The Boat Comes Together

As the summer progressed and the daylight decreased, my work hours increased. I was spending up to 14 hours a day with the wood-burning pen clutched in my hand, copying text onto the wood that would become my boat. I couldn't work fewer hours because I was scheduled to go up to Brooklin, Maine and work with master boatbuilder Geoff Kerr and my next opportunity to work with him wouldn't be until April. I finished burning the text with one day to spare (which I used to ride in the Transportation Alternatives NYC Century -- I really know how to relax).

The boat that I'm building for my voyage across Buzzards Bay is an Annapolis Wherry. Its design calls for planks of okoume plywood. It's lighter and stronger than using traditional planks. And part of my decision making process for this project is to use all the technical innovations available to ensure that I don't share the fate of my great-great-great-great grandfather, who died in a rowboat in the middle of the bay.

Plywood is not the most receptive of surfaces for wood-burning. In all, I spent four and a half months copying text onto the wood. As the hours of labor added up, my anxiety mounted as well. I knew that the boat's design called for sections of the hull to be reinforced with fiberglass. In other words, I would be covering my tiny, handwritten text. Before I started the project, I spoke with Geoff, who assured me that the layer of fiberglass would be absolutely transparent. But my text is so small that it's barely readable to begin with. Even the slightest blurring of the text could ruin the effect, my efforts, and the boat as a conceptual object.

I arrived in Brooklin on Sunday, September 15. I was able to afford working with Geoff because he was simultaneously helping ten other people who were also building Annapolis Wherries at the Wooden Boat School. And the entire process of building the boat was squeezed into a single week. On Sunday, Geoff got a head start on the undertaking, by doing the first step on everybody else's boats -- which was to glue the shorter lengths of planks together into the seventeen and a half foot lenghts necessary for the boat. I met him there and watched him glue together the first couple of planks -- and then glued mine together. Here's a picture of the building where we worked.

On Monday, I drilled holes in my planks at six inch intervals (nobody else working with Geoff had to do this because their planks had been pre-drilled), and then I tied the planks together with copper wire.

On Tuesday, I was really grateful to have ten other people in the shop. We all paired up and had a partner gather together the front of our boat, wiring the bow together. I drilled holes in the transom (the board across the back of the boat, and I was again grateful to have help holding the springy, unwieldy boards together while I wired it into place too. What's interesting is that all the wire is just there temporarily. It holds everything in place wile the boat is glued together with epoxy. The rest of the day was spent mixing small batches of epoxy and using a pastry bag to squeeze it in between the planks.

Wednesday, we removed all the wires and cleaned up some of the epoxy that dripped and squeezed out to places where it didn't belong. Then came the moment I'd been dreading: The fiberglass. Fiberglass comes in sheets that look like heavy white cloth. It is opaque. But once saturated with epoxy, it disappears. Imagine a microscopic glass fiber suspended in clear plastic. This is what my boat looked like by the end of the day wednesday:

You can still see the white edges of the fiberglass cloth that needed to be trimmed. But the text was visually unhindered. I had been worrying about this moment since I had decided to use the design for the Annapolis Wherry in the Spring of 2012. I left the shop giddy with relief. Though I did sneak back in right before going to bed to check that it really did look okay.

On Thursday we trimmed the edges of the cloth, continued to epoxy, and glued the rails onto the boat -- another job for which I was grateful to have help. I suppose one could rig up some system of clips to get the rails on with just one other person helping, But, really, three people are necessary to avoid unreasonable stress. With so many people in the shop, we used five people to carefully glue, hold, and clamp the rails into place. And five people did not feel excessive for the job -- especially when the epoxy started to cure mid-install and we had to put twice as many clamps (and a few strategic c-clamps) on my boat.

