Right Side

Drawing boats can be a challenge especially when you want them to have soul. There's the curving lines, foreshortening, and heaving postures in moving water. Some people, like my old friend Buckley Smith are able to do it without much effort. He was pretty much a sailor of the same ability.

Sketching for me goes back to childhood with maritime drawing coming much later. The great awakening came in 1979 sitting on a dock in southern Maryland. My friend Neil, who I had bought my boat Quelle from, asked me to come up from St. Augustine and help him design and build out a restaurant in Solomons Island that he was going to lease. I prepared Quelle for my absence and headed north. I arrived to find Neil and the owner in a squabble over the lease and I was left with my hands in my pockets. I had purchased a copy of the popular Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and dove in. After many exercises in the book I started to see better and my drawing improved. After decades of concept drawings in my design work, sketches for painting in exotic lands, and now in my maritime painting ... I still think back to those days on that Chesapeake dock when I was lucky to have "nothing to do".

Learning to draw upside down