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Tag: sailing

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Is the ocean a reflection of the sky?

Brigantine Swift in Camden Harbor, 24X30, oil on canvas, framed, $3478 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

If you’re looking for me this weekend, I’ll be out on Penobsot Bay, teaching my Art and Adventure at Sea workshop aboard American Eagle. That means no connectivity and therefore no blog post on Wednesday. One of the most common questions I’m asked is, how do you paint water. Water is so immense, slippery, and mercurial, that it is impossible to nail it down into a schtick. Instead, the painter must rely on observation.

Heavy Weather (Ketch Angelique), 24X36, oil on canvas, framed, $3985 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Is the ocean a reflection of the sky?

Reflections are a distortion of the surrounding environment. That’s true whether you’re painting them on the ocean or in a glass of water. These reflections are never going to be consistent but they will follow the laws of physics.

Imagine an ocean that is perfectly flat, and that you can walk on water. Looking at your feet, you can see straight down into the water. It’s not reflecting anything. Looking at a rubber ducky floating ten feet away, you’re looking at the surface at about a 26° angle. You’ll see a reflection of the ducky, the sky, and a glimpse of what’s under the surface. As you look farther away, the angle gets smaller and smaller, and all you see is the reflected sky.

Reflection involves two rays – an incoming (incident) ray and an outgoing (reflected) ray. Physics tells us that the angles are identical but on opposite sides of a tangent. This is why the reflection of a boat needs to be directly below the real object in your painting. You can add other colors into that area, but the reflection can’t be wider than the object it’s reflecting.

Breaking Storm, oil on linen, 30X48, $5579 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Water is transparent, but it has a shiny surface. Some rays of light make it through and bounce back at us from the sea floor. Reflections in glass work the same way. You can see through the glass in the surface that’s facing you, but the curving sides reflect light from around the room. Because glass is imperfect, these reflections will be distorted.

The ocean complicates matters by being bouncy. Even on the calmest day, the surface of water is never perfectly flat; it’s wavy or worse, just like a fun-house mirror. Waves are a series of irregular curves. How they reflect light depends on what plane you’re seeing at that nano-second. It seems like the easiest thing to do is to capture it in a photo and paint from that, but what we see in photos is sometimes very different from what we perceive in life.

Instead, sit a moment with and watch how patterns seem to repeat. They’re never exactly the same, since waves are a stochastic process (think random but repeating). But they’re close enough to discern general patterns.

Beautiful Dream, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Solid objects can also trip you up in their reflections. Consider the humble spoon. It’s concave. That distorts its reflections. There’s no point in trying to predict what you might see; it’s best to just look. Likewise, a mirror only reflects straight back at you if you’re in front of it.

There are times when the ocean makes no reflection at all. Only smooth surfaces reflect light coherently enough to make reflections. That’s why burlap has no reflections. Sometimes, when water is being wind-whipped, it doesn’t have reflections either. To paint such a sea, keep the contrast low. A grey, windy day, or a turbulent sea will have a surface too broken up to reflect anything but the most general light.

Some people say that reflections should be lower in chroma than their objects, but I don’t think that’s true. Often, the ocean seems to concentrate color. Sometimes, the water will be lightest at the horizon; other days there will be a deep band there. However, the farther away, the more its colors shift toward blue-violet.

Paintings by Ray Roberts, courtesy the Page Gallery.

If you’re in town this weekend

Colin Page tells me there’s still room in Oil Painting On Location in Camden, Maine with well-known western artist Ray Roberts. That’s next Saturday and Sunday, September 21-22 from 9-4, and the fee is $300

This workshop will be in oils, but all media are welcome.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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My love affair with schooner American Eagle

Breaking Storm, oil on linen, 30X48, $5579 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

“You have a crush on every boat,” my husband once said. Of all the boats I’ve ever loved, schooner American Eagle is at the top of the list. She’s not the only windjammer I admire, or even the only windjammer I’ve painted. But I get to teach on her every year, she’s always in perfect nick and I never have to do any of the maintenance. That’s down to Captain John Foss, who restored her impeccably, and Captain Tyler King, who’s keeping up the good work.

