The Whirlpool (Moby Dick project) as of July 1, 2024

Here is my painting for Porter Mill's upcoming Moby Dick show as it looked on July 1, 2024.  I had spent a lot of time working on placement of the text,  the last sentence of the final chapter of Moby Dick, describing the Pequod's disappearance into the whirlpool.*  It was time to start painting the whirlpool.  I didn't really have much experience painting water until I moved to Massachusetts, and I certainly have never painted a whirlpool.  I didn't expect to be able to create a realistic painting of a whirlpool, but still wanted to make a representation that would communicate the idea of a whirlpool. So I looked at images and videos of whirlpools.  There were a lot of ways to go.  Still uncertain, I decided to begin by creating blue shadows to indicate the concentric circles. To be continued. . . 

  *The text is: "And now concentric circles seized the lone boat itself and all its crew and each floating oar and every lancepole and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight."