Plundering a Pirate's Ship....turnabout's fair play eh Mr. Blackbeard?

     I have just returned to the studio from the NC Maritime Museum where a few minutes ago another cannon from Blackbeard's flagship the "Queen Anne's Revenge" was recovered after 300 years on the ocean floor. The cannon made a brief public appearance in front of the museum before heading on to the conservation lab in Greenville, NC. It always amazes me when these artifacts are brought above surface for the first time. The archeologists handling the newly surfaced artifacts have to treat them like living organisms. After 300 years in the ocean environment they become part of it. Living sea organisms attach to the artifacts and become part of the artifact itself. This cannon even smelled like a beached sea creature, which I guess that's what it really is at this point.

     Here are some pictures from the event......

Here comes the cannon fresh from the deep.

The team unwraps the baby from her wet blankets.

Thar she is!

Here's a view of the sunlit side. Check out the kid in the light blue jacket and his intense look. You can tell this experience is going deep in him...I know the feeling bud!!!

View of the barrel. All of the cannons discovered at this wreck site were loaded with their shot. There are supposedly 40 cannons with this ship so these guys meant business!

Like I said, they have to treat these things like living sea creatures so they need to remain wet. The cannon will now be transported to the conservation lab and will be placed in a desalinization tank for a few years then the concretions and marine growth will be meticulously ground off with something about the size of a dentist's drill.

This is an 8 footer and is the 13th cannon recovered thus far. They've got a long way to go.

Happy plundering guys!

Precious Metals

"SENTINEL BY THE SEA"

24k gold & pure silver on prepared paper

 5-1/8"x 8-3/8"

     We have the most beautiful windswept (and often windlashed) live oak trees here on our stretch of the coast. They are absolute portraits of the wind, meaning you can see the wind in them. The drawing  pictured above is a commissioned piece I just finished. 

     Years before working in metalpoint, I did several drawings of these trees in pencil. I always felt they lent themselves nicely to be rendered in pencil but I feel even more strongly about doing them in metalpoint now, that is to say gold and silver. This will be the last gold and silver drawing I do for a while now that I'm exploring platinum in a new series of metalpoint drawings for my upcoming exhibition. I will be working with new subject matter exclusively suited for platinum. I can't explain why certain materials and subjects strike me as compatible other than it just feels right. I wouldn't use metalpoint for just any subject. There has to be some connection between the subject and material used to render it, and although I'm not always conscious of what that connection is..... I sure can feel it.

The Briny Deep

"OFFSHORE"

oil on canvas, 18"x 24"

     Here's a preview of the open water series of paintings that will be a part of my upcoming exhibition next summer. I will be posting images of them periodically so keep an eye out.

Afternoon offshore....."Carolina Style!"

     Yesterday afternoon I took a trip offshore to photograph the open sea for some paintings I'm working on for my upcoming exhibition. Capt. Buddy Harris took me out in his custom built 50' Harris (yes he built her). Buddy is a renowned builder of true "Carolina Style" sportfishing boats (click here and read Capt. Tennant's history of the Carolina style boat to find out more). I wanted to go out on a day with some moderate seaswell so I figured with energy from Tropical Storm Phillipe out there and 15 knot westerlies there should be some good wave action. Got what I wanted as you can see from the roll of the boat in the photo above as we were heading out into open water after leaving the dock. Below are a couple of pictures from the trip.

First we went by our old friend Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge watery grave. Divers were working the site probably checking out the status of everything down there after Hurricane Irene. You'll notice the ship went down only a mile offshore. You can clearly see the beach and houses in the distance.

This is a shot from the flybridge. I thought I'd go up top and chat with the Captain for a few minutes. I forgot how compounded the sea action is the higher up you go and I'm not one to get seasick but it was pitching and rolling a little too much and I didn't want to take any chances this early in the trip....so I just eased myself back down the ladder.

This is the sea buoy which is about 8 miles offshore. It is the last buoy as you head out to sea and the first buoy marking the shipping channel as you come from sea. The most amazing and eery thing about it is, it has an air cavity and air channel built into it with a horn at the upper end. The air pressure from the sea swell creates a rush of air that blows through the horn. Below is a short video I shot...

 

The effect reminded me of Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida's Wind Comb I saw when I was in San Sebastian Spain a few years ago.

Here's a shot a few miles beyond the sea buoy, but what caught my eye when I returned to the studio to review my photos was the shape of the cirrus cloud above. It first struck me like the "Batman" sign in the sky from the old "Batman" series but then it looked more like a white dove. Was it a sign......?

It was after all a very good afternoon!