Hayley Phillips
The Art of Drawing Boats
I.
First, make sure that you have both
a love for, and a fear of, the sea.
This is crucial in defining a line
against it. The bow, decision-
maker, a stance of opposition,
an angle forward, starboard
and port gentle curve of some safe,
dark belly which marks one
water from the next, hull
the cradle, stern the soft arrow
nock. None of this without its
complexity. No smallness
stacked on smallness without
due immensity of detail.
II.
To reconstruct something already
made by human hands is a
search for information.
You must ask it questions
like, Are you a summer or
a winter? Which side do you
favor? Do you think of yourself
as a vertical or a horizontal
creature? Don’t expect your answers
right away. They are not
in the ink or the charcoal,
not in the roll of your joints
pushing them across the paper,
which you will find, also, quiet.
III.
Midway through, you may feel
the need to revise your portrait,
to replace something here, inaccurate
for its model, or there, where
you realized, after all this
time, you can do better. From
the start outward, you’ve
become a better artist. How
little time it takes, you
didn’t know. Shuck off
the broad sail, this one
should be small – it’s the body
in focus. This one knows
the water better than the air.
IV.
The surface, of course, has a way
of slipping out from underneath
your subject. Pin it down
with a horizon; let it drift off
or return, humbled, to your
pining viewer, unreachable
in a kind of distance. The sky
should not draw the gaze
center – we are in little need
of division. Hold it at arms’
length. Choose carefully
which element should pierce
its membrane, which should
spill into a repeated world.
V.
Lastly, you need to know the contents
of your vessel. You’ll find you have been
there before; it is a history and a
drowning. Add creatures of your
choosing – there will be room. Make
sure to draw two of your father
in there, side by side. They may
squint through reinforced window
or stand willfully on the deck.
Know that if you bear down
hard enough on their likeness,
one of them may crumble out of the other.
Ask yourself, deciding completeness,
why they so desperately need to float.
Hayley Phillips is a Virginia native who received her MFA from Randolph College in 2021 and is now a PhD candidate at Louisiana State University. Her work is included or forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, ONE ART, Evergreen Review, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere.