Jasmine Langcaster-James
ENG 369
Martha Rojas
9th May 2018
Critical Preface – A Triptych of The Feared, The Sublime and The Self
I chose to do the creative project for the final in this class to explore the way the narratives compel us to imagine and create. I produced a triptych of three scenes inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Foot-Prints on the Sea-Shore’ and Henry David Thoreau’s ‘The Shipwreck’, from Cape Cod. I chose the form of a triptych, composed of ink and watercolour paintings, because I wanted to focus on my three favourite texts from this semester, but also use this exercise to examine the similarities and differences between them while I created the three pieces. My aim was to have media I used, and the subject matters within the pieces, to reflect the form and themes of the texts: the ultimate theme being the way the ocean affects human beings, but human beings do not affect the ocean with any lasting impact.
While deciding on which medium to use, I was being drawn constantly to watercolour paint and inks. Watercolours perfectly capture the fluid look of the ocean. The ability to create varying tones in the bleeding pigment means that depth can be created to give the illusion that the water is deep and full of lurking shadows; darker areas that contain more black paint pigment appear deeper than the lighter areas with less pigment and blue tones. I did not want to use a light blue for the colour of the ocean to reflect the darkness of the tones of the texts. The ocean is not referred to as idyllic or bright, but dark and almost menacing, and I feel the use of dark navy and black portray this well. For the main subject matter of each piece, i.e. the skull and footprints, the whale and ship, and the shipwreck and gull, I wanted to only use line drawings made with black ink. Therefore, the areas with less shading or lines appear in stark contrast to the fluid effect of the sea paintings. I was initially inspired to use line drawings after having seen the whale ivory etchings in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, as seen below:
I attempted to create a similar effect in my drawings to the etchings on the whale teeth and bone kept in the archives, in an attempt to connect better with the whaler’s interpretation of the sea, ships and sea creatures such as whales.
I decided I wanted each triptych to appear in the confines of a circle shape for multiple reasons. Firstly, for the Thoreau piece, the circular shape depicts the holes at the ends of telescopes and ship portholes. For the Hawthorne piece, I thought circle is the most fluid and eternal shape, composed of no straight lines or edges, which I feel is most applicable to the ocean itself, and reflects the cycle of walking and transforming the self. Lastly, for the Melville piece, the circle shape depicts a target; the ship sits outside of the target while Moby Dick is the centre of the aim. I toyed with the idea of outlining the circle in red ink to make the shape stand out, but decided it detracted from the dark tonal values in the image.
For my Hawthorne piece, entitled ‘The Self’, I was mainly inspired by the sentence, ‘Thus by tracking our footprints in the sand, we track our own nature in its wayward course, and steal a glance upon it when it never dreams of being so observed’ (Hawthorne 167). The fascinating concept of a walk along the beach as a transformative experience was why I connected with this text. Though I initially found it difficult to plan a way to represent this topic, I settled with a skull sitting on a cliff and footprints leading away from it into the ocean. Death and the ocean are intrinsically linked, as the other texts I have read this semester suggest. Consequently, the skull not only represents the bones washed up ashore, but also the old self that dies and is left behind at the shore, and the footprints represent the new self that has been transformed at the ocean’s brink, and is walking away from the old mind left behind. The footprints lead to the ocean and fade away, as opposed to leading down the beach, because I wanted to convey the connection between the self or mind and the ocean in that moment, and how they become one. The idea that walking through nature, and being immersed in the natural world, can help one greater our understanding of ourselves is one that many authors tend to write into their works, as it is something most readers can identify with. This action is the pastoral tradition of creating a ‘narrative structure in which the protagonist leaves civilisation for an encounter with non-human nature, then returns having experienced epiphany and renewal’ (Garrard 49). The pastoral ideology of walking in relation to self-discovery and development is prevalent in early 17th Century literature: for example, Jane Austen was also an author who was known for focusing on walking and self reflection, using extensive walks in nature as a way of remembering or clearing the mind.
The Thoreau piece, entitled ‘The Sublime’, was inspired by the sentence ‘The ocean did not look, now, as if any were ever shipwrecked in it; it was not grand and sublime, but beautiful as a lake’ (Thoreau 20). In order to portray this scene, I chose to depict calm water surface, as opposed to waves that are in my Melville piece. I also included a flying bird in the foreground to create the idea of a ‘bird’s-eye-view’ perspective of the water from above, where the wreck blow cannot be seen, as Thoreau described in ‘The Shipwreck’. Though the surface of the water is calm and the sky is left unpainted, I wanted to portray a ‘sublime’ scene below on the ocean floor, with the darkness of the watercolour pigment, to highlight the difference between what can and what cannot be seen. Philosopher Edmund Burke describes the sublime as found in ‘shadow and darkness and dread and trembling, in cave and chasms, at the edge of the precipice, in the shroud of cloud, in the fissures of the earth’ (Burke 64). This is precisely what I want to portray in my own painting, with the black ocean, the ominous shadows lurking in the water, the rough rocks and caves on the sea floor, and the unseen wreck. This piece ultimately explores the ocean’s ability to digest life, and for this reason, I chose not to include any dead body images in the sea. Rather I included the birds that live above the surface to portray the way nature continues even when human lives do not. This is a reference to Thoreau’s ‘mariner’ analogy, where he asks the reader why one would mourn for the sailor who leaves behind his body as an ‘old husk’, while the rest of nature continues on unaffected by human emotion and death (Thoreau 14-15).
The piece entitled ‘The Fear’, inspired by Melville’s Moby Dick, was also influenced by Burkes passage on the sublime, as I depicted a dark ocean, a dreaded shadow of the heavily shaded whale, and the ship almost balanced atop the water’s surface, as if on a precipice and about to fall. For this piece, it was important for me to subtly imply the relationship between the whale, and the ship through the faint scars on the whale’s skin. I experimented with including a harpoon leading from the boat to the whale, however one of the theories I find most fascinating about Moby Dick is that the whale may not be real, and may just be a figment of Captain Ahab’s imagination as a result of fear and anger. As a result, I ensured that the whale remains ambiguous as to whether it is seen by the crew, or if it exists as a shadow beneath the surface, as a subconscious fear of the unknown. Though I rarely practice drawing animals or sea life, I was pleased with how this part of the triptych turned out.
Overall, I believe that by connecting the three texts together through the same medium and form, I have gained a greater understanding of their similar ideologies and teachings of the ocean, and of life. I am pleased I was able to depict the way human life is connected to the sea without needed to draw any living human in the pictures, and leaving more subtle suggestions of human life there instead. I feel this conveys the way the ocean is unaffected as a whole by individual people, and will continue regardless of the impact they believe they have as anthropocentric beings.
Triptych Information
- Dimensions – 8 inches, by 8 inches.
- Materials – Watercolour paints and ink pens.
- Watercolour paper.
Works Cited
Thoreau, Henry David, ‘The Shipwreck’, Cape Cod. Parnassus Imprints Inc. Orleans, Massachusetts. 1986.
Reference images sourced: https://www.whalingmuseum.org/programs/30th-annual-scrimshaw-weekend-2018/
Garrard, Greg, ‘Pastoral’, chapter from Ecocriticism. In ENG 369 Pack.
Burke, Edmund, in: Greg Gerrard, ‘Wilderness’, chapter from Ecocriticism. In ENG 369 Pack.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, ‘Foot-Prints on the Sea-Shore’, American Sea Writing (Library of America, 2000) out of print. In ENG 369 Pack.
