MARINE ART
The Flowering of a Hidden Agenda By Willard Bond
After about fifteen years making the SoHo loft scene in Manhattan as both a ceramic muralist and easel artist, I got bitten by the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome bug. l moved into a rain jungle by the sea in Jamaica, WI, where for five years I experimented with geodesic construction with all manners of local materials from bamboo to ferro-cement; some experimentation on speculation and the last bit on a grant from USAID through the Peace Corps. My part of the coastline was absolutely no good for sailing which was greatly disappointing because sailing was my hidden agenda all along. In early 1976, for various reasons, Jamaica ceased to be the glorious place to live that it had been for me and my wife and I found myself at loose ends back in Manhattan gladly accepting a job as night pier master at South Street Seaport Museum. Note the year! Ships and the sea had always been in my repertoire as subject matter for painting, but not very profoundly. Operation Sail turned me around. I rediscovered ships in all their glory when I received the port lines from the young ladies of the Sir Winston Churchill on Pier 16. Those were great weeks for me. I was rediscovering watercolor as my medium-and the "subject matter" was all around me! Behind my office on Pier 15 sat a 33-foot skipjack. She was being rebuilt by Richard Fewtrell in off-hours from his giant task of restoring South Street's own square-rigger Wavertree. For me and my lady she was love at first sight. We bought her from Richard and today sail her out of Three Mile Harbor at the east end of Long Island, bringing her to the East River for occasional visits to South Street and to the National Society's headquarters pier across the way. I work entirely in watercolor now, almost exclusively ships and seascapes, with an occasional nude thrown in. The plunge for me has proved rewarding, ships and ships' people being a good crowd to be among. .i,
SEA HISTORY, SUMMER 1980
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The fishing smack Lettie G. Howard in the foreground nods daintily to the East River tide. Behind her is the sturdy bulk of the original Ambrose lightship of 1907 at South Street Seaport Museum's Pier 16. Below, Willard Bond celebrates the urgency and color of an ocean racer running under spinnaker.
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