Little Constructions

Lately I have moved away from painting and other 2D pursuits, and focused more on building 3D miniatures of various environments, many inspired by the New England landscape and the Cape Ann area in which I live. 

I enjoyed making and painting models, and miniatures since I was a child , but after a long period of mostly graphic design, painting and illustration work, i have returned to the pleasures of making little things. I use a variety of found materials, things that have been discarded or would be considered junk by most people, bits of cardboard and Masonite, bits of wood, oddly shaped rocks, shells, plastic packaging, odd pieces of cloth, sponge or packing material. I rarely buy the materials that I work with, in fact I pride myself in constructing with mostly found or free materials.

One of the first of these projects was a miniature of a houseboat that can be seen sitting in the Annisquam River as you drive up Route 128  towards Gloucester. 

This always caught my eye and fired my imagination. I had recently moved to Gloucester from Salem, so I had no knowledge about the boathouse and no way to obtain any, and that lack of information fired my imagination. I was always wondering who owned it and lived on it each summer. Visually it really caught the eye both because of it's location, light aqua color and the fact that it sat by itself in a little bay of the river, with no other houseboats anywhere near it. I also loved that there was often a sailboat , or skiff parked next to it, like some kind of nautical commuter service. It always seemed to me like the kind of place a mermaid would live if they had a human partner. 

I may have become a little obsessed with it. I would often take photos of this place from different vantage points around the bay, there were several places to pull off  of 128 for a better look, and an Essex County Greenbelt property very close by. Once I had collected enough photos covering the houseboat from every visible angle, I decided to make a small model of it.

I used cardboard, balsa wood, toothpicks and cut paper.  I even fashioned a little couple , mermaid and her partner, out of cut paper. I painted it up with acrylic paint, and used a gloss acrylic medium to put a shine on the water. The base is about 8" x 7" and the whole thing is about 3.5" high. Since building this first model, I have created several more, which I will post later.

Mermaid Doodles

A couple of mermaid-related doodles in pen & ink and watercolor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aral Sea Mermaid Doodles

I was recently reading about the Aral Sea, which is a lake lying in Asia between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It was once the fourth largest lake in the world, but due to a Soviet-era, large-scale irrigation project which diverted the two rivers that fed it to area farms, the lake has been slowly drying up, until today, 50 years later, it has largely disappeared, being about 10% of it's original size. 
This is an ecological disaster on an epic scale, and has left many fishing communities that used to be on the shore of the lake, literally high and dry. It is not unusual to see the hulks of rusting fishing boats, laying in what looks like desert, but was in fact, the floor of the lake.
Keeping with my recent mermaid themes, i did a couple of small, quick sketches of dying mermaids, sitting mournfully in the shade of these hulks. Perhaps I will turn them into larger, more detailed paintings at some future date.

Panhandling Mermaids

My wife and I were walking along the Gloucester waterfront a week ago and at the end that is nearest to Stage Fort Park, there are a series of rocks. As we were walking by I imagined what it would be like if a pod of mer-people, took up residence there, maybe voluntarily, but possibly forced there because of pollution, or over-fishing.

I imagined that at first there would be a lot of initial interest in them and their story, local and national press coverage, television crews and press helicopters . Scientists and others who wanted to photograph and study them. An influx of vendors exploiting the situation by selling everything from snacks to mer-themed t-shirts and hats.

Inevitably, people would gradually lose interest, and the mermaids who were once magical and mythical, would become commonplace. Add in a bit more time, and they might actually start to become a problem. Since they no longer have their deep-water homes, they no longer have the means to support themselves, and rely on handouts to live. They may descend into problematic public behaviors like smoking, drugs, drinking. With that in mind, I doodled the scene below.
Mermaids as homeless, panhandling to survive, and with the same sort of reaction from those passing by.

Henry Hudson and the Mermaid-FINAL

I finally finished this piece!

The Ipswich Mermaid

When I was in high school our drama department did a performance of Peter Blackmore's play "Miranda". If you are not familiar with this work, it is a comedy about a London doctor who goes to Cornwall on holiday and is captured (or rescued) by a mermaid who talks him into taking her back to London, disguised as an invalid patient. She takes up residence in his flat, much to the consternation of his wife, and proceeds to seduce every man in sight, which leads to a lot of humorous complications. It was made into a movie in 1948 starring Glynnis Johns. (Google it).
In both the play and the movie version Miranda is a "full-time" mermaid  (no "Splash" style, leg-to-tail-conversions) and gets around by either being carried, or pushed around in a wheelchair.
The girl who played Miranda in our high school version, was a lovely girl named Denise Brockelbank, who had beautiful long, dark, crinkly hair, (which she inexplicably cut just a few weeks before the show went up, forcing her to wear a wig, but that's a story for another time). The vision of her as a mermaid, sitting in a beautiful dress, in a wheelchair, was an image that has stuck with me for many years. This was pretty much the flashpoint for my interest in Mermaids. A few years later, in college, I  did a marker drawing of my impression of that vision. The face and hands of the mermaid were courtesy of an Italian fashion model in an issue of Vogue. The stylized hair and dress were the result of an art-school obsession with Alphonse Mucha.

