Ellis, Shipping on the East River, N. Y., 1820.
GORDON ELLIS was born and bred in Merseyside, the waterfront of England's great Midland port of Liverpool, where he lives today. Like many another child of the River Mersey, he spent his young years wandering around the wharfs and docks of the harbor, every moment he could. The steam whistles, the impudent chuff of innumerable tugs, the dignity of salt-stained merchantmen coming in from deep water evidently got in his blood, for he went on to train in naval architecture at John Brown's in Clydebank, and then studied with Walter Thomas, marine designer and painter. Long service in the Royal Navy in World War II made him familiar with men, ships and the seas in all their moods, an experience he enriched with work on fishing boats, crewing in ocean racing yachts, and sailing steam launches through the Irish Sea in more peaceful times. Much of his work today is of contemporary shipping. Those brought up in the ways of the sea, which
MARK GREENE, born in Philadelphia, studied at the Graphic Sketch Club and the Philadelphia Museum School of Art. Until 1967, he worked as advertising illustrator. Then he took seriously to painting ships, a lifelong interest. As a small boat racer, he likes to catch a vessel at a particular moment in her passage between sea and sky. "I find the fascination of the histories and experiences of the ships, masters and crews, the men who designed and built them, as interesting as painting the ships," he says. "I will preferably select
are not always easy, seek out his work, and he travels where the work calls him to paint the scenes he is called to at first hand. Here, in an historical excursion, he paints the working waterfront of South Street in New York in the days of sail. Liverpool and New York grew up together in the oceanic trade between
an episode in a ship's history to paint, feeling that the painting, when possible, should be more than just a portrait." He makes his home in New Rochelle, on Long Island Sound.
them, and root understanding of the hard work that drives ships across wide oceans is evident in this, as in all Gordon Eilis's work. He is represented in New York by Kennedy Galleries, but he was off painting ships in Greece when this was written, and no photograph of him was available for this review.
Greene, Flying Cloud, catches the most famous of clippers running in ideal conditions, "all her washing hung out," as sailors used to say, a thing of monumental but very lively grace and unforgettable beauty.
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