā€ to protect whales from entanglements.
Who knew lobstering was such a poetic exercise? Mankind has been getting its food from the sea almost as long as weā€™ve been talking, so I suppose language is deeply entwined with fishing.
Axonometric projection grids were a cheat for draftsmen back in the days when they drew by hand. You laid them on a light table and drew above them. I still have a set. I could have made this easier on myself by using them to draw the wire mesh, but I chose to do it freehand instead. Estimating perspective is always good for the mind.
My real goal was to try to figure out a way to represent the color interference of different layers of mesh without drawing every gridline separately. I drew the trap freehandā€”by which I mean I used a straight edge and no measurementsā€”on a very cheap bit of canvas from Ocean State Job Lots.
My erasures with water pulled the gesso right off this very cheap canvas.
I keep those canvases for students who forget their own, but now Iā€™m not sure theyā€™re good even for that. Erasing, I rapidly peeled the gesso off the boards. They handled paint just as badly.
My trap was squatter and shorter than the real thing, but no matter. I wanted to paint it using the #6 or #8 filberts I was using on my actual work. Obviously, this is no way to get any detail, but I havenā€™t been after detail, just an impression.
And the brush I painted with…
Had I been working in either watercolor or acrylics, Iā€™d have approached this by painting the background and contents of the trap and applying the grids on top of these. But oil paint doesnā€™t work that way. I settled for painting in a dark pattern for the grids, plugging the holes with color and then restating the darks by incising back to my initial darks.

Itā€™s never going to win me a scholarship to art school, but Iā€™ve learned what I needed to know. Thanks, Bob, for the loan of your trap.

Bamboozled by lobster traps

Detail from my current unfinished painting.
When I go silent about my own work, that means Iā€™m involved in a big mess. My process, as it were, is that I show up in my studio every day at the same time expecting a miracle. More often than not, they happen. But at times nothing works. My painting looks and feels mechanical and rusty. 
This is not to say that I donā€™t know what Iā€™m doingā€”I haven’t forgotten how to paint. But between the technical and the transcendent, there is slippage that nobody can define. Thatā€™s not unique to painting; itā€™s true of music and (I suspect) a host of other creative endeavors. We sometimes call these things ā€˜happy accidents,ā€™ but they are more than that. Theyā€™re as if the whole universe suddenly slides into place, right there in that tiny rectangle in front of you.
Occasionally, the opposite happens. Nothing comes together. I tap, tap, tap on the frozen parts while nothing moves and I get more aggravated. Those are the weeks I wish Iā€™d taken up something fun, like dentistry.
Monhegan lobster traps, waiting to trip up the unwary painter.
Whatā€™s got me flummoxed this week is an old nemesis: the lobster trap.  A modern lobster trap looks like a plastic-coated Havahart (Ā®) trap, for you inland dwellers. It operates on the same principle: a lobster unthinkingly (because thatā€™s how lobsters do) crawls up a funnel and gets stuck in the main room. I know how big lobster traps are, what colors they come in, whatā€™s inside them, and how they reflect light. But I donā€™t seem to be able to paint them convincingly. Whatā€™s heartening is that I donā€™t much like how anyone else paints them, either.
If only Maine lobstermen would use creel-style pots like they do in Scotland! These are rounded, more solid and poetical. But Iā€™m an American, and my paintings ought to be grounded in what is real for my time and place. Darn it.
I never finished this sketch of lobster traps at Port Clyde, but it’s on my schedule.
When Iā€™m stuck on something, I revert to first principles. Get closer, look more carefully, and draw, draw, draw. Iā€™ve asked for the loan of a trap, and Iā€™m going to set it up in my studio and study it. (Iā€™d rather not do that in the blowing snow, thanks.) I hope that I have some sort of epiphany that informs my work going into next summer.
This is the lad who really owned that lobster boat, but I never took a photo of him while I was painting him.
Iā€™m finishing a painting I started years ago, of Eastportā€™s lobster fleet. I worked on this for days on the public landing, but it wasnā€™t finished before I had to leave. The tooth on the canvas is much rougher than I use today. Itā€™s kind of nice, but the adjustment is hard.
Because I took very few photos, Iā€™m forced to make a lot of stuff up. Part of me is certain that a someone will look at this painting and say, ā€œthat boat would never have that standing shelter!ā€
Sadly, I had to lose the figure of the young man who owned the closest boat. He was just too large in my plein air rendering. Since I had no photos of him on his boat, heā€™s been replaced by a Gloucester fisherman. Iā€™m not sure if that should even be legal.

Meanwhile, Iā€™ll be back tomorrow to tap, tap, tap some more. Eventually it will all fall together. It always does.