The first of this series of sculptures has been languishing in the workshop. I’ve called it Ship and I wasn’t sure it was going to see the light of day!

Things are looking brighter now that I have spent the last month working on it.

In the beginning I was fascinated by the curves seen on a clinker-built boat so I played around with plastic strips and paperclips.

I put together a framework which exploited these curves in 3 dimensions.

And filled in the spaces with thin plywood “planks”.

This where I got stuck so I left the sculpture alone collecting dust for just under a year while I made other pieces. Finally, in mild desperation,I got hold of it and filled and sanded and generally tidied it up till I was almost happy with it.

 

I decided to use colour so I found an old cleat from a boat called Sea Queen own by the Museum. Sea Queen is being renovated at the Museum so the old cleat was not needed. I decided to use the old paint colours on the cleat as my colour scheme for “Ship”. The cleat has been painted and overpainted many times in the past. I could identify 4 different blues and a green.

I matched these colours in acrylic paint, fixed a pattern of masking tape on the sculpture and started painting in the shapes.

These are all the colours on the cleat, reproduced faithfully.

Finally I decided to pick out the curves in pure magenta.

I don’t know why I chose magenta but once I had imagined this colour in place I could think of no other. I’m quite pleased with it.

She now sits on a fine larch base ready for exhibition.