In celebration of our current exhibition, Call of the Running Tide, we present the following adapted text written by writer and art critic, Laura Gascoigne, on the occasion of James' 2021 exhibition at David Messum Fine Art.
There have been many watershed moments in James Dodds’ career, all related to water. There was the moment in 1972 when the sailing-mad dyslexic Essex teenager who left school with a single O-Level in art landed a weekend job as trainee mate on a Baltic Sea trader operating as a charter out of his native Brightlingsea – an experience that led to a job as an apprentice shipwright with Walter Cook & Son in Maldon. Then there was the change of course in 1976 when the qualified boatbuilder decided to follow in the steps of his artist father – the Radio Times illustrator Andrew Dodds – and enrolled on an art foundation course at Colchester School of Art, progressing to Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College, where his allegorical Self-Portrait (1982) as a split personality - half down-to-earth boat-builder, half winged artistic Icarus - won him the Anstruther prize.
Professionally, his course appeared to be set. But the big watershed moment would come much later in life with the offer of a solo show at the Minories’ firstsite gallery in Colchester in 2001. Up to that moment Dodds had been a narrative painter, loading his allegorical canvases with personal meanings in the manner of his heroes Max Beckmann and Stanley Spencer. Now, given the run of this large public gallery, the 43-year-old artist was forced to confront a long-deferred question: what was his art actually about?
One day the question answered itself. Standing in front of a canvas crammed with miscellaneous detail, he found himself on impulse painting it over with an enormous image of a life-size blue boat. Contained by the frame, the vessel hung in space like the chestnut stallion in George Stubbs’s famous painting Whistlejacket, a picture that now hangs in the National Gallery but was formerly housed in St Osyth Priory nearby. Looking back, Dodds suspects that the memory of Stubbs’ image may have been an unconscious influence, though for a shipwright the conception was familiar. “The viewpoint I take is very much how a boat-builder looks at a boat when it’s up stocks in the shed,” he says. “It’s not a boat in water, it’s floating in some other sort of space.”
Blue Boat was the vessel that launched a hundred vernacular boats. In the twenty years since it emerged from his brush, Dodds’ successive Wivenhoe studios have launched a parade of painted vessels celebrating the beauty of historic work boats shaped by their native seas, from his own East Coast to as far afield as Maine and Bermuda. But the moment also marked the start of a conscious struggle between the craftsman boatbuilder and the artist Icarus in Dodds. “With the Blue Boat I had the boat-builder sitting on one shoulder saying: ‘You haven’t put enough planks’ and the artist sitting on the other saying: ‘But look at the colour and the feel of it.’”
The struggle is ongoing, and the fact that it will never be resolved is what gives Dodds’s work its creative tension. He is not on autopilot; he is constantly tweaking the rudder. Sharp-eyed visitors to this exhibition will notice an increasing emphasis on colour. The elegance of the underlying drawing remains – the ‘fair line’ of the master shipwright – but the balance between what Italian Renaissance artists used to call ‘disegno’ and ‘colore’ has tilted, with colour now in the ascendant. In the wake of the Blue Boat, other new subjects are identified simply by their hues. As well as portraits of particular types of boat, they are receptacles for abstract exercises in colour. Like Josef Albers’s Homages to the Square these paintings might be called Homages to the Boat, if that wasn’t a little too pretentious for Dodds. Much as he enjoyed his art school course on colour theory, he prefers practice: “I’ve gone back to looking at things,” he says. “If I start applying theories, it doesn’t work. Colour has to be felt; you have to feel your way.”
For a period Dodds ground his own colours, mixing in River Colne Estuary mud for local flavour; now he uses pigment-rich Michael Harding paints to mix the shades that make his colour combinations sing. An admirer of the late Craigie Aitchison, he aspires to the same luminous simplicity: “When something is pared back to that degree it is so powerful.” In the past his paintings were literally pared back, with the paint brushed on, then scraped back with a curved knife to achieve the silky finish of boat varnish. Now the paint surface is built up with a palette knife to achieve a weathered effect on the outer planking, while the interior is layered with a brush, making it glow with that “inner light, part obscured” that lends Dodds’ painted craft their special air of mystery.
Dodds refuses to answer his own question. “Something precious that doesn’t need to be defined”. Around the time he was “floundering about” before the Blue Boat hove into view, his friend the artist Helen Napper sent him a postcard of the French Symbolist painter Odilon Redon’s Mystical Boat which he pinned up on his studio wall. It is only now that he recognised the possible influence of Redon’s radiant, dreamlike image on the Blue Boat. “It was one of those things in the back of my head that has just been stored. Certain things become touchstones.”
Those touchstones are literary as much as artistic. Ted Hughes’s poem October Salmon suggested the title of Dodds’ new painting of a salmon-keel boat, whose iridescent “sea metal” hues recall Hughes’ description of the fish its prime; other lines in the poem - like “that is what the splendour of the sea has come down to ” – chime with the artist’s feelings for the abandoned hulks he sometimes comes across rotting on beaches. But he is loath to divulge too much of what is in the back of his mind. “The different boats are vessels to carry the colour and the texture of the paint,” is all he’ll say. Their freight of meanings is left to the viewer.
Dodds’ vision has been described by Dick Durham as metaphysical, but its inspiration remains solidly physical. These days he finds many of his physical models in maritime museums or sailing trusts where survivors of this once vital industry are increasingly preserved; occasionally he’ll spot one by the side of the road. “I like to see boats out of the water to be able to see the whole boat. It is often what is below the water that is most interesting - like people!”
What makes him fall in love with a particular boat? The shipwright in him is a sucker for a ‘fair curve’ in the sheer line, and the ‘run’ from midship to bow – the hollow aft – is also crucial. But a boat’s history has its own appeal. Among the historical craft in this exhibition, the Gjoa is the converted Norwegian fishing boat in which Roald Amundsen made the first Northwest Passage, and the pilot cutter Doris was the pleasure yacht of the famous Arctic explorer Quintin Riley. With Thames Skiff and Peggotty there’s a ‘family’ connection: both were both built in the Richmond boatyard of E Messum & Sons, the shipwright forbears of David Messum.
Dodds has painted Breeze many times from different angles and knows its clinker-built curves like the back of his hand; he has described it as his “muse and artist’s model”. But the berth it occupied in his studio now stands empty since he gave the boat to the Pioneer Sailing Trust earlier this year. Like a mermaid in a fairy story released from exile on dry land back into her element, his much-loved muse has been returned to the sea: “I felt it needed to be sailed and be in the water”.
There are boats in his marine iconography that Dodds could paint “over and over again and find something new in the light, paint and surface each time.”
A full list of available works by James Dodds is available online, or enquire at our gallery in St. James's
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