A quick glimpse will tell you why we had no onboard electronics on this lovely old girl. I wish I still had her but, as they say, it’s complicated.

I grew up in western New York, where my family kept a 30′ wooden sloop, first at Buffalo on Lake Erie and then at Wilson on Lake Ontario. As a kid, I figured that since the Great Lakes are smaller than the ocean, they must be safer. It’s only been since I’ve moved to the Maine coast that I’ve realized how extreme the weather in my hometown of Buffalo is. The Great Lakes are prone to unpredictable squall lines, seiches, and storm surges. Electrical storms are very common, even in winter, when they create the phenomenon known as thundersnow. Periodically, the water in Lake Ontario turns over, making a noticeable, sudden change in the temperature that results in fog. The Great Lakes have heavy freighter traffic and fog can drop in an instant. It’s less nerve-wracking now, but in my youth “onboard electronics” were limited to running lights.

American Eagle in Drydock, 12X16, $1159 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

On the other hand, the Great Lakes are consistently deep. If you can get out of the harbor channel without grounding yourself on last winter’s silt, you’re unlikely to hit anything submerged. That’s different from the Maine coast, where rocks stick inconveniently out of the water, or worse, not quite out of the water. When I first sailed on schooner American Eagle, I told Captain John that the thing that gave me pause about potting around in the ocean by myself is not knowing what was on the bottom. “Lobster traps, pretty much,” he laughed. And sailors today all use depth finders, which take the sport out of holing one’s hull.

However, the weather on the Maine Coast is simply not as foul as it is on Lake Ontario. (A friend who lives in Scotland tells me that Rochester is more dreich in late fall and winter than is Edinburgh.) It rains less here, and there are fewer storms.

I see boats as powerful symbols of the human condition. We’re always either sailing into trouble or getting ourselves out of it. Breaking Storm, above, is about the latter, and I’ve got a painting of the windjammer Angelique on my easel that’s about the former. (Sorry about that, Captains Dennis and Candace!)

American Eagle rounding Owls Head, 6×8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 unframed includes shipping and handling in the continental US.

Breaking Storm is my favorite of all my schooner American Eagle paintings, but I realize it may be too large and expensive for some people. That’s why I painted American Eagle rounding Owls Head, just 6X8. It’s softer and more suggestive than the larger painting, and there’s no sense that the storm has abated.

Of course, if you sail with us in September, you can paint your own version of sailing on the Maine coast. But if you can’t go adventuring with us, a painting is every bit as wonderful.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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How I fell in love (with a boat)

American Eagle in Drydock, 12X16, $1159 unframed.

Shortly after I moved to Maine, I presented myself at the North End Ship Yard in Rockland to ask if I could paint. It was spring, and the annual rite of fit out was just starting. This is when the windjammers are lifted out of the water, their hulls scraped and painted, and below-the-waterline repairs done. Large wooden vessels spend all year in the water, and each boat spends just a few days on the rails. If they pass their Coast Guard inspections, they are allowed to sail another season.

It was there that I met Captain John Foss of American Eagle, and Captains Doug and Linda Lee of Heritage. They’ve co-owned the shipyard for almost fifty years. They are tolerant of artists and allowed me to mooch around the yard all spring.

When that season ended, Captain John said, “Why don’t you go out with us on our last cruise? You can see what this is all about.” I foolishly brought oil paints, which got all over his beautifully-finished deck, but he’s a very even-tempered fellow.

Schooner and double rainbow. That’s almost as good as a unicorn!

The next year, we started our watercolor workshop, because the paint is easier to get off the fittings.

I think American Eagle is the best-looking schooner in the Maine Windjammer fleet. (The ketch Angelique comes a close second.) I’m not saying that just because I sail on her. Some schooners, like Angelique and Heritage, are modern reproductions of 19th century designs. Others are repurposed 19th century working boats. They tend towards the ruffles and ribbons of the Edwardian age.

