Art gallery

Today I thought it would be nice to take a break from catching up with the Mako refresh and instead check out the shop. More specifically, a look at the artwork out here. During lockdown in the early days of the pandemic Simon was living at home. He had planned to spend at least a semester in Maine while working on Sara Gideon’s senate campaign. But shortly after he got home the pandemic hit and he ended up staying for all of 2020.

One of the ways we passed the time was to go out to the barn in the evening and work on restoring his Dyer dinghy. As events transpired, the division of labor soon evolved so that I focused on the restoration with periodic help from Simon while he was consumed with drawing on every surface of the barn.

We created a loose narrative about two civilizations on opposite walls of the barn. They had not yet made contact with each other but were deep into the exploratory phase by mid-summer.

Now every time Simon returns home to visit he comes out to the barn to add to the artwork. Sometimes I take his fabulous work for granted, but more often I look up from whatever I am doing on whatever boat is in the spa and I realize how fortunate I am to be surrounded by such excellent artwork.

So today’s posting is a sampling of the magic that goes on in that most happy of my happy places.

We’ve got LEGO heroes watching over us.

We’ve got LEGO bug-men climbing electrical conduit.

Plenty of transportation images.

Raccoon? Fox? Wolverine? Who knows.

Giant squid attacking a mahogany-shell sailboat. Oh boy.

This is Ellen’s work and it used to be the figurehead on a backyard play structure/pirateship we built when Simon was just a wee salt.

In addition to hosting a study of teapots, the door sports a reminder to cover one eye before leaving the barn on dark evenings. It’s a trick we learned from pirate lore: the purpose of the eyepatch pirates wore was so they could flip it up and have low-light vision in that eye when they dashed belowdecks during a battle. We try to remember to cover an eye during clean up at the end of the night so the perilous walk back to the house is easier with some night vision.

This image recalls the riddle of the person who needed to move a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain across a river. The person only has a boat big enough to carry himself and one other item (fox, chicken, grain). If the grain is left with the chicken, the chicken will eat it. If the chicken is left with the fox, the fox will eat it. How does the person get across with all three without anything getting eaten?