Interview with Steve Rogers

Steve, your paintings reflect a world that is quietly slipping away—working boats, weathered docks, and the remnants of a maritime life once central to many coastal towns. What compels you to return to these subjects again and again?

I have always been drawn to the water, working waterfronts and working boats. I love the coastal marshes and open water in equal measure. I will be 80 this year and over my life have witnessed the unrelenting pressure of development on working waterfronts and the people who make their living there. The pace of change has not been even. Even in places where development has not been the principal driver of decline, climate chang-es and land subsidence have had a similar effect. Economics has played a role as well. Higher taxes on valua-ble waterfront property is one part. Changes in the natural patterns of the various fisheries have required up-graded equipment and bigger more expensive workboats. I admire these people and hate seeing their lives upended by our desire to live on the coasts.

There’s an undeniable presence in your work—boats seem to hold memory, structures whisper of the lives that once moved through them. Do you see your paintings as a form of preservation, or do they carry something more personal for you?

Watermen have always had a notion that there is something more than just the physical presence of a boat. There is this thought in the back of their minds that a ship is a living thing. Back after the war (WWII), there was a collision one night in the ship’s channel off Lewes, where I live, and the Menhaden boat involved had cat-astrophic damage to the bow and forward section and began taking on water. As it sank, and as the roof of the forward cabin entered the water, the salt water shorted out the horn circuit. The horn began to blow and continued to sound until the ship slipped below the surface. All the men in the various boats surrounding the slowly sinking ship that rescued crew were completely freaked out and it was a story told around the fleet for years. I don’t hold the same beliefs, but I understand and I try to incorporate that in my depiction of working boats.

While some viewers describe a certain melancholy in your paintings, others see resilience, craftsmanship, and history. How do you think time—both its passage and its preservation—manifests in your work?

I have been told this. I have often painted boats abandoned in the marsh or sunk at the edge of a channel. I feel that this is more of a recognition that they have served their purpose, and that should be respected. Workboats are generally thought to serve about twenty years, but many exceed that. Every day they carry their owner and crew out to work in any conditions, rough or calm, and bring them home again to their fami- lies. When they can no longer do that safely they are retired. Its not a sadness to be felt, it more of a time well served. But yes there is an element of melancholy and I do feel it and it does influence my work.

Your technique, though in acrylic, recalls the richness and texture of oil. How do you approach your surfaces, your brushwork, and the physicality of painting to achieve this depth?

There are a great number of artists whose work I admire. I have always loved the impressionists particularly Monet and Van Gogh. Probably because I grew up in Chester County, Pa, Andrew Wyeth’s work speaks to me. My parents had a small farm there with a 300 year old stone farm-house. I fondly remember the cold winter skies and bare trees and fields. This would seem to be a lot of conflicting styles but I have tried to meld them into one that allows me to accomplish the effects I am after.

I have always loved the texture and paint strokes of oil. I love the three di- mensional feel of it and I try to achieve that with heavy impasto brush strokes. One of my ap- proaches is to use underpainting and glazing to achieve brilliance. It can be done in oil, but it is time consuming. Acrylics dry within minutes and allow you to almost immediately glaze over the underpainting. I use almost every paint tool designed to build up layers , lay in fine lines and blend soft boundaries in skies. Acrylics allow endless layers of paint as the image is built up and I think it results in depth and complexity

Light plays a defining role in your compositions—whether the golden haze of late afternoon or the cool weight of dawn. What role does light serve in your storytelling, and how does it shape the way you approach a painting?

For the purpose of ambience, my go-to time of day is the “Golden Hours” of the morning and the evening when the warmth and enhanced contrast play a role in more clearly focusing on the sub-ject.
I have painted a few pieces where the sky was overcast or snowy and it tends to flatten out the scene. Workboats go out in all kinds of weather and I enjoy a chance to depict them in less than ideal circumstances. A friend recently took a photo of a hand-tonging rig returning in a snow storm after a day on the water. Two of the men stood aft at the stern in their all weather suits quietly talking as the boat worked it way towards the docks. The woods and marsh on shore fad- ed away in the snow. It was a great subject. Just the kind I look for to illustrate what it is like to be a waterman.

Water and wetlands create their own influence on light. There is something indefinable in the natural light of a marsh or open water. Maybe it’s a brilliance or maybe it’s the clarity, but cap- turing it is important. I rarely show the sun in my work and choose instead to show the effects with bright surfaces and deep shadows. I almost always add a little ultramarine blue to show the influence of backlighting from the sky. Its important to also remember all the other sources of reflected light on the subject such as the marsh grasses or light reflected from water.

So much of your work captures objects in transition—a skiff left to weather in the grass, a boatyard at the edge of activity. How do you view these moments? Are they endings, or simply another phase in the life of these vessels?

