MARINE ART: An Interview with Bill Gilkerson by Stuart M. Frank
Reproduced through the courtesy of SEA HISTORY magazine,
© 1998 National Maritime Historical Society

“Have You Ever Tried to Draw a Crocodile?”

Artists are often reticent about speaking of their work in the way that many of us would most like them to speak – to answer such questions as, What was going through your head when you did this? or, Why ever did you decide to do that? and so forth. 1 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 of his 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 SF: You’ve painted any number of historical ships and scenes; how important do you hold historical accuracy 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 accuracy 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 amount of work to a picture without making it a better picture per se.

SF: How accurate can an artist be with something he or she has never seen?

WG: That depends on what source material is available and how impassioned one is with trying to get the thing right, which can be really complex with a ship portrait. For instance, it took 20 years of what I can only call obsessive effort to find out what John Paul Jones’s Bonhomme Richard looked like.The breakthrough came in the form 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 Anacortes, 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 eyewitness accounts of that action, along with wind and sea conditions and computer calculations of the moon’s bearing and declination, 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 accuracy really counts?

WG: You’ve gone straight to the heart of a fairly profound question. In fact, it’s so complex for my enfeebled brain that 1 can only deal with it picture by picture, on the spot, with whatever counts to me. Between the sheer muscle- flexing 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. At least, there does for me, because there can be so much intricately researched detail that it freezes up the picture as a whole, which can be a real trap. Whenever I’ve been seduced by rivet-counting, everything else seems to suffer. I don’t know any formula for finding the balance, but I reckon it’s something everybody has to work out for him or her self. For instance, Turner illustrated a number of maritime scenes from centuries earlier than his own, and he was definitely more concerned with making a good picture than getting the exact lead of the rigging or, sometimes, even the hull shape. Sometimes he exaggerated his portraits of ships from his own time, ships he actually saw. So he was a lot more interested in his visual statement than his technical accuracy – thank goodness. Yet the earlier Van de
Veldes – whom Turner revered – were so accurate that they provided pictures that are reliable in exquisite detail. In their super-detailed grisailles the Van de Veldes became “rivet counters” par excellence, but without losing the life of the overall work. So anything seems possible, as long as you can bring it off.

SF: So, what would you call one of your historical pictures – a recreation or an interpretation or an impression? An educated guess or something else?

WG: No doubt all of the above in varying degrees, with a dollop of intuition thrown in. Skies and seas haven’t changed much over the centuries, and sailing is still sailing. So if a marine artist is familiar with these things, he can make a good guess at how, for instance, Henry Morgan’s hodge-podge fleet might have looked on a warm,
Caribbean evening in 1670, or how an Armada galleon in a gale might have looked a moment before hitting the rocks off the Connaught coast a century earlier, or a Dutch whaling ship at sea. The reconstructions, or interpretations, of those ships depend on what source material is available – models, orthographic drawings, photos, whatever.

SF: In the case of the poster that you made for the Kendall Whaling Museum, you had a contemporary Dutch model of a 17th-century whaling ship to work from.

WG: Yes, and a great luxury it was, having that. A reliable model is the most useful reference I can think of, bar none. You can pose it and it doesn’t sail off somewhere, and you can light it as you wish. I must add that, of the dozen or so maritime museum posters which I’ve done, the Kendall Museum poster was the most fun – first, because the 17th- century model made an interpretation of the actual ship easy, and, second, the creation of a 17th-century style “monstro” to go with it was a playful touch usually disallowed in the serious and hallowed halls of academia.

Without the luxury of a model, any visual reference is a treasure. Photos are certainly valuable, when available. Some pictures would be impossible without them. A recent experience with that is a picture I was commissioned to make of Bard’s Wharf at Point Hueneme, Ventura County, Southern California in the 1890s. The old wharf was long gone, leaving only a pair of century-old photos by way of record,
neither showing a very interesting view. But from them it was possible to build a cursory model allowing a drawing from a happier angle-not a copy. I find that very important. Photos are so indisputable to a representational artist, it’s easy to get sucked into their literalness. So they’re great for reference but deadening when copied. You find yourself altering the whole picture to accommodate a certain pose because that’s the photograph you’ve got enshrined on your drawing board or easel.

Of course, for references from the time before cameras, you’re reliant on other artists’ views, which can be completely fictional, though contemporary. Often I’m thrown back on simply representing a particular ship with a picture of a ship of its rig and size. For instance, while Spanish galleons played a huge role in the sea history of the world, specific visual information about any one of them is extremely scarce, which makes for more guesswork in their portrayal.

In the best of all possible worlds, before starting a ship’s portrait I would be able to actually sail aboard the ship, then view her from various angles outboard, sketching and making snap- shots, then take these to my studio, where I would also have a reliable model of her, along with books loaded with more photos.

SF: Have you ever had that situation?

WG: Not bloody often. But yes, in fact, just last July during the bicentennial sailing of USS Constitution, which was some kind of dream come true. She’s, of course, a pretty well-researched ship besides actually being there, so I was able to make my roughs, get some snaps, retire to my model and books, and make a diptych portrait – two views. Of course, soon after framing it I discovered small but embarrassing errors. I always seem to.

