MARINE ART LIVES
CHARLES J. LUNDGREN counts himself a lucky man. He grew up sailing small boats in western Long Island Sound, enjoying fair weather and foul and learning all its creeks and byways. Having a noticeable bent for art, he studied at the Parsons School in New York, then topped this off with study in France, Germany, and Italy as well. As a young man he was able to pursue his fascination with the sea by sailing in many famous ocean racing yachts, and earned his living painting what he saw. His paintings hang in the New York Yacht Club, and he is a kind of unofficial artist for the Cruising Club of America, many of whose members' homes have a Lundgren over the fireplace. Sailing in these boats, from catboats to blue-chip racers, he mastered their ways and learned to paint them from inside out. After World War II Charles embraced a major challenge: to go to Europe and seek out the seagoing roots of the Isbrandtsen family, who have sailed ships in trade for several centuries. The fruit of that effort is a lively and utterly authentic museum of models, artifacts, and paintings, a recreation of the whole life purpose of a hard-driving shipping family extending across generations. To this work he brought his own authentic experience in thousands of miles of deep-sea and coastal sailing. A decade ago, when South Street Seaport Museum was in the making in New York, he brought vision and challenge and sustaining help to that enterprise and may be ranked as
Lundgren, Christian Radich, full-rigged Norwegian school ship.
one of the founders . His work by that time was already hung in Mystic Seaport, and his full range of historic background in the field, ranging from North Sea traders of two centuries back to modern container ships, proved invaluable to the undertaking . The Lundgrens, Charles and Sanchia, live today on a farm in New Milford, Connecticut, where the surrounding hills remind one of the ocean rollers. He was, naturally,
the official artist of Operation Sail, and moving on from that recently completed a series of twelve paintings of the whaling ship Charles W. Morgan, which has been shown at Mystic and will next be shown at the Mariners Museum in Newport News, Virginia. If Charles is a lucky man, his great gift has been to spread that luck around, with generosity and wisdom and a deep caring that shines through all his work .
Beddows, Sir Winston Churchill.
MICHAEL BEDDOWS, born in Staffordshire, England in 1931, started out studying art and working in an architect's office. For ten years he worked in automobile sales, pursuing sailing and art as his hobbies. Art won out when in 1972 he decided to paint professionally. Since then he has begun to make a name with paintings of grace and promise, like this of England's entry in Operation Sail, the Sir Winston Churchill, flanked by a modern racing yacht and an oldtime cutter, all in a lively sea and brilliant sun, close-reaching together. 12