Echolocation

Suppose a drawing begins as a single line.

As that line stretches, doubles back, multiplies, a territory starts to take shape. as though the line is all that's known, and the emptiness around it is terra incognita.

I don't romanticize exploration, or any of the explorers that "discovered" lands already long inhabited. The non-heroic kind of exploring, however, is another matter: to walk without a path, through foreign terrain, guided by curiosity. In artmaking it's akin to working with an unfamiliar method or material: I press forth into the unknown, treading softly so as to measure. Each step freshly informed.

To explore is to venture, alert and astute, into something one doesn't yet comprehend; to step outside the boundary of the known. An artist must do this continually—forever inquiring, interrogating, reaching.

• • • • •

A 19th century photograph led me here. I knew I would draw it, before knowing why— without knowing its story.

An expedition, I soon learned, to measure the depth of Crater Lake, Oregon, in 1886. There they measured the greatest depths recorded in any lake in North America. More than nineteen hundred feet. The apparatus was primitive: a plumb line, dropped until it foundered. Sounding, as it is called, would later be achieved with sonar—actual sound. Echolocating like bats in darkness.

I later sketched the scene from memory, several times before the line felt loose enough. Everything ought to be weightless, I thought–the boat is borne effortlessly on the still surface; the figures' reflections now stark silhouettes, hanging like bats, above fathomless depths.

Memoriam

In Memoriam, 2017, acrylic on panel, 20 x 24 in.

On the conception and making of Memoriam, 2016

At times I see a picture that stays with me insistently, compelling me to make something of it. For this I have a catch-phrase: I am drawn by the image.

In this instance it was a found photograph of a ship’s crew. Eight men stand facing the camera shoulder to shoulder, sharply defined against a huge canvas sail. The group is replete with contrasts, the identity of each man straining against the ostensible unity of the line. I set to work on adapting it to a painting, knowing nothing about these men or the photo. 

In drawing and painting, I have a longstanding interest in the expressive range of the human figure, and what is conveyed through a silhouetted form. When a face is obscured, the body can act as a kind of semaphore, communicating subtleties of emotion and identity. 

Often when I paint figures, I choose to depict them as though far away, the specifics obliterated by distance so that only the silhouette is left.

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In the case of Memoriam, however, I was interested in key details, and in closing that distance. In the photograph, a rugged tailoring and non-uniformity of the clothes—overalls on some; jackets buttoned or left open, and so on—hint at ranks, roles, and the diverse origins of these men. 

The painting was nearly complete when I began investigating the story behind the photograph that inspired it. I learned that these eight were part of the crew of the Wyoming, a six-masted coal schooner that sank during a storm in 1924 off Cape Cod, with all hands lost. The photo dates circa 1923 and is the only known picture of the crew. The fate of the Wyoming also marked the end of an era of shipbuilding: the six-masted, 450-foot schooner had been the largest wooden ship ever built, and the last of its kind in operation. 

From the blog of the Maine Maritime Museum, in an entry dated January 2011, on the 102nd anniversary of the Wyoming’s launch: 

‘Each year at 12:45 on December 15th, we celebrate the anniversary of the launching of the six-mast schooner Wyoming, the largest and last of the six-masters. …More than a dozen [museum] staff stood on the spot where she was built, in a steady cold rain, and hoisted glasses of various beverages (slowly being diluted by the rain) while reciting the names of the 13 men who went down with the schooner in 1924.’ 

The method I used is a kind of pochoir, made using a number of overlapping stencils. For every edge of every figure or garment, I cut a shape from paper, used as a sort of shield to lend sharpness to that edge. Something between twenty five and thirty stencils were used.   

Reflections in a Shallow Bay

Strand, 2019. graphite on paper, 22 x 30 in.

The expression snapshot, to mean an instant in time, was already in use by 1897. The sense of a photo’s instantaneousness, summed up in the shutter’s split-second sound, is rooted deep.

But there are photographs that play strangely with time. Rough waters, captured on the wet plate negatives of the 19th century, can look like still pools of mist, and bodies in motion may appear translucent. Amid crisp details in a landscape or street scene we may make out faint blurs and residual shadows left by anonymous passersby.

To decipher these traces is a kind of reanimation: attune yourself to these rhythms, restore the breath to the arrested moment, and the experience becomes cinematic—as long as you can be both viewer and projector.

• • • • •

My source for the drawing was a photo found online. It shows a stranded bark, its rigging in disarray, identified as the wreck of the Hannah, 1849. But when I tried to learn more about the Hannah, which sank after striking an iceberg en route from Ireland to Quebec, with fifty passengers perishing, I concluded it couldn’t be the vessel pictured, whose end was surely less catastrophic. The picture’s backstory, then, was not for me to know.

• • • • •

Although a photo may describe an instant in time, a drawing may take weeks. In that time, storylines may emerge, characters develop, moods evolve. To derive a drawing from a photograph, then, is not so much a copying but an unfolding. The narrative of that frozen moment must be adapted, rewritten, restaged.

The source photo was meanwhile of a very degraded quality, many of its details blurred and indecipherable. Much of it would have to be reimagined in my rendering.

While working on the drawing in late January I looked up at the clouds every day, between the frequent storms, trying to memorize patterns and behaviors. I took a trip North to where the Russian River meets the ocean and forms a delta. With the unfinished drawing still fully in mind, I studied the contours and textures of the sandbars there along the ragged coastline.

And thus attuned, I would return to the drawing and further develop the textures of sand and sky. Soon the setting had become, unmistakably, the Pacific coast, between winter rains.