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Articles> James Dodds
For more information about James Dodds, visit James Dodds. His next exhibition will be at The Buckenham Gallery in Southwold from 22 May to 23 June 2010, and his next solo show in Messum’s, in London, will be in October 2011. Visit Messums. James is also planning a large one-man show in Rockport, Maine, USA in August 2010. His book, ‘River Colne Shipbuilders: A Portrait of Shipbuilding from 1786 – 1988’ is for sale online through Jardine Press.
In a part of Essex which would once have been a noisy, bustling shipyard on the River Colne, there stands a family home with ivy climbing up its walls and bits of weathered wood stacked against an open back door. The road leading past the house is dry and dusty and the building shakes as huge 14-wheeler trucks rumble past; not transporting parts for ships, as they might have done up until the late 80s, but bringing concrete foundations for a housing development.
Once the only domestic residence on the street with a view down to the river and with marine workshops for neighbours, the new housing project means that James Dodds’ Wivenhoe home can no longer be seen from the water.
That era has passed.
It’s easy to become nostalgic around James. Even as his home is being crowded by soulless modern developments, his printing studio bulges with heavy black cast iron presses and drawers of moveable type – individual typesetting letters – that could be museum pieces. He tells of how his children have learned to use the small 1890s treadle platten Jardine press; he admits to wanting to print books on an 1850s Wharfdale after he retires, when he hopes to have more time.
Upstairs, in a spacious wood-clad studio he built himself, the nostalgia continues. He shows off the latest book he and his wife, Catherine, have published together with archivist John Collins.
Weighing in at three kilos, it is probably the most comprehensive history ever of boat building on the River Colne from 1786 to 1988, but the contents only scratch the surface, James enthuses as he leafs through the 328-page hardback. There is enough material ‘out there’ for each chapter to be turned into a book in its own right. ‘This is very much an introduction, really.’
Behind him, absorbing the light streaming in through the studio windows, hang two large, partially-completed paintings. They are typical of the strangely haunted images James loves to produce: boats hovering in mid air as only a ship builder would see them during construction, with the hull curving gracefully into infinity or the keel revealing the painstaking craftsmanship that has gone into its making.
‘You don’t see a boat like that when it’s in the water,’ he explains quietly. ‘Half of it is always missing and you’re looking down into it. This is very much how a boat builder looks at a boat. The boat would be on the stocks and the boat builder would crouch down and look along the sheer line.’
Below the paintings sits a large driftwood swan sculpture, dropped off here by its owner because its creator, Guy Taplin, who lives up the road, is away on holiday. The swan has a chipped tail that needs repairing.
‘I thought I might paint it while it was here,’ quips James, before correcting himself and adding, ‘I don’t mean physically paint it, of course, but do a painting of it. I’ve done a couple of paintings of Guy’s work before.’
That James should veer from his boat paintings is a sign that, for now at least, some of the pressure is off him. He has delivered a show to a gallery in Holt, Norfolk, and his 30 paintings for an exhibition at Messum’s in London are not due for a while. It was such a relief, in fact, that on his way home to Essex he immediately diverted his car to a small Norfolk boatyard that specializes in yacht wherry restoration. There, he spent some time wandering around, talking to the builders and taking photographs.
‘It’s really nice,’ he says. ‘People are beginning to know the sort of work I do, so I am welcomed in.’
Although boat building isn’t quite in James’ blood – his father, Andrew Dodds, was an illustrator for the Radio Times – it may as well have been. Born in the east coast fishing town of Brightlingsea in 1957, he grew up surrounded by the ship building industry. ‘I’d be playing in the garden and hear the siren in the shipyard and I’d know it was tea time,’ he recalls. ‘And apparently, when I was on a seaside holiday aged five or six, the father of another child asked me what my father did for a living, and after a long pause I said, “He’s a shipwright”, so I obviously really wanted my dad to be like all the other dads at school.’
Ironically, it was James’ stepfather, Bryan Thomas, who would own the boat that would encourage James to learn to sail. James was soon out on the type of sailing and camping adventures around Mersea Island that were reminiscent of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, often with his best friend and stepbrother, Adam. Eventually he began working weekends on Solvig, a chartered sailing boat. Then, at age 15 and bored at school – he had been diagnosed with dyslexia – he heard about Walter Cook and Sons in Maldon, who were looking for an apprentice.
‘It was the best thing I could have done,’ he says. ‘I was quite big and strong, and they wanted someone to work with the old boat builder who was in his 70s.’