One of my favorite places to visit are traditional shipyards. There are always workboats up “on the hard”, supported by blocks and boat jacks. You can see and appreciate the subtle curves of the hull as well as the driving and steering gear below the waterline. These boats are working. This is the necessary work to get ready for the season. Paint, patches and repaired gear cover the hulls and decks along with tarps, lights, and ladders. Finally, at the back of the yard, in the grass and weeds are the boats that are no longer worthy of the trouble of prepping for the season.

Often, the only thing that held them together was water pressure and paint. Usually, they are the older craft, older designs, mostly wood, occasionally fiberglass. Chesapeake Bay workboats , particularly the wooden ones distinctly show their ancestry with the sailing versions of the previ- ous century. I have always enjoyed learning how they were built, looking at the keels and keel- sons, the frames and engine bed as well as the various steering arrangements. I have learned much of my craft here. Is this the end of their useful lives? Yes, and that’s OK.

There is an intimacy in your process—you step away from the easel to watch the ospreys, the herons, the shifting tide. How does this act of looking, of pausing, influence the final strokes on the canvas?

I did not grow up near water so with my first exposure to it, I thought it was exotic, entrancing, and I have never changed the way I feel about it. The interest in boats is a part of it, but the landscape and the wildlife appeal to me as well. There are places along the eastern shore of Maryland where the marshes go to the horizon. These places are alive with eagles, ospreys , sea- gulls and hundreds of other species of birds. Since I don’t paint in the field, I some times have to step back from my work and think about what I am doing.

Most artists will admit that on occasion a painting on the easel is not progressing the way in-tended. It isn’t always clear why. When I see this happening sometimes I just need a palate cleanser. A cup of coffee, maybe a step out into the garden, maybe I’ll look over the canal to the osprey nest and wonder if one of the two males has finally given up and sought another mate.

When I return to my painting, the flaw in either composition or execution becomes clear. Then the second decision is how to fix it or whether I should sand it, gesso it over and begin again. I have actually done this. Its hard to walk away from several days work but to produce something that is sub par is not something I would be comfortable with.

Your paintings suggest a deep respect for the hands that build, mend, and navigate these boats. In an age of rapid change, do you see your work as a tribute to these traditions, or something more reflective of how we adapt to loss?

For about twenty years I taught ship model building for the Woodenboat School in Brooklin, Maine. It was a hobby I enjoyed and to go up to Woodenboat for a week , teach in the shops and be amongst people who were also building full size craft was great fun. My students built small boats in large scale. That allows you to build them the same way a full size boat is built. I have watched all manner of traditional full size craft finished or begun, taught by skilled traditional boat builders who knew their craft. These are people you want to have a beer with. It was also never hard to go down some small dirt road and find a one man shop at the end building a classic lobsterboat the old fashioned way. I found that they were as interested in the model building as I was in their work. Understanding how boats are built has been immensely important for me in getting the details right even if I don’t include them in my composition.

Despite the stillness of your compositions, there is movement—water pulling at a hull, birds circling above, the suggestion of wind against a dockside house. How do you compose a painting to hold both presence and motion?

My compositions have always been a little off balance. I think that to the eye, that infers move-ment. Generally, I will weight the subject before center or above midline. I don’t think about this; it just happens. It works to include other elements that direct your attention to the subject as well. These can be subtle or obvious. Grasses, small streams, Pilings or old docks work. There have been occasions when the idea behind the painting was to portray immense distance and demonstrate how small the human element is when compared to the expanse of nature. These haven’t always been my most successful paintings but there was almost always a buyer that got what I was trying to say.

There have been exceptions, but generally I try to keep my skies sim-ple so they don’t draw your attention away from the main subject. Knowing and understanding how water behaves whether in a storm or behind a boat moving through it is a skill I constantly have to work at. Observation is the only solution and studying how other artists have depicted it helps. I don’t do it often but on occasion I have driven down to the beach and simply sat and watched the waves. I go to bay beaches as well because the waves are different. Only if you think about it, you realize that reflections see things from a different angle than you do.

When a viewer stands in front of one of your paintings, what do you hope they carry away with them? Is it nostalgia, an understanding of a vanishing world, or something less tangible—perhaps the feeling of salt air and time itself settling on the skin?

Sometimes I am only saying that this drew my attention, isn’t it interesting? Other times, I am trying to say how our world is changing. This is how it was. I want there to be an emotional Response like the one I felt. Respect for the accomplishments and efforts of people now gone and some still with us is one element of what I am trying to pass on. Another part might be the incredible stark beauty of some of the places I have found and I want to share them with you. I try to put you in the place I saw and feel how I felt. Nothing substitutes for actually be-ing at some of these places with the rain and wind in your face, but putting it on canvas is the next best thing I can do.