Patrick O’Brien and Antigua

Back in November, a friend of mine, Patrick O’Brien, visited Antigua to spend a week getting a feel for the place and to do some painting.

I had met him about a year ago shortly after he became the president of the American Society of Marine Artists, a group of about 400 artists that are particularly drawn to the sea.

Of this group there is a small subset that are recognized as among the best in the world of Marine art. Patrick is one of about 40 that are so recognized as “fellows” and his work certainly stands out among the group.

Brenda and I visited his studio recently and learned that he has also been active over the years in other areas beyond marine, including children’s book illustration and, of all things, dinosaur art.

The minute that Brenda saw the books, she whipped out her phone and ordered a few titles for our grandson Rhett.

Patrick has also taught locally at the collage level for many years and while his career has had a number of twists and turns, he’s been focused on Marine art for many years now.

When we were in Antigua, we headed out three days, twice in the morning and once near sunset, for Patrick to paint.

I have written some about those outings in recent posts and enjoyed watching the process of him choosing a spot, setting up his easel and finally, blocking out the image on the canvas. This link covers, along with other topics, our first outing for him to paint.

I have hung around artists for years but had never really sat with someone while they painted and the experience was great fun.

This piece, the third of three that he did, was painted high up on a neighboring hill, Shirley Heights, perhaps the best place to view the sunset in all of Antigua. In the background is Falmouth Harbor and foreground, English Harbor. When Patrick painted this piece, Pandora was on the dock, the left point of land in English Harbor.

Patrick wasn’t able to finish the piece before it got dark as the light falls very fast in the islands. He finished up the piece in his studio.

When I called Patrick last week to tell him that Brenda and I were going to be visiting our son Rob and his family, only about 45 minutes from his studio, he invited us to join him.

He told me that he wanted to give me one of the pieces that he had worked on while in Antigua when we visited. As you can imagine, I was thrilled.

I assumed that he had one particularly in mind and was stumped when he said “choose one”. Oh boy as they were all so wonderful.

So, here is the finished piece we chose, painted by Patrick, high atop Shirley Heights. And we were there…

Brenda and I are thrilled to have the piece, a real O’Brien displayed in our living room, well lit by the special gallery lighting that we installed a number of years ago to display our growing art collection.

What a wonderful piece. Thankyou Patrick.

One of my favorite parts of cruising is to watch the sun set and enjoy the waning light. What better way to commemorate my favorite part of the day than this piece? Well, that and a rum punch, while sitting on the bow of Pandora.

Brenda and I have accumulated a fair amount of art over the years, a lot of it marine related so the addition of one of Patrick’s pieces is a wonderful milestone for us.

After a week with him in Antigua and, now, a visit to his studio, I have gained a better appreciation of his work and what it takes to create a work.

We all think of painting as, well, painting. But a lot more goes into the process for someone like Patrick who is very focused on accuracy, both on the vessels in the piece as well as the setting as it looked during the period that he is focused on capturing.

Imagine the level of detail needed to recreate an image of “old New York” as in this piece.

In spite of the “antiquity” of his subjects, he is quite adept with technology and has many videos on YouTube. This short video is one of many on his YouTube channel and goes into some of the steps that go into the creation of one of his pieces, much of which happens long before he puts a brush to canvas.

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Based on his visit to Antigua Patrick has decided to do a major piece that will depict English Harbor during the time that Lord Nelson was stationed there. Many of the buildings, while authentic and beautifully restored, were not there, or looked very different, than they do now.

While Patrick was in Antigua we met with retired island archeologist Reg Murphy, PhD, who has shared a treasure trove of information about the Dockyard. It was fitting that Patrick should meet Reg as he was the architect for the UNESCO designation of Nelson’s Dockyard as a world heritage site.

Careening ships was an important part of the Dockyard, a process enabling the cleaning of the bottom of a ship. Along with cleaning, copper sheeting was applied or repaired to keep the bottom clean and free of invasive toredo worms that, like termites on land, eat wood, especially in the tropics.

These plans are of the structure used to careen ships in English Harbor when the harbor was the headquarters of the Royal Navy.

One of the things that Patrick often does as he is preparing to do a complex painting is to recreate the scene digitally so he can assemble the buildings and “fly” through them to find the best perspective. This rendering is of the capstan house, which does not exist any more as part of his preparation for the piece.

This rendering is one of many that Patrick will prepare and assemble into a lifelike view of what the Dockyard might have looked like when Lord Nelson was stationed there.

Today all that remains of this structure are reproductions of the capstans themselves, one example of how different the place looks two hundred years after Nelson was there.

In spite of all the time Patrick spends reconstructing ships and the sea on canvas, he has spent little time on the ocean. I am working to change that and have invited him to join me and my friend George for a run from Antigua to Trinidad in March. It will be interesting to see if that experience changes how he views the ocean and recreates it in his work.

Patrick and I first spoke of a possible visit to Antigua about a year ago and I am thrilled that, based on his visit, he is now planning to create a major piece focused on English Harbor, a place that has become very important to me.

I can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

Paint away Patrick!!!