MARINE ART: An Interview with Bill Gilkerson by Stuart M. Frank
Have You Ever Tried to Draw a Crocodile? rtists are often reticent about speaking of their work in the way that many ofus would most like them to speakto answer such questions as, What was going through yourheadwhenyoudidthis?or, Whyeverdidyoudecidetodo that? and so forth. I have known William Gilkerson for quite a few years and was glad to be asked to pose a few questions prompting him to address some of the causal features of his work and, perhaps, to reveal to us how some ofhis art comes to be. The answers for each artist are likely to be quite different. Gilkerson's answers, like his work, are unconventional and revealing, penetrating to the center of the creative consciousness. -STUART M. FRANK
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SF: You ' ve painted any number of hi storical ships and scenes; how important do yo u hold historical acc uracy to be in making a good picture? WG: They are two different things, it seems. I can't think historical accuracy has much to do with how good a picture is as a picture. A good picture says something to the eye, whereas historical acc uracy is a concept that speaks to the rational mind. These two things can co-exist very happily in a picture, as has been proven by a lot of marine artists from the Van de Veldes on down. Historical accuracy can add a tremendous amoun t of work to a picture without making it a better picture per se. SF: How acc urate can an arti st be with something he or she has never seen?
WG : That depends on what source material is available and how impassioned one is with a¡y ing to get the thing right, which can be really complex with a ship pom¡ait. For instance, it took 20 years of what lean onl y call obsessive effort to find out what John Paul Jones 'sBonhomme Richard looked like. The breakthrough came in the fonn of 39 sheets of plans that historian Jean Boudriot was able to draw up so that I could commission a model built by Dick Boss out in Anaco1tes, Washington. With it, plus admiralty drawings of HMS Serapis, plus sources for the other primary ship involved in the Richard!Serapis battle, plus some 39 eyew itness accounts of that action , along with wind and sea conditions and computer calculations of the moon 's bearing and decl ination, as well as some other stuff that I'm forgetting , it was possible to make a picture that was at least eligible to be a fair guess as to how those ships might have appeared during that moment over 200 years ago. Of course, if I could be magically visited by a vision of the real battle, I'd no doubt be very surprised. So in the end it's still a fiction. It's fun to try, though. SF: To clarify , what kind of accmacy really counts? WG: You've gone stra ight to the heart of a fairly profo und question. In fac t, it 's so complex fo r my enfeebled brain that I can onl y deal with it picture by picture, on the spot, with whatever counts to me. Between the sheer muscle-flex ing of a picture that goes for minute detail and another that doesn' t give a damn about any kind of accuracy there has to be a balance of some kind .