"Rusty Spear Stacking Lobster Traps, Monhegan Island"

RUSTY SPEAR STACHING LOBSTER TRAPS, MONHEGAN ISLAND

This painting has recently come back to me by one of my patron friends Lesley Waldron. It was painted in 1999 as a major part of my Carina House Mohegan Island Residency. Back then my residency involved visiting each day with Ann Hubert, whom I filmed and conducted conversation each day about how James Fitzgerald worked. She was a mentor and spiritual mother mother to me as she would give practical advice to me in my approach to painting. Ann and Jim were good friends, intuitive and finished each other's sentences. So when she would speak about what Jim would think about a particular way of working and how he would approach his work I soaked it all in as a sponge and proceeded to put it into practice.

In this work I tried to reconcile the method of working from photographs and from memory. I used photography not copy them, by studying the many live action shots I took of Mohegan's well known young fisherman at the time, Rusty Spear.  Here he is caught lifting and stacking one lobster trap after another, each weighing 50 pounds or more. Many of us can not even imagine the kind of labor these lobstermen are capable of. For the background and even the color of rusty's gear I relied more on my memory of how the subject felt when I first witnesses the event in person. I used the black oil wax medium that was made by James Fitzgerald and that he actually used in his oils to achieve the impasto look and glistening feel of the slickers. I also added liberal amounts to all my colors to increase their brightness and to make them appear to be more alive.

Back in the time when this painting was completed, Rusty was bring in the season's lobster traps in late June before the tourist season started in July. That very July I painted this version of Rusty Spear in what was then considered second best studio on Mohegan Island, only second best to Jamie Wyeth's studio at the time. The residency was located in what was fondly known as The Pink House. I worked day and night on it lighting up my studio with high watt lamps, and remember how they lit up whole haves of buildings through my studio window. But in the end this work began even back then, to define the work that I loved to do. 

In the bible it talks about how God dances over us while we are unaware. This is what I love about what I paint. They are little moments in time where there exists such a rightness in the figure and landscape it causes God to dance over it. At least that is what I experienced during the photo shoot. This is also what I look for. The one image that is so right in composition and the elements of design, that it becomes an intimate window of the beauty and joy of God's heart. Even though Rusty Spear on Mohegan Island may have been completely unaware of it at the time.