Things in Motion

This piece, The Harborof Love is one of a cluster of images that are organized under the heading of 'Things in Motion'. I noticed a few years back that a fair number of images that I had been working with all involved the act of moving, or an object that you could use to go somewhere else : bridges, stairs and ships. Once I became aware of this, I began to build on it in a more intentional way. Initially though, I was happy enough to let the instinctive pull of an image spur me into action. For example, this drawing is based on an old 'Look' magazine photograph of a Clipper ship that I had torn out and saved several years ago. Because it kept pulling on my heart strings, I just felt that it needed to be drawn. I also thought that I could serve it in a relatively small format. Well, that didn't last long. It just kept wanting to be larger and longer, and so I kept cutting new sheets of tar paper and push-pinning them together In turn, this affected the graphic dynamics of the ship. It kept getting stretched beyond its actual proportions and the number of masts multiplied so that it ceased to exist a literal ship. That kicked out of the natural realm and made it about larger things. Meanwhile, I had bought a cd by Ry Cooder, The Prodigal Son, and was listening to that while working on this piece. One song that I was particularly drawn to was ‘The Harbour of Love: :“…and the Great Ship will anchor, in the harbour of Love”. At some point, I realised that the evolving drawing and lyric fused together and I realised what 'it' was about. Still, I don't think of the resulting image as an illustration of that song, but the ship implies movement and movement implies a destination, and that’s as good a destination as I can think of.