Over the years, I kept coming back to this image again and again. I always wanted to do something more with it. I kept kicking around the idea of a painting. I even had my wife pose for me.

Finally, I decided to get off my butt and actually finish some projects that have been hanging around (in my head or otherwise) for years. The first inspiration came when I saw this old postcard of the lighthouse in Ipswich, MA, my home town. You can read more about the lighthouse here: http://www.newenglandlighthouses.net/ipswich-range-lights-history.html

  Ipswich has always held a special significance for me. I grew up in Ipswich and have many fond memories of visiting Cranes Beach.
The original lighthouse was moved to Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard in 1939, so it was long gone before I came on the scene, but I knew about it because the lighthouse keepers house, which our church used to rent for summer events, didn't burn down until the 1970's, and I had actually been in on several occasions. I now had a definite place to set the mermaid in.
The next inspiration was coming across this old advertisement for wicker "invalid chair".

Now I had something to put the mermaid in. The original play was written in 1948, and was set in the late 40's, but there was something very appealing to me about the Victorian time period, especially since the lighthouse would have been gone by the 1940's. There is something more magical about the fashions, and also the modesty of the period. You could believe that a mermaid might have an easier time concealing herself as an invalid in a large "invalid chair" and keeping her tail under a long Victorian dress. Who would know?
I looked for an appropriately-styled Victorian dress. I was going to keep most of the original sketch, if I could, but having an actual dress in mind would be more helpful. I found one online. Now I had a dress to dress her in.

I was ready to start painting. I took a 8" x 10" canvas and started to rough in the painting. I pretty much stuck with the overall look of the original drawing that I did back in college, but I adjusted some of the details.

The next step was adding in more detail and enriching the color.

It quickly became apparent that the hair was too stylized to work with the more realistic background, and that the hands were really large and strangely positioned. I found the position of the hands appealing for some reason in the original sketch. They seemed to reinforce the vulnerability of a mermaid stuck on dry land, but they were way too big, and as my wife pointed out, it would be "painful to hold you hands like that". I had my wife pose for me just to try it out and see.
We came up with a more realistic, and less painful-looking position.

I repainted the hair, and the hands. I added in gloss highlights on the tail, the eyes and the water. Sprayed it with varnish, and framed it in a white wooden frame.
Here is the final painting.

The Daily Mermaid Logo

My wife Amy, who works as an Internet Product Editor at Christianbook.com, is also an aspiring writer. She has written poetry, short stories, several children's stories, and is working on a young-adult fantasy novel. In an effort to give herself a steady outlet for her writing, as well as to attract the attention of potential readers (and possibly agents), she decided to start a blog.
She wanted to call it "The Daily Mermaid" and she wanted it to have a logo. This is where I come in. Amy and I both love mermaids for a lot of different reasons, we both were born and grew up in New England not far from the sea, and all things maritime just seem to be part of our lifeblood. Plus they are inherently romantic, mysterious, and alluring.
So I started. Amy wanted a mermaid, but she didn't know exactly what form that mermaid should take. In some ways, there are way too many versions of mermaids to choose from, everything from the Starbuck's logo, to "Splash".  I started researching mermaids, trying to narrow the criteria for what Amy was looking for. One representation of a mermaid that I knew she liked , was one that we saw on Block Island during a visit there last year.

Designed by Nancy A. Cook in 1999, This mermaid is on bumper stickers and t-shirts all over the island. Amy really liked the wood-cutty, bold graphic feel of the thing, and also liked the basic position with the ascending hair and the right-facing tail, but since her blog was intended to be literary in nature, and not primarily about mermaids, it would need to reflect that in some way. The most obvious choices were the addition of something representing writing; a laptop, a typewriter, and a book. The laptop was rejected as being too contemporary, the typewriter, too dated (would people even know what it was?)
So that left a book. I did a rough thumbnail of a mermaid holding a book.

Amy liked the basic layout of it, but it needed detail. The question was, what kind of detail?
I pulled together about two dozen examples of what I thought Amy would like. She likes "classic" looking mermaids, not too weird or science-fiction-like ( no gills or webbing) she also liked mermaids that are not sexy in a Las Vegas showgirl kind of way, but more in a lyrical, sweet, simple, natural-looking way. She also doesn't like them to be wearing a shell bra. This presented some challenges. I finally narrowed it down to (2) images. One was the logo for the

Moondance International Film Festival. 

