Looking Out to Sea

Another 4" x 10" acrylic painting  on illustration board. Haven't decided weather it is done, or if I will work on it some more. My output, never prolific, has been very sparse this year dealing with the fall-out of Covid, divorce, and a bunch of other crap. But every now and then I rouse myself enough to pull together a couple of small pieces. So take that universe.

Ipswich Girl, 1898

 Pen and ink drawing of a young girl from Ipswich, MA. Based on a print made from a glass-plate negative taken by Edward Darling (1874 – 1962), one of the earliest Ipswich photographers.

Strand Theater Model

I have a strong interest in papercrafts. According to Wikipedia, "Paper craft is the collection of art forms employing paper or cardboard as the primary artistic medium for the creation of three-dimensional objects".
I have a backlog of papercraft projects that I wish to build, but every now and then, I get a break in my regular work, and I get to do one.
One of these was a model of the historic Strand Theater in Ipswich, MA.
This project was on the top of my list as it holds some personal significance to me. I was born and grew up in Ipswich, and my first memory of going to the movies was seeing "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming" with my family when I was six years old. Most of the movies I saw from childhood through early adulthood were seen at the Strand. Jeremiah Johnson, Westworld, Rocky, Jabberwocky, Star Wars, were all seen there (to name but a few). I also worked at the Strand as as usher in highschool.
Unfortunately, the theater fell on hard financial times in the early 80's and rather than being preserved as the historic building it was, was torn down in 1985 to make room for an addition to the Ipswich Savings bank. A lot of people are still pissed about that.

So, for all of those reasons I decided I would try my hand at making an HO-scale replica of the building facade. The only problem was, for a building that was built in 1920, there was a real shortage of good photographs showing the building in it's heyday. Also complicating the issue was the fact that the building had been extensively renovated several times through it's history (once after a fire), so I also had to decide what version of the building I was going to make.
After some extensive Googling  I was able to collect several photos of the Strand. Since many theaters were called "The Strand" I had to make sure that they were images of the one in Ipswich, MA. Most of the photos were of poor quality or in black and white, but there were a couple that were color, and taken just before it was torn down.

There was also a close up shot showing some of the detail.

I took those shots, and using Photoshop to correct the perspective of the photo, used it as a template to redraw the facade of the building in Adobe Illustrator. This is the base layer of the drawing.

I drew the raised and recessed architectural elements and the marquee separately.

I printed these on heavy card stock and then commenced to assemble the pieces. I used a piece of foamcore for the base and balsa wood for re-enforcing the structure. The hardest part was cutting out the marquee letters.

 I added an HO scale figure and voila! 

 If I get really ambitious, I might try a version with a light-up marquee and lobby. I did add the title of and posters in the display cases on either side of the entrance for the movie that was playing when I worked there in 1977; the original Star Wars.

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.

Trustee of Reservations Signs

About this time last year, I did some design work for the Trustees of Reservations. I produced files for about twenty interpretive signs that were going to be installed at various locations around the Crane Estate in Ipswich, MA. The signage was installed this spring, but I never seemed to have time to get up to the estate to take a look. Well my wife and I finally got around to traveling up to Ipswich to check them out in situ. They looked terrific. The Crane Estate is one of my all-time favorite places, and the fact that something I worked on will be part of the landscape there makes me very happy.