for Country Life by Ian Collins
James Dodds is the master mariner of current British art. Sailor, builder, campaigner, printer, publisher, painter – his highly productive life has been all about the crafting of boats. His latest pictures chart a valiant solo voyage and speak to the human spirit.
Born in the Essex port of Brightlingsea, in 1957, he has since sailed six miles up the River Colne to his berth-place of Wivenhoe. But from his waterside studio he has a vision that now transcends the planet, steering vernacular working wooden vessels from origins in Viking longships out into the realm of dreams.
When he was growing up in Brightlingsea, the little town was largely self-contained from boat-building to fishing via scores of ancillary saltwater trades, with a lot of leisurely messing about in boats. And not just messing, since local yachtsmen raced successfully for Olympic gold.
Dreams also foundered here. The lives of local fishers and traders were lost to storms near and far; Donald Crowhurst famously jumped overboard from his Brightlingsea-built boat, in 1969, during the first single-handed non-stop round the world yacht race after faking his position and sailing round in circles.
Busy as a child building up stories and pictures for future books and pictures, James Dodds added an early fable of his own. He was overheard telling strangers that he was the son of a shipwright – when his father, Andrew, was really an artist casting his own family in Radio Times illustrations for The Archers.
From confinement in classroom prisons due to dyslexia, James learned to sail on Essex fishing vessels – Colchester smack, Winklebrig – before crewing on a Baltic trader’s North Sea crossings. At 15, with only an O-level in art, an iron will and a passion for making and mending things, he secured a dream job as apprentice shipwright with Walter Cook & Sons of Maldon.
Black-timbered and brown-sailed Thames barges – once the main mercantile vessels on this stretch of East Coast – were being converted into pleasure craft by shipwrights working in pairs. Veteran Alf Last, the new boy’s partner and mentor, said: “I shan’t say noth’n. You’ll just have to watch me.” And so he did, until he knew boats backwards.
But when trained as a craftsman, the boatyard’s self-appointed resident artist, drawing through work breaks, realised that his hobby was his true vocation. Seven-year labours at art schools ensued, with scholarships and prizes taking him from Colchester to Chelsea and the Royal College.
Besides paintings overloaded with allegorical meaning, he gouged a fine line in linocut prints and triumphed over dyslexia to launch the fine-edition Jardine Press, initially using a mammoth Victorian cast-iron press, with every inked word painstakingly assembled from trays of lead type.
His best work, always about the business of boats, focused on the builders, in part as emblematic images of himself. At this point he moved to Wivenhoe and built himself a house and studio – also waging doomed battles to save closed shipyards on his home river from being bulldozed for housing.
Then, in 2000, surveying a large canvas “covered in eclectic bits from everywhere” and failing to coalesce, he painted suddenly and swiftly the outline of a monumental boat over the top in brilliant blue pigment. “It was just the sort of boat I had helped to build,” he says. “Now I physically built it on the canvas and called it The Blue Boat. The vessel was everyday and universal; an archetype embodying everything.”
Advancing from a backdrop of deepest-ocean black, the overlapping timbers shone in marine blues and greens with a glimpse of red interior holding a strange illumination and suggesting a haven from all that is dark, cold and dangerous.
It signalled a future fleet of painted boats both humble and unearthly. He tackled each portrait in the way he had worked on the surfaces of actual vessels – scraping back paint and building up the ground again to keep them watertight.
Every new work became a voyage of discovery for the artist. “Colour and surface become more and more important the more minimal the subject,” he reckons. “If you isolate something in space, despite all the apparently literal rendering, you create a mystery.”
The writer Julia Blackburn notes: “His boats seem to float on an element that is neither water, air or earth and they are illuminated with a mysterious light such as you get just before a storm breaks and I think it’s these two qualities that gives them the mysterious nature of apparitions. They also have something that I can only call an inner calm, a meditative quality which makes them good to stare at, until you are lost within the act of contemplation.”
The artist has also underlined artisan expertise in interior images, where congregations of timbers resemble whale skeletons or medieval church roofs or the insides of musical instruments. The point being that a community of elements makes a harmonious whole – with the subliminal message that, rather than alone and all at sea, we are all in the same boat.
Just as his linocuts have now depicted gull’s-eye panoramas of coastal communities from Scotland to Cornwall, so he has painted traditional inshore craft evolving with subtle variations to fit each port. And in creating such a record he has championed their rescue and revival.
James Dodds had already travelled for source material to yards and museums from Scandinavia to New England, when lockdown led to a deeper focus on the ways that Viking models adapted into vessels of singular sturdy beauty as they reached across the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Black Sea. His iconic new pictures venerate buoyant skill.
James Dodds 