Moored boats in Cannaregio

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The wreck in the harbour - Dracula arrives in England

A ship founders under the steep sides of the English town of Whitby. It was here that Dracula came to Britain in the late 1890s, aboard the Russian ship Demeter, and that's what I was thinking about when I made the picture.

I used a modern version of Whitby, however - the one I saw a few years back. This is the view, more or less, looking down on the town from the ruined abbey on the north shore.

Venice - the gondolas on the Riva degli Schiavoni

It was a cool November evening when I sat down on the embankment to make this picture.

I was in a hurry. The shapes were quickly sketched in with a black crayon, and then rounded out with watercolour. Although I started with lines - as I almost always do - the picture quickly became about mass and pattern. The final touches were added in gouache; you can see its opaque layers where the blue covers of the gondolas are visible above the dock.

In the background, San Giorgio Maggiore was a box of shadows, except for its brilliant marble facade, which here merges with the air.

Off the Coast

tarragonsmith.com

Venice by night

Mikhail Vrubel found Venice boring. It was of interest "only for his palette." That was not my experience. Even at night, when your palette shrinks to greys and only a muddy simulacra of the daylight colours are visible, the city remains beautiful and ominous. It's a place to feel lonely in.

And to paint. Watercolour at night is not easy. I was alone, and wandering the sestiero di San Marco, but I had my paints and I had plenty of time.

How Vrubel, a painter at once romantic and nihilistic, could have rejected Venice, the most romantic and abnegatory of cities, is a mystery. Perhaps they were too much alike. Sometimes you have to be a little bit dull in order to appreciate the magical. Tolkien retired to the most tedious suburb imaginable. Perhaps magicians read only non-fiction.

The harbour at dawn

An early 20th century harbour on the Great Lakes - possibly on Lake Huron. Alongside the quay, two schooners. The white hull in front may be a private yacht, while the darker vessel was one of the many trade ships still in operation at the beginning of the century.

It's a tiny acrylic painting - only four by six inches - done on canvas. Private collection.

The Bleak Shore

For some years in the early 2000s, Tarragon lived in Halifax. Its rather bleak topography served for several landscape paintings. Or seascapes, as in this oil painting of an unladen container-ship passing the oil refinery on the north shore of Halifax Harbour.

It's one of my favourites of Tarragon's landscapes. The economy of the composition serves to suggest both the vast danger of the natural world, which multiplies beyond our capacity to grasp, and how heavily humanity's hand lies upon it.

dockside at Burano

A quick sketch done at Burano in the Venetian Lagoon. It was done with gouache and watercolour on mylar, which is not a combination I recommend. Mylar is barely water-absorbant, so the paint sits on the surface and shows a heavy texture. Also, the moisture tends to crinkle the mylar, which is visible here.

It's a nice boat, though.

Small craft in Venice

I saw this small watercraft while wandering around the island of Burano, in the Venetian Lagoon. Shipbuilding by hand is one of those once-great vernacular arts that is everywhere on the decline, but one still encounters an immense variety of small craft, each with a design specific to their context and locale. I find them enchanting.

Gondolas

Gondalas at rest.

I was hypnotized by the pattern of the stakes and the black craft. Painted on a warm November day in watercolour and gouache on the wharf-side steps outside Santa Maria della Salute.

The Canal of Giudecca

as seen from a window of the Doge's Palace.

It's an etching on zinc, printed on hand-coloured Japanese tissue on a support of rag-cotton European paper.

The Endurance

I distinctly remember my first discovery of Frank Hurley. The photographer of Shackleton's epic 1914-17 antarctic expedition, his photographs, printed using an old glass-negative process, have a resolution so high it's almost painful to look at them. His image of the Endurance illuminated at night is famous, but I prefer his panorama of South Georgia, which for me captures the impossible bleakness of the place in a way words never can.

Such things were on my mind when I made this small drypoint:

The print was done rapidly on vinyl and printed on Japanese paper in a very wee edition of 7 proofs. It's about five inches square.

The Sea

Nautical paintings have a long history, but paintings of the sea are less common. It was things on the waves, not the sea itself, that animated most painters.

And for the minority of artists that did concern themselves with the sea itself, it was invariably the sublimity of the ocean, its danger and vastness, that provided their themes. Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea is a good (spectacular, really) example.

Tarragon's recent seascapes have a composition derived from Friedrich. But the theme here is different. The creamy breakers curl and roll, skimming the sand like wet silk over flesh.
They are not sublime. They are erotic, as lush and inviting as Hockney's swimming pools.

Like a flooded basilica

And he went down to Brighton,
set eye to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
he set up canvas out on the swart beach.

Il Molo

The view from the Molo - the quay at San Marco's opening onto the mouth of the Grand Canal - across to Santa Maria della Salute.

It is, of course, impossible to make etchings of Venetian subjects without evoking Whistler. But where his etchings were animated with a fairy-like lightness of touch, here I was aiming for a heavy, almost claustrophobic atmosphere.

I chopped off the top of Salute and reduced its gleaming marble to a slab of grey. The unified colour tone is achieved with a technique called chine colle; during the printing process, a layer of hand-tinted Japanese tissue lies between the plate and the heavier European paper. The pressure of the press impresses the image through the tissue onto the heavier sheet.

untitled (Ulysses)

A drypoint that's diminutive both in size and in print run; it's about 4 by 6 inches, and I only ever editioned 7 of them. It's printed on a thin layer of Japanese tissue overlaid on a support of sturdy European paper.

The retro styling of the technique and the paper supports the subject matter: a brig with sails struck, waiting out the calm. It was only after I completed the picture that the thought of the sailors sitting out there, wondering when they would return home, suggested the Greek myth.