Woodtick Village Built from Shipwrecks — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is more than four times as wide as it is tall, which is exactly the shape a village strung along a waterline wants to be. You read it from left to right like a sentence, and it does not repeat itself once on the way across.

The buildings are ships. Hulls sit tilted in the shallows with their decks turned into floors and their gunports turned into windows, planks run between them as streets, a house with a peaked roof and a lit doorway has been built on top of one stern, and a striped red and white awning shelters a walkway at the left. The masts stand at whatever angle they came to rest at.

Light is entirely local and entirely yellow. Lanterns hang from brackets and rigging, doorways glow orange, gunports read as small warm rectangles low in the dark hulls, and all of it comes back off the swamp water as a soft green-gold sheen. The rest is deep blue night, a scatter of stars, one flat spiral of cloud.

The right third opens out. A rope and plank footbridge crosses to a rocky shore, a wrought iron lamp on a curled bracket lights the middle of it, and a wooden sign lettered in red stands on the rock at the far end. Part of our Monkey island collection, and its companion panorama is the waterfront under a full moon. For water like this crossed at close range, see the coffin.