Photojournalism as Art

Art:

High quality of conception or execution, as found in works of beauty; aesthetic value.

- American Heritage Dictionary

In my creation of visual art, I focus on concept, context, execution and intentional aesthetic beauty. Whether the story is suggested in a visual artwork or told overtly in a novel, the medium should matter less than the message. Either way, the creative expression should be an engaging, emotive and moving experience for the viewer.

In reality, the act of creation is rarely beautiful for the creator. Exploring a subject from inspiration to capture to development, color studies, editing, paper and media tests and final form is relentlessly challenging. Inspiration is helpful, yet each of us receives it in often diverse ways. For some, it comes readily to the committed life in which art and the disciplines that accompany it are organizing influences of the smallest daily choices. For others, inspiration comes after a process of exploration, testing and reflection. My curious mindset motivates me to ask, observe and process more or less constantly. This way of being creates more inspiration than I have waking hours to pursue. When I am inspired by a subject, such as a tall ship, there is nothing that can stop me from exploring its design, history, meaning and value to its owner, captain, sailors, shipyard, sailmaker, student, scholar, art lover, citizen of its flag country, its strengths, weaknesses, and the sources of its white oak, live oak and black locust and other woods.

1863 Barque Starboard Quarter New Framing Futtocks - Restoration Series by Mark Roger Bailey

The Art of Sail - RESTORATION

For me, the journey is the thing. Five-sensing a subject helps me ensure that my viewer experiences the artwork as if they were with me under the vessel when I photographed it on a cold January afternoon. Realism counts significantly in this regard. If the hair stands up on the back of my neck when I crawl under a 300-ton antique vessel to capture the light on 150-year-old strakes, I’m doing my job. My hope is that my print’s owner will feel something akin to my feelings of vulnerability, awe and, yes, fear that the creaks of the wooden timbers aren’t signaling the ship’s collapse. Most importantly, I hope that he or she experiences the same rush of enthusiasm for the stories of the shipbuilders who shaped those strakes and fitted them into place with such extraordinary care and skill that this massive sailing ship is as seaworthy today as it was more than a century and a half ago. This is a large part of what my RESTORATION series is all about.

If I’ve succeeded, beauty will wash over the senses of the observer. A moment of the tall ship’s past will live on for years to come on the print owner’s wall. Time moves on, and our actions live on in memory, in art and in their effects on the future. In this sense, every winning moment is a lens on all time.

Each glance, each 100th of a second is the fruit of ten million years. We are both the inheritor of an unknown stranger who long ago conceived our moment’s bounty and we are the creator of time’s gift to another whom we will never meet.

Each of us is the sum of all these moments along the flow of time. Art is creative expression of our presence here, now, whether it is words on the page of a book or a fine print in a picture frame.  

Collectible limited edition art by Mark Roger Bailey

View my Tall Ships collection and please stop by my Gallery Shop to consider a special series of signed and numbered limited-edition prints for the collector. A miniature print of a tall ship would make a wonderful gift for yourself or a thoughtful surprise for a friend. 

Today, We Are All Irish

Editing and Remembering

Working on the novel today. I am remembering my research of the Book of Kells in the Library of Trinity College in Dublin. So long ago, it seems. Not to the Book of Kells, I'm sure. The last of its 340 folios was completed in 384AD.

Today is March 17, and the weather is beautiful where I am. The sun is bright in a blue sky and warming the chill of a late winter morning beside the Pacific. It's a good day and I am grateful for it. That said, I'd rather be in The Temple Bar this morning for a proper Irish Breakfast.

Irish Breakfast

• Eggs

• Bacon (chewy, not crispy)

• Sausages

• Mushrooms

• Baked Beans

• Grilled Tomato

• Black Pudding

• Toast  (Irish soda bread for me, thanks)

• Butter

• Marmalade

• Tea  (coffee for this Yank)

Dublin is 11 hours and 5,145 miles away measured in time and miles but not in the more accurate distance of memory, desire and the senses. The streets, Georgian stone architecture, the greens, buskers and bracing poetic passions of that place are just outside my mind's window today.

The annual St. Patrick's parade will cross over the Liffey River at O'Connell Street and enter another year of one of western society's most enduring traditions.

Patrick and Ireland are indelibly bound in our imaginations, yet he is not Irish. He was born Maewyn Succat in Roman Britain. When he was about 16, Irish pirates kidnapped him and sold him into slavery to a Druid high priest in Ireland.  He worked as a shepherd for six years before escaping back to Britain. Eventually, he had a dream in which a voice gave him the mission of returning to Ireland to work with the Christians there. Patrick was beyond good for the Emerald Isle. He adopted the Irish and by the time of his death, he had established schools, monasteries and churches all over the island. 

Perhaps it's the Irish in me, but I'd like to think that Patrick and today's Irish would recognize one another if he were to return to Ireland for today's celebration in Dublin. He would welcome the embrace of that legendary and companionable literary city.

Now, I'm off in my mind to The Temple Bar for a stout. With a raising of the glass by the Scot in me to the North-Northeast and a corresponding Sláinte to the assembled patrons in the pub, I settle in to appreciate ballads accompanied by Uilleann pipes.

Photo: Leandro Borges de Carvalho

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you.

Mark

Navigating Choices

Art - Like Literature - Captures Essential Truths

Much of the art that moves me explores our experience at the intersection of one world and another. Sea and land. Man and woman. City and country. Feeling and intellect. Offense and defense. Generosity and greed. Past and future. Life and death.

A practical, real-life example is the boat. A boat floats on a membrane separating two universes: fathomless reaches below and infinite space above. Sailors who live in that narrow in-between are a metaphor for each of us who live between now and then, yesterday and tomorrow, right and wrong, left or right, risk and reward, failure and success. We all float, sink or fly by the choices we make.

