Tuesday 207: Run Before The Wind

Jessica Ives November 1, 2016

Run Before The Wind /

4" x 4" / 2016

Now available through G lesason Fine Art

Jonathan writes about sailing with his dad, Bobby Ives: This painting is from a day that Jessica and I went sailing with my dad and his wife Phyllis on the 26 foot Pierson they keep in Pemaquid Harbor. We sailed around John's Bay and anchored off the northern side of Thrumcap Island, where the thread of life ledges blocked the winds and waves so we could eat a picnic. As we ate, I was distracted by the white caps that were building and recommended we get going. Jess is new to sailing and feels nervous when the boat really lists over. By the time we weighed anchor the winds and waves, which were from the southwest, had built up and it was a bit hairy running with the wind back into the harbor. Steering a straight course with a large following sea takes serious concentration to prevent an accidental jib. The mainsail would luff from time to time and we all waited for the boom to swing across, like a batter swinging for the ball.

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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on a 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.

Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.

Tuesday 207: Walking Water

Jessica Ives October 4, 2016

A human being is a container invented by water so it can walk around.

- from Job’s Body

Popham Colony was a short-lived English settlement founded the same year as the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. Over the course of its first and only year of existence in 1607 and 1608, settlers built the Virginia of Sagadahoc, the first English-built oceangoing vessel in the New World.

When Jonathan and I were at Popham Beach last summer we played in the waters at the mouth of the Kennebec River. This was the river by which Popham's settlers explored the land that would become Maine, seeking communication and trade with the Abenaki who lived along its banks. Later colonists to the area, building on the experience of the original Popham Colony, settled further up this river at the site of present-day Bath where winter storms and tides were not as severe. Bath, of course, became a renowned shipbuilding capitol; in the mid-19th century it was the fifth largest port in America and sent clipper ships criss-crossing across the waters of the world.

In the fall, after our late August swim at Popham Beach, Jonathan and I fished the headwaters of the Kennebec, the "long quiet waters" of the Abenaki. We waded in and walked the waters, just as we had at the beach.

Water is how we move in the world. It shapes our stories, our experiences, our histories. Rivers and oceans move us. Our ships, our paintings, and our bodies are all vessels.

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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on any 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.

Tuesday 207: Dwelling

Jessica Ives July 12, 2016

Sold

Dwelling / 4" x 4" / 2016

$300.00

A house is a dwelling. So is the body. Monhegan's Red House was the island's first home and because of excellent craftsmanship, great care, and unique character it has withstood time and the elements since 1790. The human body, likewise, is built to last. What can we do to take great care and express our unique character so that we, too, have a dwelling for years to come?

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Tuesday 207: Mostly Water

Jessica Ives March 8, 2016

Sold

Mostly Water

$207.00 $300.00

"We are, in fact, mostly water. As terrestrial organisms we may live on solid ground and breath air, but as a collection of individual cells we still live within the same liquid medium from which we emerged. Every organ and system in the body supports in some way the containment, the renewal, and the circulation of this internal sea."

Deane Juhan in Job's Body: A Handbook for Bodyworkers

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Water Warmer Than The Air -- a small painting sale exclusive to the blog!

Jessica Ives January 6, 2015

I want to start the year off with a double dose of goodness so I'm offering a second small painting for sale this week. This painting isn't of Maine (did the bikini give it away?) but will still be available for the special price of $207 through Saturday at midnight.

Last month I had the opportunity to return to Costa Rica for work. A friend and I created a portfolio of images and a video for my uncle's vacation rental listing. I'll share more information about the rental in a future post when I have more beach and surf paintings to show because, yes, alongside the hired camera work I took plenty of photos for painting in the studio back home. Making swimmer and surfer paintings has become one of my winter survival tools. The imagination is strong medicine. Second-hand Vitamin D is almost real.

On the night before our flight back to Maine we spent every second of sunset playing in the surf at Playa Negra. It was Christmas Eve, and it was the most unusual experience of Christmas I've ever had. I think I understood the incarnation for the first time. I played and splashed and floated, surrounded by infinite bodies of air and water that were so...continuous, so infinite, and so close to my own temperature that I had moments of forgetting myself. And so it was, that in my moments of remembering, I was all the more aware of being miraculously, powerfully, and gracefully within my finite body.

Run Before The Wind /

4" x 4" / 2016

Now available through Glesason Fine Art

Now available through G lesason Fine Art