August Tuesday at Rolleville

FYI, August Monday, the first Monday in August in the Bahamas, is a national holiday when many Nassau and Freeport residents go home to their origin islands to party. There are numerous small sailing regattas, beauty pageants, dances and sport field days then. For we Northerners and Maine-iacs the weather would be frightfully hot. Bahamians consider this time, when the trade winds still blow enough to keep down the sand flies, the height of wonderful summer. (As opposed to September, when the trades fail to do the job and life in the Bahamas is only barely bearable.)
Forget the subject, which is two racing dinghies, while racing home, pulled up on the beach, their captains catching a snooze. The painting is not about that.
This work is done on a canvas that has been repeatedly gessoed and smooth-sanded to a perfect porous Flake White surface. This in preparation for the repeated thin washes that create the image. This is a painting done almost in the same way as a watercolor, with many places reserved out as highlights. It is a brilliant and translucent work, only revealing itself as an oil through opaque areas that could never have been so contrasty without a little thickness and texture. There’s a limited palette, but just as is true with a good Winslow Homer….well, better yet…. Just as is true with the very best of Winslow Homer watercolors like “After the Hurricane”, a limited palette can still show all the color variation necessary, through subtlety. What makes it work is that each color is completely accurate. Thank god the days of amateurs doing abstraction are behind us. Some of them, just like you suspected, were phonies. It is impossible for the diligent figurative artist to be phony, and it is particularly impossible for the diligent figurative MARINE artist to be phony, since marine art is obviously wrong if even slightly inaccurate. Note the accuracy, in color and in draughtmanship, of Winslow’s “After the Hurricane.” “August Tuesday” is at least comparable.