SF: Besides your chronology of Constitution pictures, you’ve done others on a theme, such as American whalers in the Western Arctic, the ships of John Paul Jones, and now you’ve made some 60 pictures which have been the main focus of an exhibit, “Under the Black Flag,” which David Cordingly curated. It opened last year at the South Street Seaport Museum, went on to The Mariners’ Museum and is currently at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia. My question is: Why pirates? Is it just for fun, or is there something more compelling about them?

WG: Both. I certainly didn’t go into it with the idea of 
romanticizing the pirates-any more than you did in writing your new book, The Book of Pirate Songs. (See end note. -ED.) In your introduction to it you explicitly de-romanticize piracy and deplore the savage deeds which created quite a lot of human suffering, and I do, too. But I also see them as human beings who were often enough the instruments of governments that were as cruel and aggressive as any pirate you can think of. Quite a number were kidnapped into men-of-war, systematically abused, and taught how to loot, pillage and destroy in the name of some monarch, only to find themselves (by a
twist of colonial 17th-century politics) branded as pirates.

It’s hard for me to think of them as “the pirates,” because they were such a collection of individuals. Some were savages, some more humane; there were gentlemen, like Sir Francis Drake (whom Elizabeth called “my pirate”), Henry Mainwaring, Sir Henry Morgan, to name a sample, and there were simple boucaniers. The original ones were market hunters making a more or less honest living on Hispaniola before the Spaniards started treating them very unpleasantly.

My piratical pictures are more concerned with the details of the ships and their settings than sociological issues. Piracy was certainly an important factor in the world’s maritime history. Anyway, I found great fun in peopling my pictures with portraits of my friends as the Brethren of the Coast. For instance, I did a picture of Harry Glasby’s trial aboard Royal Fortune using Lewie Howland for Glasby and Norm Flayderman as one of the judges. Next time I’ll put you in there.

SF: Most of us are aware that being a marine artist has in common with other callings the objective of putting bread on the table. Is there some key to making it all work as a livelihood?

WG: All I’ve been able to think to do is make the best pictures I possibly can, to my own taste, and hope that there are people who
will want them. So far I’ve been lucky enough to support my family, plus a hungry old sailboat and a couple of large dogs.

SF: But how does that work in the case of somebody such as you who has no gallery, no agent, very little participation in commercial exhibits, and no advertising at all?

WG: It is very important to somehow get the pictures out and seen. So far, enough of my work has been published here and there to accomplish this without use of any of the means you mention, although that’s now changing. John Stobart has invited me aboard as an associate artist with Maritime Heritage Galleries. John and I are long-time chums and colleagues. His work and mine are quite different – as you know he works primarily in oil and most of my recent stuff is in aquarelle. As of early summer, some of my things will go on display in the various Stobart galleries. I’m glad and honored, because I have tremendous respect for John, both as an artist and as a
businessman, which I’m not. He’s always run pretty much a one-man show, so this represents a considerable change for him – and for me, too, I should add.

SF: What would you say is the greatest satisfaction you’ve gleaned from your life as a marine artist?

WG: Just being able to pursue and develop my work and do a bit of sailing.

SF: Is there any particular picture you would call your favorite?

WG: Almost always that’s the one I’m working on at the moment, which is a feeling that starts to fade when it’s finished. (Hopefully not before that.) But I do have some lasting favorites, such as a chapter illustration made some years ago for a storybook which I wrote. It’s a picture of a Renaissance port with five little boys sailing a sprit-rigged skiff along its waterfront. It was tremendously enjoyable to be able to invent that scene.

SF: You are referring to your just-released novel Ultimate Voyage, A Book of Five Mariners. Although you’ve always been a writer as well as an artist, how do you explain the impetus to turn from your art to writing maritime fiction of all things? And why a novel?

WG: I don’t know, except that as the written word can never say a picture, the reverse is true, too. I’ve been so profoundly affected by the sea and what I’ve learned of it and from it, and from the people I’ve sailed with and other teachers, I couldn’t resist spinning it all into a yarn. Then, of course, the yarn had to be illustrated, at least as much as the publisher would allow. He’s been very generous about that, actually.

SF: What is it about the sea and about voyaging that provides so generous a canvas for transcendent thought and expansive notions, so rich a palette of vivid colors and subtle shades, which, methinks, no other theater can afford?

WG: I think it must have something to do with a voyage as a deeply moving symbol of our lives, which are like voyages, each one of us with our aloneness, groundlessness, and the necessity to navigate through all kinds of surprising waters without foundering or running onto rocks, or being taken by pirates. It’s a powerful metaphor, as you suggest – and a universal one.

SF: What project are you working on now?

WG: At this moment a picture of a royal dhow ghosting down an equatorial river, as seen from a shore richly populated by hippos and crocodiles, and I’m finding both to be harder to draw than the ship and its crew. Have you ever tried to draw a crocodile? It’s a very complex creature.

Copyright © 2012 Wm. Gilkerson