This experienced boat builder, Alf Last, told him, ‘I’m not going to talk to you, I’m not going to tell you anything, you’ve got to watch me,’ recalls James. ‘This, coming straight out of school, was really quite a shock to me. How was I going to learn? But, actually, it is the only way you can learn. You watch how they hold their tools, what order they do things in, what tools they use, how they sharpen them.’
Still his father’s son, however, James also continued with his other love: art. He took evening classes and, through his father, began illustrating books. He sketched boat yard scenes whenever his apprenticeship allowed him to, and in 1976, having completed the foundation course at Colchester School of Art, he left the boat building industry to enrol in a degree course at Chelsea School of Art and, later, at The Royal College of Art in London.
Throughout his college days James remained self-employed, doing illustrative work and selling at exhibitions in order to pay his school fees. He also spent a day a week at the National Maritime Museum and at the Public Records Office at Kew, researching a book about ship building during the 1760s. Then, for the next few years, he continued to work in the ship yards for three months every year.
‘One of the hardest things for an artist is coming to terms with working on your own and I really missed the camaraderie of the shipyard. So, this way I’d get fit, I’d hang out with the others, and I’d get money, because as an artist you don’t make any money between Christmas and Easter, and that’s the busiest time in the boat yard.’
Once more he used stolen moments to draw sketches from which he would create linocut prints. ‘There’s a whole series of linocuts of what I was working on in the boat yard from that time,’ he explains. ‘We used to joke that I was an artist in residence, really.’
By now James had also found his own course as an artist. ‘When I was finishing art school I was producing very complicated narrative paintings, full of symbols and stories. I had been wrestling with problems I was having in my life in the painting, instead of doing it in my life. But then, in 2000, Firstsite offered me an entire building to fill at the Minories in Colchester. I didn’t have to do paintings necessarily to sell, and so I asked myself, What do I know about?’
The answer stared him in the face. He grabbed a large canvas covered in references to ‘eclectic bits from everywhere’ and painted a great big boat over it, from memory, based on his years of experience as a boat builder. ‘It was the sort of boat I’d built and so I physically built it on the canvas.’
This painting was The Blue Boat, and it would launch a four-year touring exhibition for James which resulted in a sell-out show at Messum’s in 2004.
‘It set me free.’
Everything James had been wanting to say, he explains, was there in the painting. ‘And the things I wanted to say, they weren’t contrived, they were just naturally there in the boat. It brought the two sides of me together. At college I had been very much comparing the training of a shipwright to the training of an artist; being trained by watching and imitating or being trained by debate and thought. Both interested me and The Blue Boat very simply brought the two things smack together. I let go of feeling that I had to justify everything. I could just say that I wanted to do this, it’s what I know about and I’m not about to apologise for it. This is what I do. This is me.’
There’s a ghostly, spiritual element to James’ boat paintings. Although always architecturally accurate and often cleaned up to look like new – ‘I can’t help it, I think the boat builder kicks in and I just have to create a boat as it should be’ - his choice of palette and the way in which he layers and scrapes back his oils, injects a memory into the whole that is of salt, rust, sweat and adventure; the specific somehow becomes abstract.
‘[The boat is] alive in a way that is quite unworldly,’ writes Adam Nicholson in the 2007 Messum’s Catalogue which accompanied James’ third sole show. ‘Free of the restrictions and disciplines which the sea imposes on a boat in the real world and afloat, vividly living, in an element which does not belong to the here and now.’
‘Culturally, boats are very rich, they’re part of the culture of a country,’ James explains, stalwartly avoiding being drawn into any discussion about the ‘visual alchemy’, ‘watery realm’ or ‘heavenly’ undertones attributed to his work by art critics. ‘Boats are symbolic, they are just so rich. I also think boats are quite universal, they have associations for everyone, and one of their beauties is their curved lines. The eye’s led back into itself. I do think my work is quite masculine, it’s quite physical, and yet I have had women say to me that they find my paintings quite erotic.’
Kris Day, of Messum’s in London, believes James’ audience ‘appreciate the organic line and inherent power of the paintings as much as the structural accuracy of the boats themselves,’ and as a result are drawn to the works ‘regardless of their interest in boats’.
Asked if he was born into the wrong time, James smiles. ‘I would have liked to have been born in the 1820s. It was a very hard life, but what energy and what fantastic things going on. What a thing, to build ships that would sail around the world. The ingenuity of everybody. You build a boat in anticipation that it will go to sea, it’s got to weather the storms and be safe, and in a sense that’s what I do with a painting – I build it to be strong and hold up on its own. And, of course, one of life’s lessons, in a way, is that at some point everyone has to sail their own little boat.’
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