53CLASSIC SAILOR52 CLASSIC SAILOR

Iconic is a word that gets used rather too loosely these days. Yet it is totally appropriate to James Dodds’ paintings of boats. Meticulously detailed, they hang in darkness or an abstract glow, which creates a somewhat surreal, Magritte-like

feel. They are at once delightfully attractive and challenging. They seem to represent a heritage which is demanding not to be forgotten. James himself speaks of them as a meditation, and “the balance between the known and the unknowable”.

He has a major exhibition, titled Wood to Water, currently on at the Firstsite gallery in Colchester – just up the Colne river from

As the east coast artist James Dodds prepares for his current major exhibition, he talks about his work to

Peter Willis

his home in Wivenhoe and his birthplace in Brightlingsea. We meet as he is preparing for it – in fact the interview is delightfully prolonged by his reluctance to leave his studio overlooking the river to go and get involved in the arrangements for it.

So, is it a selling show or a retrospective? “A bit of both,” he smiles. It’s taking place 15 years since his first major exhibition, at the same gallery, which in effect launched his career – a breakthrough in terms of both development and recognition. “It was the first show where I painted a boat in isolation – that was the Blue Boat. I painted it because I realised I had all this space to fill. I didn’t expect it to sell.”

to a new, dramatic (not to say controversial) purpose-built and larger building and once again James was faced with the task of filling some space.

His solution is, quite literally a change of direction and a return to roots. Rather than a perspective view of a boat, the centrepiece of the show a side elevation of the Colchester fishing smack CK 171, Peace. It is just over 20ft in length, effectively half-size, over five panels. It’s the largest painting he has undertaken and to make it he resurrected a long-dormant boatbuilding skill, lofting. This is the boatbuilder’s art of getting the measurements for a build by drawing out the boat in chalk on a prepared

ARTIST

But sell it did, almost immediately. The initial show, reflecting his work to date, had featured human figures engaged in maritime activites such as rowing – rotund, rather Beryl Cook-like people (a comparison which, when I offer it he doesn’t reject – “I’ve always liked her work.”) but by the time it went on tour round the country, it was all about the boats. It ended at the National Maritime Museum Greenwich, which was where I was first, all unsuspecting, confronted with them. To borrow a term from the vocabulary of art appreciation, I was totally gobsmacked.

So that was the first show, titled Shipshape. Since then Firstsite has moved

JAMES DODDS

James Dodds with Winklebrig ‘Breeze’ Oil on roof panel 2015 (130 x 169cm)

Oil, wood and water

“The balance between the known and the unknowable”

Above: Cromer Crabber, woodcutLeft: Wood to Water, ink on roof panel

55CLASSIC SAILOR54 CLASSIC SAILOR

floor, using flexible battens and nails to hold them in place to create the curves of the hull. “It has been 40 years since I lofted out a boat,” he writes in the catalogue for the show. “It was a Folkboat and I was an apprentice at shipbuilding training school in Southampton. This was the part of the course I enjoyed most. Lofting out this painting reminded me of this time, the concentration and accuracy required, endlessly checking and rechecking measurements, then finally correcting by eye.”

Unlike a real boat, James was working in two dimensions. But his decision to superimpose the fore-and-aft body plans – half bow, half stern onto the boat’s midship section, creaes a sort of dual perspective, and is authentic: many lines were drawn up this way, to economise on paper, or floorspace.

Luckily, he now has the space to do this. About two years ago he transferred his painting from the cramped studio on the side of his house, filled with printing machines for his printmaking and Jardine Press activities, to a spacious industrial unit in the redevelopment of the old Cook’s Yard on Wivenhoe’s waterfront. “It’s so nice to be able to look out on the water – the calm rhythms of the tide, and so much space and less cluttered. Nice to be able to just come down here and paint.”

One of the walls has rails fixed where paintings or works in progress can be hung. This is where the pentaptych of CK171 was created. Today as we chat, James hauls out

Above: Colchester Fishing Smack, pentaptypch, oil on board 2015, 153 x 610cm

and hangs up finished works to show and talk about.

Up goes one painted on very rough boards. “It’s the roof panel of the family’s beach hut at Brightlingsea. My grandfather built it in 1953 after the previous one floated away in the floods. All the beach huts floated up and smashed into each other. So he built a trapdoor into the floor of this

JAMES DODDS

one to allow the tide to come in and stop it floating about. We told other people about it, but they thought we were daft. We rebuilt it at the beginning of this year – the roof is a lovely quality of sawn timber, pine of some sort.” The painting itself is of James’s own boat, the Winklebrig Breeze, built by Shaun White 10 years ago. It’s not in the show, though others painted on bits of the beach

hut are. It was rejected by the gallery, but it did somehow make it into the catalogue.

Then comes a more surprising painting, one with people in it. James takes great pleasure in providing the narrative. It’s of Jimmy Reid addressing the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1971 after the Heath government had refused to continue funding the yard despite a full order

ARTIST

“It’s been 40 years since I lofted out a boat. Lofting out this painting reminded me of that time – the concentration and accuracy required”

book. This led to the famous work-in where, under union control, four ships were completed. The red flowers in the foreground refer to the bunch of roses with which John Lennon accompanied a £5,000 donation to the fighting fund.

“It’s the first thing I’ve done with people in it for, what, 20 years?” James explains. “The UCS action inspired Solidarnosc at the Gdansk shipyard, and I did a painting of that when I was a student. Recently my conscience began pricking me, so I decided to create this as part of a tripytych celebrating shipbuilding on the Clyde.” It will go to Essex University.

Boat building is at the heart of what James does – his education embraced both it and fine art (at the Royal College of Art), and he is a keen supporter of restoration projects. The local Pioneer Trust is one – Rupert Marks, its founder, is lending the Brightlingsea smack Hyacinth to stand outside Firstsite for the duration of the exhibition. Another is Rescue Wooden Boats at Stiffkey, north Norfolk.

The status of boatbuilding has changed over his adult lifetime from an essential industry to, in effect, a private obsession, and an optional luxury. “Boatbuilders have to build what they want and try to sell it,” James reflects. “Painting – it’s become a very similar way of life.”

The exhibition Wood to Water continues at Firstsite, Colcheter (firstsite.uk.net) until 14 February. Possible tour venues and dates are under discussion. ‘Timepeace’, a timelapse film of the lofting and painting of the Colchester smack CK171 can be seen at http://youtu.be/OnfxWfS8JK0

Left: Jimmy Reid addressing workers at Uppoe Clyde Shipbuilders

Left: Crabber Stern (detail)Above: Falmouth Work Boat, Looking Back

Above: Yorkshire CobleBelow: Winklebrig, carved in shallow relief on mahogany