Seen in this way, the art of sail becomes a bridge between the creative process and the secret explorer in each of us.

Three-masted Topsail Schooner Oosterschelde NL (2018) by Mark Roger Bailey

Lovers desperately seek perfect union yet are distinct beings. Prisoners of their bodies, they are separated by heart or mind, love or lust, soul or body, past or future. They are so close yet so far away.  

Day and night are rich with potential meaning between bright color and blackness, light and shadow, openness and mystery, work and sleep.

The fact is that I am thinking about storytelling puzzles constantly, making notes about whether this story renders better through this lens or on that page. For too long, the New England Yankee in me always said, go slow in revealing what you're up to. You'll confuse readers if they think you're passionate about art, and you might confuse art collectors if they know you've published novels and optioned them for the movies. The Californian in me says relax, don't second guess yourself, trust the flow. It's way bigger than you and will show the way. The traveler in me asks what are you doing? Whatever it is, is it more important than experiencing the stories that are happening right now in the Hebrides, Antarctica and the Aegean? Who will I listen to today - the Yankee, the Californian or the traveler? The writer or the visual artist?  

What are we to do with all the potential of these intersections between universes? We must choose. Art is born in the choices we make, where we sometimes find ways to express the beauty and meaning of this existence between opposites.

Collectible limited edition art by Mark Roger Bailey

View my Tall Ships collection and please stop by my Gallery Shop to consider a special series of signed and numbered limited-edition prints for the collector. A miniature print of a tall ship would make a wonderful gift for yourself or a thoughtful surprise for a friend. 

The Art of Sail | Tall Ships

Why Maritime?

My artistic interest in sailing vessels goes back to my earliest memories on the shores of Lake Champlain in Northern Vermont. The mystery of wooden rowboats caught my imagination at first. Rowboats. How was it that humans figured out how to build wooden crafts that could both float and leak simultaneously? Every harbor had dinghies filling with water while waiting for their owner to return, who would bail them out with a coffee can or bucket, then row off to the deep water mooring where a more substantial boat waited patiently for its master. Being around these workboats was powerful stuff for the curiosity, intellect and ambition awakening in my seven-year-old self.

Then I noticed that the larger boats were also bailing water from their bilges, fighting the intrusion of the lake on which they floated. The mystery and majesty of vessels large and small fighting the same good fight shaped my early attempts at ordering and understanding the facts of life on the water.

Then one day while out in an uncharacteristically stiff wind braving breakers on the beach, I saw an even larger vessel, a three-masted fully-rigged ship (full rig means that all masts and yards carry square sails) beating north through the robust winds and high waves. It was an honest-to-goodness blue water tall ship on Lake Champlain! THAT caught my attention. That extraordinary vision seared its way deep into the folds of my brain and took root in my soul. That afternoon is as much an influence on the man I have become as anything else I have experienced.

Later, I tested myself on sailboats on Lake Michigan, the Pacific Ocean off southern and northern California, Chesapeake Bay, Mamala Bay south of Oahu, Gage Roads off Fremantle, Western Australia, and the North Sea. These experiences sharpened my skills and bound me to the waterman’s ways. Increasingly, occasional encounters with tall ships drew me closer like Ulysses’ sirens. Increasingly, I organized my life around getting to the tall ships and photographing them, finding their elemental selves afloat and ashore. Tall ships are in a class of their own where natural and human mysteries are expressed in wood, iron, canvas, and hemp. Each vessel reflects human passions, aspirations, and purposes that are as distinctive as the sailors who master the winds that power them across the sea.

Tall Ships Series

Artistic inspiration is an unconscious burst of creativity in a literary, musical, or other artistic endeavour. For me, curiosity is a foundational component of the process. It starts with a question such as what is that? Why is it doing that? How does it work? In the process of solving any one of those questions, inspiration sparks creativity, which results in art as an expression of my experience of the subject.

Readers, clients and buyers are people with multiple interests of their own, also. Curiosity is a hallmark human characteristic, after all. Inspiration is all about being open to all possible answers to a given question and finding a connection with truth, however fleeting. Creativity, then, is about being human and curious and disciplined simultaneously… intentionally.

Sailing vessels are floating manifestations of centuries of sailors’ curiosity. Their curiosity was inspired by necessity to create something functional, to solve a problem. In my view, along the way they created art.

As an artist, my process is to observe a vessel and its rig at various times of day, paying particular attention during early and late daylight hours for maximum angles of slanted light. I also prefer to study vessels and rigs during the midday hour or two to see how the rig shadows cascade onto deck and water. This strategy is not always practical, so I adapt to circumstances and stay flexible, yet with my ultimate vision still in mind.

Foremost to me is finding that unguarded instant where the ship and her rig reveal themselves to the appreciative eye, a pivotal moment where art supersedes science. Like every relationship, there is a give and take; an exchange in which individual priorities must bend to mutual recognition, appreciation, and need.

I then pare down the composition, light, and shadow to allow the ship’s rig to speak for the vessel and the sailors who sail her. To me, these studies convey a palpable sense of quiet strength and particular respect for these vessels. Each image strives for one essential, elemental truth that is absolute and immutable. If I ever achieve that single moment of artistic representation of pure reality, I’ll let you know!

Spars Above the Treeline (2018) by Mark Roger Bailey - Barque Charles W. Morgan

In the meantime, I invite you to view my Tall Ships collection and please stop by my Gallery Shop to consider a special series of signed and numbered limited-edition prints for the collector. A miniature print of a magnificent tall ship would make a thoughtful surprise for the love of your life.