I never did any sailing, I’m just a navigator of the ocean called Time. We should be careful with what we are doing to the oceans lest we end up with a dead Albatross around our collective necks telling our descendents of a time when birds flew and fish swam. Which brings us to the not so Coleridge “rime”…
Pacific thermals
unbound above polymer sea
– Albatross sailing
I love writing Haiku. It forces you to be concise and descriptive in three lines. As I’ve said previously, I’m trying to write verse for each piece for a new show I’m working toward in April 2022. These aren’t new pieces, but are ones I never wrote about. They both use NOAA navigation maps. The NOAA has a website with digital scans of historical up to present era maps. For these, I like to load them to Photoshop to add color or boost existing color before I print and mount them for painting. As it they are, the deep water is white and the coastal depths are blue which seem backwards.
This first piece is a map of the Choctawhatchee Bay entrance. I was born in Fort Walton (on the left) and after graduating high school in Defuniak Springs, Florida lived several years in Destin which is on the right. The birds are Laughing Gulls. Keying off their name, I cheekily named the painting So the Pelican Says… as if the one is telling a joke to the other.
The second uses map of Dry Tortugas which is west of Key West. It’s inspired by author Peter Matthiessen (Shadow Country/Far Tortuga). I briefly lived in Gainesville, Florida and got to see a lecture given by Matthiessen just after release of his novel Far Tortuga. Tortuga is a spanish word for sea turtle and can also refer to the a cay where sea turtles are found. The word “tortuga” makes me think of The Dry Tortugas and shipwrecks. I borrowed a character from Treasure Islan and called the piece Billy Bones’ Key.
I’m a 5th generation Floridian. I suppose since I don’t live in Florida anymore I can’t say I’m Floridian. The stories my Grandparents told were of a state more frontier than today or even the one I grew up in. These are the stories that haunt and inhabit my pieces; a place that was perhaps more frontier than now and reaffirming Thomas Wolfe. Perhaps we can visit together.
