DO NOT PAINT

Seeing it through…the layers

And then Maggie and I took a walk.
Through the seaport village of Mystic, along the harbor’s edge, and out back to the shipyard.

A truly dog friendly museum with water bowls and benches and grassy greens in between the historic buildings…
and ships.
Vessels of all manner and size and in every degree of completeness and restoration.

As we rounded the harbor into the working shipyard we ran into the behemoth of a hull of the L.A. Dunton.
Drydocked for a major restoration, the commercial fishing schooner which was built in Essex, MA in 1921, was awaiting the ship carpenters to do what they do best…preserving ships and their history
so the stories can be seen and told a hundred years from now.

Out of the water she stood at least two stories tall. Stem to stern is 104 feet of massive wooden planking.
As we walked around the rear of the ship the sun…
there goes that wonderful sunlight again…
was raking over the hull.
The top half was deeply in shadow the beneath the slanting line the rust and paint work was alive with color.

The blazing red and the electric golds.
Walking up close I noticed those ceramic squares attached to different areas of the surface.
Worn almost to the point of disappearing, I could still read the words…

Do Not Paint

em just around the corner that day.

Well consider me challenged  Muses…you’re on !

My first art teacher Jim Gainor used to tell us…
Paint the air not the chair.
That giant negative space created by the opening where the propeller is housed presented the perfect frame in which to
paint the masts of the Amistad as I saw them just around the corner that day.

PS- The Docent at Mystic seemed to think that the plaques were meant to warn shipwrights
because the type of paint used would corrode the surface of the metal fastenings.
I observed that over the years this warning was overlooked.