Two Other Projects, and the Rookery (Stave 4)

In late 2016, I started work on an overmantel painting.  This was a commission from some friends of mine.  I went into high gear on it in January 2017.  This is the completed painting, before installation.

It shows the marsh shoreline of Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, with some of the town's historic architecture at left, and the lighthouse at Barnstable Beach Point on the right.  There are two coastal fishing schooners under sail, and the five-masted cargo schooner Harwood Palmer at anchor in between them.  The ship on the left is after an 1864 photograph taken in Canada.  The ship on the right is after drawings by William Bradford and Albert van Beest.  

Harwood Palmer was run aground by her captain in January of 1905, during a winter storm.  She had first put in to Provincetown, but her anchor chains parted.  The captain knew that there were sand flats, but few rocks, off of Yarmouth Port, so he steered her there, to minimize damage to the hull.  He succeeded, but it took until May 1905 to get her free of the sand.  Here is a close-up of Harwood Palmer:

The buildings on the left are, from left to right (or east to west): the onion steeple dome of the former Congregational Church, since dismantled, at what is now the Yarmouth Port playground; the current Congregational Church, built in 1870; the cupola of the Colonial House Inn; the steeple of the Strawberry Hill Meeting House, a former church renovated with considerable love by the much-admired theatrical set designers Herbert Senn and Helen Pond; and the New Church, also know as the Swedenborgian Church.

It is NOT an accurate rendition of the town.  This was necessary to incorporate all of the desired buildings and ships.  Today, it would be difficult to sail ships of this size out of Bass Hole (which would be to the left side of the painting), because so much sand has filled into the channel there.  The coastline today is forested much as I've depicted it here, but in 1905 the area was mostly farmland.  The onion dome hasn't been there since sometime in the 1800s, and that church is entirely gone now.  Strawberry Hill is actually higher than the New Church, and of the four extant structures, only the Congregational Church is visible from the shore.  And Barnstable Beach Point Light would be at least 6 feet or so beyond the right-hand side of the image.

The painting is irregular, about six feet wide by approximately fifteen inches on the left side, and approximately seventeen inches high on the right side.  This is because of the dimensions of the existing space, over a fireplace in a historic sea captain's home.  This fireplace is in a part of the house dating to circa 1670, so there are few truly straight lines or right angles.  The painting is acrylic on masonite.

I must also extend my thanks to the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth, for collecting and archiving so much information that was necessary for my research, and to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which many years ago hosted an outstanding exhibition of the work of William Bradford.  Publications from these two institutions provided valuable research material and inspiration for this project.

This next piece is titled 潮州歌剧院之王 / The King of the Teochew Opera.  I lived in Thailand from 2010 to 2014, saw Chinese Opera there for the first time, and absolutely fell in love with it.  I couldn't understand the language, so I'm learning Chinese on my own now. It's slow going - there's just a lot of information to memorize for the writing system - but no matter.  All learning is worthwhile, no matter how long it takes.

And last, but not least, and back to A Christmas Carol, a scene from Stave 4, showing the three people who have pilfered Scrooge's deathbed belongings and are taking them into a London slum to sell them to a dealer in things unsavory.  I used conté crayon on a pencil underdrawing.  In order to get the detail on the figures, I made the image bigger than usual, 15" x 15" instead of 7.5" x 7.5".  The text doesn't mention stairs, but does mention arches.  I took the stairs-and-arches motif from da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi,turning the Three Wise Men into the pilferers, and the barn and manger into Old Joe's shop.

Stave 3 : "A Place Where Miners Live"

In Stave 3, the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge on a tour of Christmas, as it can be experienced in all manner of situations.  He doesn't shy away from showing Britain's industrial poverty to Scrooge - shy is the last word one could use to describe Christmas Present - so that Scrooge can see that everyone deserves Christmas cheer whether rich or poor.  After a tour of London, including a stop to bless the home and family of Bob Cratchit in Camden Town, Christmas Present and Scrooge fly over Britain and then out to sea.  

Industrial Britain was powered by coal.  Coal mostly comes from underground.  Somebody has to dig it out, if it's to be used.  So, after seeing so much Christmas cheer in The City : 

"...without a word of warning from the Ghost, they stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place of giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed, or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner; and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass. Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of darkest night.
'What place is this?' asked Scrooge.
'A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of the earth,' returned the Spirit. 'But they know me. See!'
A light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly they advanced towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and stone, they found a cheerful company assembled round a glowing fire. An old, old man and woman, with their children and their children’s children, and another generation beyond that, all decked out gaily in their holiday attire. The old man, in a voice that seldom rose above the howling of the wind upon the barren waste, was singing them a Christmas song—it had been a very old song when he was a boy—and from time to time they all joined in the chorus. So surely as they raised their voices, the old man got quite blithe and loud; and so surely as they stopped, his vigour sank again."

Here is my image of the mining country :

It's a composite image.  The background is gouache over pencil.  The mining pump at the left is an overlaid addition, drawn after an actual British mine pump called Fairbottom Bobs, which I had the opportunity to see in person.  It is on permanent display at the Henry Ford Museum, in Dearborn, Michigan.  Fairbottom Bobs was no longer in operation by the time of "A Christmas Carol", but it was still on site.  In fact, it was not taken down until it was shipped to Michigan, a gift from Lord Stamford (who owned it) to Henry Ford.  This information is from Wikipedia, and the full article, with a late nineteenth-century photograph, is here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairbottom_Bobs.

Other influences on this image are the inestimable J.M.W. Turner, the Japanese printmakers Hokusai and Hiroshige, and the Massachusetts painter William Bradford (for some of his arctic scenes; do check out his work at http://www.william-bradford-gallery.org).