Man uses love of sailing to capture vivid portraits

BRIDGEPORT » It was as a sailor and an artist that Brechin “Brec” Morgan set out nearly 20 years ago from Block Island, Rhode Island, at the age of 51 to circumnavigate the globe singlehandedly in his 27-foot Pacific Seacraft Orion sailboat he calls the Otter.

Early on in his 32,000mile journey, his dual passions were sated as he approached Mount Temetiu, which rises from Ta’a Oa Bay on the island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. This iconic South Pacific Ocean peak signaled safe harbor and a chance to visit the final resting place of one of art’s towering figures.

“Take a look at that dark area, right there. Do you see all those trees?,” Morgan asks, pointing to one of his paintings hanging in Southport Galleries. “Up to the right, just about where the last trees are, there is a graveyard, a big cemetery, and that is where (Paul) Gauguin is buried. I went up there to see his grave.”

Morgan’s ode to the famous French post-Impressionist painter is a lush image, re-created in acrylic paint and inspired by one of hundreds of sketches he made of places and people he encountered during his four-and-a-half-year journey; there are 18 such sketchbooks.

“There was this strange, beautiful sunlight,” he says, of the rose-gold hue that would swath the tip of the peak in late afternoon. “It was just so rich.”

Morgan, a Milford resident with a studio at the American Fabrics Arts Building in Bridgeport, is the star of a solo show, “Voyages & Vistas: Southport to Sri Lanka,” at the gallery through July 4. It doesn’t take long to see among the dozens of paintings of his voyage and other jaunts his appreciation of the many ways humans create floating vessels, from handmade fishing skiffs to the large cargo dhows he saw in the port city of Massawa in the African country of Eritrea.

“I was particularly fascinated with these guys,” he says, as he wanders to another painting featuring cargo dhows that dock right next to modern freighters. “They were these giant, old, home-built things, with very high prows and sterns. .. The Red Sea has particularly rough, short, steep seas and this design works really well.”

During his world travels, Morgan took stacks of photographs and kept journals where he hopes to find inspiration for a book. Unlike most sea captains, who only have words or photos to fall back on, Morgan had his artist’s eye to help record his voyage. Were the seas off Flinders Island in the Great Barrier Reef as green as Morgan depicts them? They were close, but he added a bit more green. It is the way he best translates the pleasure he felt knowing that a long day’s sail in high winds would soon end with safe shelter on the lee side of the island.

“I do use photographs for references, but a painting doesn’t work as a painting until you have gone beyond the photographic aspects of it,” he says. “There is something about the experience that needs to be brought out that can only be brought out in paint. One of the reasons I paint rather than write about it is that there is a quality of experience that I think one can only capture through the visual experience. It’s a way to be back and present in the moment as I remember it.”

Since Morgan was a child, the ocean and boats have enthralled him. He grew up in Guilford and spent his summers on the beach, fishing and swimming. “I knew the water on that beach touched every other beach in the world and the concept came to me that I could get a boat and it would take me to every beach on the planet. You know, right from here.”

His first explorations were close to home, zipping around the Thimble Islands off the Connecticut coast in a Blue Jay sailboat. By 17, he was crewing on sailing charter boats in the Caribbean, which led to his first effort to sail around the world. Signed on to crew a 40-foot wooden sloop, he and his young boat-mates were no match for a hurricane off Bermuda in the first leg of the journey. The badly damaged ship limped its way back to shore in South Carolina, where the crew dispersed and Morgan entered an associate degree program at the Silvermine College of Art in New Canaan from 1966 to 1968. (It closed in the early 1970s.).After a short stint on an oyster boat and other odd jobs, he opened Morgan Signs in South Norwalk. Even as he ran his sign company, which closed in 2000, he created several nautically inspired outdoor murals, including one of coastal schooner Alice S. Wentworth (built in South Norwalk in 1863) on the side of an historic building at the corner of Washington and Water streets. These days, Morgan’s nautical offerings are attached to memories, such as the one that comes back when he looks at a painting of the Caribbean island of Nevis.

“This was the first place I went (to) twice; it’s where I closed the circle,” he says. “I had this goal for most of my life and after I actually achieved it, I felt like I had lived next to a mountain all my life and woke up one morning to find that it was gone. It was strange; a space without a goal.”

He since has filled his time with art, exhibitions, jaunts on the Otter and time with family. Last month, he and a group of artists met as part of an annual tradition and fanned out across Marblehead, Mass., to capture plein air scenes for an annual three-day, weekend show at the Arnould Gallery. For about a week they create, collectively, about 50 pieces and then gather on Friday to frame, wire and hang their work in time for the Friday night opening.

As a solo adventurer, Morgan would sometimes set up for plein air painting during his sojourns on land. For his Marblehead jaunts, he is part of a crew.

“I’ve known these guys for about six years,” he says of the group. “About six of us always get together for 6 a.m. breakfast at the Driftwood Diner, where the waitress there looks forward to us coming every year. Then, we are out hitting the bricks by 7. It’s just a great community of plein air painters.”