penpressionism

Narragansett Bay is a 10 mile by 25 mile estuary east of Rhode Island. We spent 7 days on the bay aboard the sailing vessel Onward, a Catalina 470, with 4 adults and 2 toddlers.

We spent 7 amazing days sailing around with a group called The Corinthians. Imagine Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn dreaming of one day sailing around various harbors with their closest friends, making memories, and enjoying daily happy hours on the water. This is the Corinthians annual sailing adventure.

I’ve spent multiple trips sketching, painting, and documenting the amazing images and scenes that one finds by visiting a different harbor each day for a week while sailing.

I’m developing a bit of a formula on how to capture the best of these trips and immerse myself into that magical “sketch flow” place while on a boat with the crew.

I try to use the water we are floating in for the watercolor. I first stumbled into this by accident when I was sketching in an alley in Venice early one morning. The rain started as I was finishing the sketch and there were rain drops on my moleskine before I completed the sketch. What I initially thought was a problem became another learning experience while doing spontaneous sketches. As the moleskine paper ­— which doesn’t appreciate too much water— started to buckle a bit, I let some water slide off and allowed the paper to remain wet. I ducked into the apartment and added some watercolor pigment to the rain water on the page.

Back to Naragansett, the varying degrees of salinity in the bay offered unpredictable and uncontrollable interactions with the watercolor pigment. You can see this as tiny speckles in some of the colored areas in the sketches. About 2.4 billion gallons of freshwater enter the bay from rivers and other sources every day. This causes different concentrations of salt depending on the proximity to fresh water sources. The upper bay has an average salinity of 24 ppm while the areas further south nearer to the open ocean average about 32 ppm.

These sketches include impressions of early morning sunrise in Potters Cove Bight, multiple lighthouses around the bay, and multiple trips between various harbors around  Conanicut Island, Jamestown, Fogland harbor, Bristol, and Block Island. Some of the sketches were drawn in “real time”/ live as our boat was passing other boats and lighthouses on land.