On Friday, we installed the decks over the air-chambers (which prevent the boat from sinking if it over-turns) and continued to epoxy. A lot of the work we did on Thursday and Friday would have been best spread out over four or five days so that epoxy could have cured between steps. And I was often dragging through gummy, partially-cured epoxy. The epoxy job is really rough as a result. But by the end of the day Friday, the boat was assembled. If I'd tried to build this boat without Geoff's expertise, I would have taken months. It will take me months to sand, re-sand, re-sand, and re-sand the ten coats of epoxy, paint, and varnish that I need for the finished boat. But I have a boat. And my months of labor putting text onto the wood worked just as I'd hoped. I am still experiencing aftershocks of relief and joy.

The Shortest Voyage

Last Friday, I finished burning text onto the oars that I started making last August. They're beautiful -- and, perhaps, useful. Over the weekend, they got a single coat of varnish. That's not enough for a long voyage. But I had nothing to worry about.

I decided to christen the oars today by attempting to row a racing shell. I tried this once before, with similar results. So I wasn't expecting to get far -- and didn't. About ten seconds into the voyage, it ended. Weather report: the water in New Bedford Harbor is currently 55 degrees. I am glad that I decided to make this attempt today. My original idea was to do it on January 31, the anniversary of Gideon Dexter's death (the event around which this whole project revolves).

I need to thank the four people who helped me today: Cheyenne Bayse, Carolyn Flynn, Sheilagh Flynn, and Calder Reardon. All the boats had been stored for the winter, so preparing for today's row and the safety precautions necessitated by the chilly water were not simple. Of course, I need to thank also New Bedford Community Rowing -- and assure all readers that novice rowers are not encouraged to get into elite boats like this. I was indulged because I wanted to experience exactly how far I have to go in learning and preparing for my row. I only got about 20 feet from the dock. So my question has been answered.

Prequel Images

I finally have professional images of the drawings that will be part of my upcoming show. I've posted the whole series on my web site. The largest drawing, a triptych, is 84" tall and each panel is 42" wide. When framed and hanging, it spans about 12' of wall. As with my other large drawings, it is overwhelming in person, but the detail gets lost in a JPG. Here's a detail:

The first ten drawings in this series, portraits of Ivy League rowers, were part of my 2011 show at Schroeder Romero. I followed those portraits by making seven modestly-sized landscapes, the triptych, and then two more portraits. All of the drawings use rowing as subject matter. Like my previous drawings, these pieces use micrographic text to compose the images. The series uses the entirety of Adam Smith's *The Wealth of Nations.* All told, I copied by hand 507 pages of text. The largest, the triptych, used 265 pages of text:

I think of this large work as the anchor of the series. It shows the image of a steamship getting subsumed by a storm at sea. A single passenger, a woman, stands on deck, hands clasped, looking out for rescue. A single sculler rows towards the doomed ship.

Adam Smith's book is something of a Bible for economic conservatives. Smith famously refers to the economy as being guided by an "invisible hand." However, like the Bible, the text is vast -- so vast that it seems, at times, to contradict itself. In addition to arguing for the virtues of self-interest, Smith also notes that governments should probably not allow businessmen to guide legislation. Although he hails the division of labor as the cause of wealth, he also notes that it has dehumanized workers and led to moral degradation. His book is speculative, not necessarily prescriptive.

I have engaged with rowing imagery for a number of reasons. One of the most basic is that crew, in addition to being a favorite art historical subject, also brings with it an undeniable mark of class privilege. In 1776, when Smith published the book, notions of class were unformed. And crew isn't the only sport that announces the privilege of its participants; all sport takes skills developed for the purpose of survival and transforms those skills into autonomous activity. The first marathoner, Pheidippides, ran 26 miles to announce to Athens that the Persians had been defeated -- not to achieve a personal best.

The transition of boating from a necessary skill for fishing and transportation into a sport is neither simple nor is it clearly an evolutionary improvement. Sport in itself calls into question the idea of progress. The Wealth of Nations continually makes the case for modern economic systems being more evolved than what came before, even though Smith cites problems with that narrative.

It struck me while reading The Wealth of Nations that so much of what is foundational for modern economic theory is also foundational for scientific theory and for art theory -- and are recurring questions in our own lives. Finding meaning is never as straightforward as it first appears. How can one summarize the visceral experience of making these drawings, of copying a 507 page book, of standing in front of the record of that much labour.