In contrast, American Eagle was built in 1931, part of the last generation of the Gloucester schooner fishing fleet. She has an elegant, austere silhouette. I’d almost call her Art Deco, she’s so sleek. The graceful arc of her prow, which is all that shows in American Eagle in Dry Dock, is a hint that the whole of her is equally graceful.

That first fit out impressed me with the amount of sheer, hard graft the captains put in readying their boats for the water. Of course, they don’t do it alone; each year they get a new crop of youngsters working as deckhands or messmates. (If I’d known such a gig existed when I was 18 or 21, my life would have been very different.)

Trina Ross, Savra Frounfelker, and Donna Gray playing at ‘Three Men in a Boat.’

Before they ever go out, these hands scrape, strip, varnish, paint, caulk, lug, climb… in short, any difficult physical labor you can imagine, they do. And the captains are right there with them, even up past an age when any sane person would have retired.

What I didn’t realize was that life on the water is as strenuous as life in the winter. Not only does the crew handle the ship (and there are no labor-saving devices on board), they also prepare meals and serve passengers. They take turns staying awake at night to keep watch, because the schooners anchor in deep water.

Everything is done by hand on a windjammer. That’s Mike Prairie holding the line.

Two years ago, Eagle went out with a new captain, Tyler King, who is the same age as my youngest kid. I’d sailed with him as John’s mate, but that’s different from having all the responsibility for boat, crew and passengers on his young shoulders. On our first cruise together, I watched him do a quick evasive maneuver with utter calm and competence. He’s an excellent sailor and a sharp cookie.

The chances that I can convince my husband I need a sailboat are slim to nil. Realistically, I can’t even take out the skiff I own. But I’m blessed to be able to go cruising during my watercolor workshop, and I don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting.

Remember to bookmark December 1 for our first Virtual First Friday, starting at 7 PM. I think it’s going to be a gas.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Gone sailing

Breaking Storm, oil on linen

Sailing is a great disperser of cares.

Breaking Storm, oil on linen, available
Breaking Storm, oil on linen, available. That’s of course American Eagle in the starring role.

By the time you read this, I’ll be sailing in Penobscot Bay, teaching my first workshop of the season aboard the schooner American Eagle. Between the pressures of work and some personal issues, I’ve been struggling since I got home from walking across Britain. Sailing is just the tonic I need right now.

Occasionally, someone will tell me that they suffer terribly from mal de mer and ask me for suggestions. There are better medications available these days, but if you really can’t look at a glass of water without getting queasy, you’re better off just taking a different kind of workshop.

You never know what you’re going to find in the ocean.

But if you’ve got the stomach for it, sailing is a great disperser of cares. You’re at one with the boat; you have to be, as ignoring her swings and rolls will cause you to fall down. That puts you totally in the moment, watching the sails, the waves, the shifts in air, and being an active part of the amazing complexity of 19th century transport technology. Sail power is the original renewable energy resource, but the boat doesn’t go if we don’t help. Someone has to hoist those sails, and we’re it.

Painting and sailing and sailing and painting…

Schooners are defined not by their hull shape but by their rigging; they’re fore-and-aft rigged on two or more masts, with the foremast generally shorter than the mainmast. They were the workhorses of the preindustrial sea, designed mainly for fishing and to move cargo. The overwhelming majority of them were never meant as passenger boats. The whole Maine windjammer thing was an impossible idea realized by people who primarily wanted to preserve and sail these big, beautiful beasts. The best way to do that turned out to be to operate them for the tourist trade.

There’s occasional shore leave… and lobster.


One of these people is Captain John Foss, who restored American Eagle and sailed her for 37 years. He’s passed the wheel to Captain Tyler King. I’ve sailed with Tyler, and he’s a nice young man who clearly knows what he’s doing. I’m quite confident Tyler won’t hit anything, but I’ll sure miss the old gaffer. But as they say, the only constant in this world is change.

I won’t be back until Saturday, so there will be no blog post here on Friday. But on Saturday afternoon, I’ll open my gallery at 394 Commercial Street, Rockport, for the first time this year. It’s going to be a soft opening (meaning I don’t have my act together) but I sure would enjoy seeing you if you want to stop by.