John Storrow

 This is a recent painting of a boat which was originally made as an object upon which to paint, in about 2002, like a canvas or a piece of paper. I then painted on the boat, not in the sense of painting a boat green or blue, but as a form of expression, like trying to paint art on a canvas. I gave it a variety of colored dabs to make it sparkle, so it might look like “Art”  The painting you see here above is a painting of the painted boat. Then finally, I re painted the sail of the boat, the one in in the painting, the way you would paint something a color, like the ordinary way a workman in a boat yard would paint a boat, in this case the sail. Hence the title: Painted boat painted, painted. I remember sailing this boat, which I still have, in the Charles river, following along in my Kayak. It’s about 18 or 20 inches long. I call it my “leaf boat” because the shape of the sail reminds me of a leaf.

  This one has been a bit of a challenge but I’m reasonably happy with it. I wanted the ripples to look smooth and ripply, not clunky and awkward.  Sharpie canoe is my biggest boat, she’s 52 inches long and sails like a dream. I’ve been trying to fix a minor leak in her Hull which, for some reason, I’ve been un able to pinpoint and plug with waterproof glue. I’ve re varnished the hull many times but the darned leak keeps coming back. I think the solution is to use a bilge pump in the form of a syringe and a piece of tubing and just suck out the puddle. 

This is one piece made up of two paintings that serve as illustrations. The title of the piece is "monument to a radio control servo". One panel has the monument, and the other one doesn't, but the servo is still there. You can't steer a model boat without one of these servos.

 For many years I would always get a sinking feeling when I allowed myself to think about all of art history in comparison to my own art. I always felt like an insignificant (relatively speaking) grain of sand on a whole beach, and I had to compete for attention with all of the other grains of sand. I always felt that There must be trillions of other peoples paintings in the world. It’s true that I always knew that it’s important to follow my own vision and none of those other artists should matter, but It was never about “how good I Am” so to speak, it was always about the sheer size of the beach, the number of grains of sand on the beach.  Competing for attention is a drag. But I guess you have to do that if you want to have an audience. Like The old “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” thing.  Epiphany: focus on the audience right in front of me, which I already have, and forget about the size of the beach of other artist...

I like to paint things that are not immediately obvious candidates for things to be painted. I like the shapes of the humidifier and the weird blue color of transparent water tank part. I used to paint water tanks all the time out of my imagination, now here it is in real life. Worked on it some more. It’s been very intense trying to paint it neatly without any lumps, bumps, and mistakes. (I’ve been painting this way only for the last four years or so. Before that I painted from my imagination) There’s something refreshing about having a clear objective, to look very intensely at something, and try and paint it. It feels more like hard work, in a good sense.  I used to feel like art was so open ended, you had to be daring, you had to challenge the establishment, you had to be big and bold like the American way of doing things. I’ve come to realize that it’s perfectly okay to not do that. Instead, I’m going to connect to things that interest me in a visual way. Ordinary things, like...