The rime of the modern mariner
Trained as a shipwright, James Dodds soon realised his true calling was painting boats that ‘seem to float on an element that is neither water, air or earth,’ says Ian Collins
JAMES DODDS is the master mariner of current British art. Sailor, builder, campaigner, printer, publisher, painter: his highly productive life has been all about the crafting of boats. His latest pictures chart a valiant solo voyage and speak to the human spirit.
Born in the Essex port of Brightlingsea in 1957, Mr Dodds has since sailed six miles up the River Colne to his berth-place of Wivenhoe. From his waterside studio, he has a vision that now transcends the planet, steering vernacular working wooden vessels from origins in Viking longships out into the realm of dreams.
When he was growing up in Brightlingsea, the little town was largely self-contained, from boat-building to fishing via scores of ancillary saltwater trades, with a lot of messing about in boats. Not only messing, either—local yachtsmen have raced successfully for Olympic gold.
Dreams also foundered in maritime nightmares. The lives of local fishermen and traders were lost to storms near and far; Donald Crowhurst famously jumped overboard from his Brightlingsea-built boat in 1969, during the first single-handed, non-stop round-the-world yacht race, after faking his position and sailing around in circles.
Busy as a child building up stories and visions for future books and pictures, Mr Dodds added an early fable of his own. He was overheard telling strangers that he was the son of a shipwright—his father, Andrew, was really an artist, casting his own family in Radio Times illustrations for The Archers.
From confinement in classroom prisons due to dyslexia, the young artist learnt to sail on Essex fishing vessels—colchester smack, winkle brig—before crewing on a Baltic trader’s North Sea crossings. At 15, with only an O-level in art, an iron will and a passion for making and mending things, he became an apprentice shipwright with Walter Cook & Sons of Maldon. Black-timbered and brownsailed Thames barges, once the main mercantile vessels on this stretch of east coast, were being converted into pleasure craft by shipwrights working in pairs. Veteran Alf Last, the new boy’s partner and mentor, said: ‘I shan’t say noth’n. You’ll just have to watch me.’ He did, until he knew boats backwards.
Once trained as a craftsman, the boatyard’s self-appointed resident artist, drawing through work breaks, realised his hobby was his true vocation. Seven years of labouring at art schools ensued, with scholarships and prizes taking him from Colchester to Chelsea in London and the Royal College.
As well as paintings overloaded with allegorical meaning, Mr Dodds gouged a deft line in linocut prints and triumphed over dyslexia to launch the fine-edition Jardine Press, initially using a mammoth, Victorian cast-iron press, with every inked word painstakingly assembled from trays of lead type.
His best work, always about the business of boats, focused on the builders, in part as emblematic images of himself. At this point, the artist moved to Wivenhoe and built himself a house and a studio—also waging doomed battles to save closed shipyards on his home river from being bulldozed for housing.
In 2000, surveying a large canvas ‘covered in eclectic bits from everywhere’ and failing to coalesce, he painted suddenly and swiftly the outline of a monumental boat over the top, in brilliant blue pigment. ‘It was the sort
of boat I’d helped to build. This time, I physically built it on the canvas and called it The Blue Boat. The vessel was everyday and universal; an archetype embodying everything.’
Advancing from a backdrop of deep-ocean black, the overlapping timbers shone in marine blues and greens, with a glimpse of a red interior holding a strange illumination and suggesting a haven from all that is cold, dark and dangerous. It signalled a future fleet of painted boats, both humble and unearthly. The maker tackled each portrait in the way he had worked on the surfaces of actual vessels —scraping back paint and building up the ground again to keep them watertight.
‘Colour and surface become more and more important the more minimal the subject,’ Mr Dodds reckons. ‘If you isolate something in space, despite all the apparently literal rendering, you create a mystery.’
As the writer Julia Blackburn notes: ‘His boats seem to float on an element that is neither water, air or earth and they are illuminated with a mysterious light such as you get just before a storm breaks and I think it’s these two qualities that gives them the mysterious nature of apparitions. They also have something that I can only call an inner calm, a meditative quality that makes them good to stare at, until you are lost within the act of contemplation.’
The artist further underlines artisan expertise in interior images, where congregations of timbers resemble whale skeletons, medieval church roofs or the insides of musical instruments. The point being that a community of elements makes a harmonious whole—with the subliminal message that, rather than being alone and all at sea, we are all in the same boat.
His linocuts have also depicted gull’s-eye panoramas of coastal communities from Scotland to Cornwall, now echoed by paintings of traditional inshore craft, evolving with subtle variations to fit each port. In creating such a record, he has championed their rescue and revival.
Mr Dodds had already travelled for source material to yards and museums from Scandinavia to New England when lockdown led to a deeper meditation on the ways that Viking models adapted into vessels of singular sturdy beauty, as they reached across the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Black Sea. His iconic new pictures venerate buoyant skill.
‘James Dodds 2021’ is at Messum’s, Bury Street, London SW1, November 4–26 (020– 7287 4448; www.messums.com). ‘James Dodds: The Blue Boat’, by Ian Collins, is published by Jardine Press (£35)