Few aesthetic disciplines are as exacting as marine art. Consider the problems. The painter of portraits or landscapes can return to the subject again and again to verify shape, color, tone. But water is a moving, constantly changing element. The artist is dependent on sketches and memory to reproduce the play of reflections on the water’s surface or the spume and the spindrift of a stormy sea. Sky usually occupies more of the canvas than does either ship or sea. How marry these dissimilar elements so that they fuse rather than conflict? Then there is the ship. Besides a professional knowledge of art materials and techniques, the practitioner must know something of hull construction and everything about rigging. John Masefield, the English poet laureate, wrote, “In nearly all sailing ships of my time, the lines forward were of an exciting grace. Often, the curve of the hull, the sweep of the sheer, from forward aft, was of an agreeable bird-like balance. … Above this horizontal fabric of such varying charm rose the raking, tapering pinnacles of three or four masts, each subtly diminishing in size and raiment, each proud, efficient, and a beauty adding to beauty. All sailing ships had some measure of these graces: some had them surpassingly.”

The marine artist must tie all these elements together. Opportunities for error are endless, and intolerance of mistakes is even greater today than in the nineteenth century. How often we see pictured a ship with every sail set, under wind and sea conditions that promise to blow out half her canvas at any moment. The writer and marine engineer William McFee deplored “oil paintings of ships in full sail, in perilous proximity to ugly headlands or in the act of running down innocent oriental craft.” We see steamers bowling along with a following wind, the smoke from the funnel blowing aft; ships docking and undocking with almost all their sails full and drawing. Even the van de Veldes, true parents of marine art, would show half a dozen large vessels, all close aboard, sailing in directions that guarantee mass collisions within a few moments, because the painters wanted to show detail on every vessel. One of J. M. W. Turner’s most famous marine paintings portrays a cutter and a ship, both running before the wind, moving in opposite directions. It does, of course, improve the composition—which suggests the greatest problem of today’s marine artist: how to bring originality to the concept and design when all the simple, logical positions of a ship seem to have become clichés.

Christopher Blossom is proof that the genre still attracts new talent despite its difficulties. Born in 1956, Blossom is the son and grandson of the artist-illustrators David and Earl Blossom. He began painting while