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Boston Light 4'x6'
‘Boston Light’ came into being by way of a friend’s request to contribute a piece of ‘door art’ to their fundraiser: 1/3 will be contributed to their cause, 1/3 to Woods hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and 1/3 to me.
I was given a door to work with- the idea being that the door represents imagination, possibilities, playfulness, etc., and after a bit of thought, I was inspired to incorporate the door into a larger work as a secret surprise. And so I set to work imbedding it, then proceeding as I would all other paintings.
I had recently gathered a large swath of plastic boat shrink wrap- what a boat would be swaddled in while in winter storage. Within only a few miles of my house, thousands of boats are wrapped in this every year and it is not recyclable. Unsurprisingly, a piece about the size of a twin duvet washed up on Hull’s Coast Guard beach. I laid it out on my studio floor. Its seams and stretches puckered, rippled, folded in a manner not unlike the look of turbulent unpredictable water swirling around Boston Light as seen from the vantage of my kitchen window.
Bit by bit I applied my trash finds layering with paint and plaster, pencil, finger marks, etc. until Boston Light emerged. It speaks to me of the movement of the ocean, the sky and and the blurring of the horizon. In white I wrote, like the crests of waves, some of the many plastic bits used to create the painting but there seems never to be enough space to list them all.
Within the door I quoted the great Jaques Cousteau,
”The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever”
It is my hope that we can all be captured by the sea’s spell and being so entranced, love the sea, respect, treat it with the care deserving of a living thriving entity that gives us so so much.
On the inside of the door I wrote just a few sobering plastic facts. There are so many that it was incredibly difficult to choose what to write. But the sum of all the endless data about ocean pollution is that we need to reverse course for the oceans to survive and thus for the survival of our species for we are intrinsically linked whether we choose to believe so or not.