The plein air version of this scene was painted at the Galveston Plein Air event in 2024. I was really happy with how this piece turned out and even happier when judge Thomas Kitts awarded it the top prize. I think this was my favorite composition of 2024.

The curve of the guard rail, the sweeping, airy masts, the drooping mooring lines, and the massive yet buoyant hull resting on softly rippling water all come together to create a sense of calm weightlessness. That feeling of buoyancy was the central idea behind this piece.

For this studio version, I switched to a larger, square format to include even more rigging. When I'm painting something that has a lot of detail like this, I aim to tell the truth, but not the whole truth. The rigging started out, as with the plein air piece before it, as a mass of tonal color, out of which, I pulled the negative shapes (the air around the opjects) that would reveal the main structure of masts and rigging. I continued then to paint the objects themselves being careful to not loose the lost and found quality of my initial figure/ground strategy.