Found randomly on the web, Amy really liked the look of the mermaid, who is "non-hollywood standard", as well as the pen-and ink line quality of the illustration.

The other image that she loved was a painting called (oddly enough) The Mermaid by artist Maurice Greiffenhagen, a British painter and Royal Academician who died in 1931. The painting was done around 1900. Talk about a classic, lyric, mermaid.  As I always say, if you are going to steal, steal from the best.

My job now was to somehow combine the two images into one.  I tried doing a rough sketch in black and white that was a recreation of the basic pose in the painting, and changing some of the details. I also started playing around with a type treatment.

Again, Amy liked it, but she had some specific requests. She wanted the mermaid to be holding the book more realistically. She also wanted the mermaid to be looking down at the book, and she wanted the proportions to be more realistic as well. So I tried redrawing it again, this time in pencil, and with Amy in mind.

Amy liked it but she still wanted some changes. She had me make the hips and tail fuller, and the collar-bones less pronounced. With those changes made, now it was time to move on to the final version. Bringing the black and white scan into Photoshop, I  cleaned-up the artwork, and  then brought it into Illustrator as a template and used live trace to turn it into a vector. 

The first version looked like this.

Amy knew that she wanted the logo to be aqua-colored, with a light and dark shade instead of black and white, so I selected a Pantone 320 and a Pantone 317, which look OK reproduced in CMYK. There was a lot of cleaning up control points in Illustrator,  as well as figuring out how to give the image some shading and depth. 

Next step was selecting the appropriate type for the logo. Amy liked things in an Art-deco style. I picked about a half-dozen faces that were likely contenders; Benguiat, Berliner Grotesk, Eccentric Standard, Flower Child, and Fontesque. Amy selected Desdemona.

Originally I wanted to go with a vertical format, but the word Mermaid was too small in that configuration. 

Eventually I developed the configuration of type and tagline that Amy liked. Here is the final version of the logo. And here is a link to Amy's blog: http://thedailymermaid.blogspot.com/

Miranda (1948)

As many of you know, I am obsessed with mermaids, and mermaid movies. Since there is a definite scarcity of good mermaid movies, (the abysmal adaptation of Aquamarine being one example of not good) I feel compelled to call attention to a good one when I come across it.
When the movie is an older, British-made, black and white gem, even more.
Which brings me to Miranda.
























Miranda was made in 1948, directed by Ken Annakin, who also directed Swiss Family Robinson, the madcap comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and the World War II epic The Longest Day. It is based on a successful stage play by Peter Blackmore, who adapted it for the screenplay.
I have had a soft spot for this story since my high school drama class did a production of the play, which I saw and read. I loved it and was obsessed with seeing the film version, however I was never able to as it is rarely on TV and there are no official DVD versions available in the US, unless you find a DVD-R copy (usually recorded off of a broadcast such at Turner Classic Movies) or can find it online. As it so happens, after much searching, I found it online, so after 30 years I was finally able to see the film. I must say it was worth the wait.

















The plot goes something like this...With his wife uninterested in fishing, Dr. Paul Martin (Griffith Jones) goes on holiday to the Cornwall coast by himself. While there fishing, he snags Miranda (Glynis Johns), a real mermaid, and is pulled into the water. He's knocked unconscious, and awakens in her cave. Their first exchange is one of my favorites and sets the tone immediately. When he asks how he got there, she tells him that he "Fell out of his boat"
"Pulled is more like it" he replies.
Without missing a beat she quips "You're a terrible swimmer".
She keeps him prisoner in her underwater cavern and only lets him go after he agrees to show her London. She has always wanted to see Buckingham Palace, Billingsgate Market and most especially, the opera. He disguises her as an invalid patient in a wheelchair and takes her to his home for a month-long stay.
















Martin’s wife Clare (Googie Withers) reluctantly agrees to the arrangement, but once she learns that the "patient" is an attractive young woman rather than an elderly one, convinces him to hire someone to look after their guest. He selects Nurse Carey (Margaret Rutherford) for her eccentric nature and takes her into his confidence. To Paul's relief, Carey is delighted to be working for a mermaid.

Miranda’s seductive nature earns her the admiration of not only Paul, but also his chauffeur Charles (David Tomlinson) and Nigel (John McCallum), the fiancé of Clare's friend and neighbour Isobel (Sonia Holm), arousing the jealousy of the women in their lives. Nigel breaks off his engagement, but when he and Charles discover that Miranda has been flirting with both of them, they come to their senses.

Clare finally figures out what sort of creature Miranda really is. Miranda overhears her telling Paul that the public must be told. Since Miranda had a mermaid aunt who was captured and pickled, she wheels herself down to the river and makes her escape.

