MARINE ART
John Stobart's ''WorldScape'' America's premier marine artist sets out on a new tack, twentyeight years after arriving in New York by Peter Stanford " I didn ' t know he had it in him ," I said , as the closing credits rolled up on the screen over a West Indian beach scene , where we had watched John Stobart dab, stroke and brush into be ing a vibrant recreation of that scene in oil paints, in hi s own idiom. I was frankl y stunned. What an incredible thing to d ~x pl a inin g on camera what is happening in a picture, while you are bringing it into being ! "I didn't know that anyone had it in them," said Norma, who actually is a painter herself. We were exalted (there is no other word for it), caught up in the splendor of the creation , and made aware of man 's mi ssion to re-create it, joyfull y, all of it-in this case, sailboards with the ir bright striped sail s, waving palm fronds, sea-smoothed sand and strolling people, and clouds, and sky, and a mountain hunched over the scene like a tutelary god overlooking it all , the swarming, busy happy life on the beach.
The Subject Finds You "W ell , actually, it wasn 't as tough as I thought it would be," said John a few days later, when other business brought me to Boston and I decided to stop by his studio on Union Wharf. "I was terrified , of course. The worst part was that we had to find a subject, and then paint it. But that isn' t what really happens. What really happens is the subject finds you. You ' re wa lking down a street and something reaches out to you. The nex t thing you know yo u get out yo ur paint box , you've had it, you ' ve got to paint it. " The video of John painting a beach scene in St. Barthe lemy which Norma and I had watched with suc h fasc ination , actua ll y shows that process. One sees John
"Though Venice is crammed with subjects, I spent three whole days in endless searching before I came across a view that jolted me into action." 26
framing and rejecting scenes , talking of balance, of fo reground and background , and always of seeking simplicity, espec iall y for the beg inning artist-who he is most interested in reaching in hi s new series of v ideos named " WorldScape." He walks by tantalizing scenes, distant is lands, graceful boats with underbodies exposed on the beach, noble headlands. He talks about what' s good about them . Then suddenl y he comes on something that gets to him-a curving beach, the palm trees, the pass ing people. And he says: "T hi s is it. Thi s has it- it' s magic." And fro m that po int, gentle viewer, you too are hooked , and you will feel the force that pull s the artist toward the scene and makes hi s brush dab, check, and push forward again to translate salt air and sunlight (" light bounci ng all around the place," Stobart says at one point) and the haze of distant hi Ils and the immediacy of rustling palm trees-al I this-into paint laid on stretched canvas. John Stobart brought some special equipment to this scene, equipment in the fo rm of artistic experience he had gone to some pains to acquire. When he arrived in the United States in 1965 , he had behind him years of training at
London ' s Roya l Academy School s and of o utdoor painting of nature from the life, a nd painting ships commi ssioned by steamship companies. And he had hi s heroes, the heroes of his kind of painting, in a proud lineage reaching bac k from the remarkable expressive work of Edward Seago (whose work also reached and astonished this writer in the years fo llo wing World War II) to the hay wains, wate r meadows and wet East Ang lian skies of John Constable a century earlier-with other paladins along the way like the French Eugene Boudin, a grand painter of ports and shipping on the Frenc h coast of the English Channe l, and Con sta ble's contemporary, the French landscape painter Jean Baptiste Corot- whose " View ofYilleneuve- lesA v ig non" Stobart remembers in his latest book, The Pleasures of Painting Outdoors, left him " absolute ly o ve rwhe lmed" when he first encounte red it in 1952, just over forty years ago. What Corot and Boudin, Constable and Seago taught Stobart was not to copy their work, but to work as they did , painting the outdoor world outdoors, from nature. And in doing so , he began to fi nd out how he rea ll y saw that world , and what he had to say about it. In other words, he was developing his own style, or"signature. " And when you come to think of it, isn' t thi s what draws you to an arti st and makes you seek out his wo rk- that you are sharing in his vision, hi s way of seeing the world?
An Artist's Studio I had been in Boston for the National Maritime Alliance Confe re nce in mid-September this year and stopped off to consult with
" Riodel/e Torresel/e," by John Stobart, o il on can vas, 16" x 12"
SEA HISTORY 67, AUTUMN 1993