The movie moves along at a rather brisk pace. Some movies like this spoil themselves by going on too long, if anything this one, at 80 minutes, is too short.

The film's chief asset is its casting. Glynis Johns is simply wonderful as Miranda, and she's a good part of the reason the film succeeds. She later became immortalized in film by playing the mother in Mary Poppins, along with David Tomlinson. She's a joy to watch here, but she's hardly the only one. The film makes excellent use of Googie Withers, as Paul's haughty wife Clare, David Tomlinson as his glum chauffeur, by the chauffeur's girlfriend Betty, also the maid, played by Yvonne Owen, and, especially, Margaret Rutherford as Miranda's eccentric and devoted nurse.

Having been based on a stage play, the film sometimes seems in some ways oddly constrained. Surprisingly little goes into exploiting the story's potential for visual comedy, nor into showing how Miranda fares outside of domestic interiors. For this we get only two short sequences: one in which she gorges on a street-vendor's entire stock of cockles, and the great scene in which she catches a fish in her mouth during feeding time at the zoo. This curious reticence may in part have been dictated by the limiting nature of Johns' prosthetics, though what little we see of her tail (made by Dunlop, according the credits) looks entirely convincing. However, I think this constraint actually adds to its charm. One can only imagine how this could be mucked-up in an American, CGI-laden remake.























Another surprise is the mild, but nevertheless stunning raciness of the film. Miranda is an outrageously flirtatious, nearly-nymphomaniac mermaid, very open about her attraction to men, who likes being kissed, carried and admired. When Clare ponders Miranda's various eccentricities - she sleeps in a cold bath, drinks salt water, eats raw fish sandwiches, the most horrifying is, "she never wears panties!" There is also a scene in which, while out for a night-time drive in the county, Paul and Miranda come across a lake, and take an impromptu, and apparently nude swim. There is also the matter of the final scene of the movie, where, Miranda
is shown on a rock, holding a little merboy on her lap. Where did he come from?
(My guess is from the night-time swim with Paul). Although exceedingly mild by today's standards, this seems incredible in a movie made in 1948!
















While watching the film, I couldn't help making the inevitable comparisons with the movies
Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, and Splash, (both favorites of mine) several scenes play in a very similar manner, and both try for the same light tone, but they aren't nearly as charming as this. Miranda retains considerable charm and novelty, and was successful enough to prompt a sequel, Mad About Men (1954).
Miranda is not a perfect film by any means, mostly due to it's short length and cheap rear projections in some outdoor scenes, but I haven't been so delighted by a film in a long time.

I am hoping that someone will give this semi-obscure gem a decent DVD release.
Is anyone at Criterion listening?

Henry Hudson and the Mermaid-Work in Progress

A few months ago I was reading about the English explorer Henry Hudson. (You know, he "discovered" Manhattan, the Hudson River and Hudson Bay are both named after him) I was surprised by a couple of things, one, that he disappeared in Hudson Bay after his crew mutinied and set him, his son, and a few loyal men adrift in a small open boat, that his remains were never found, and that in 1608, while sailing near Norway, he wrote in his logbook:

"This morning one of our companie looking over the boord saw a Mermaid...from Navill upward her back and breasts were like a woman's, her body as big as one of us; her skin was very white; and long haire hanging down behind, of color black; in her going downe they saw her tayle, which was like the tayle of a porposse and speckled like a Macrell."

Hudson was one of few historical figures to not only site a mermaid but to make an entry of it in his log. This gave me an idea for a painting. So as soon as I read this I did a couple of small thumbnail drawings.

The first one was just to get the idea down. On the second one I started thinking more about the individual elements, composition, and lighting, making written notations on the thumbnail.The next step was research, collecting reference sailing images of ships of the period, costume, Henry Hudson, the Norwegian coastline, waves, mackerals and porpoises. Once I had that gathered I did a more finished drawing in pencil and marker to work out basic layout, lighting and colors.

As you can see the original sketch is pretty loose, and is much wider than I had originally planned. I was playing around at this stage with the size relationship between the mermaid and the ship. I wanted her to be close enough to the viewer to dominate the foreground, but not so large that you couldn't still make out the man on board the ship who is seeing her. At this point I did a more refined compositional and color study. I was also trying to decide at this point if I should include the text of the log entry in the painting itself, which would have made it a very narrow and vertically oriented painting. (I decided against it)



The final step, was to get the painting onto a panel. I used a 12" x 24" gessoed masonite panel.I drew in the image based on the sketches. As I was working , I decided to make the mermaid even larger than it appears on the sketch. I started with a just 2 colors, manganese blue and burnt sienna, roughing in the largest areas.



This is where I am at now. I will work in more detail and color as I go. I will post my progress as I go.























Here is the latest update on the painting...