USCGC Reliance

oil on canvas

I was commissioned to spend a week at sea aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Reliance in order to create a painting to be used for the promotion of the Coast Guard’s “Deep Water” program. Built in the sixties, the sturdy cutters of the Reliance class (along with other vessels) are beginning to show their age. The Coast Guard was proposing that Congress fund the construction of a state-of-the-art fleet. The problem for me was that the Coast Guard wanted the painting to communicate obsolescence without making their ships appear poorly kept. My solution was “The Seas Ahead” in which I show the Reliance passing from smooth seas of the past into the gathering storm of an uncertain future. I had no idea how portentous this concept would be.

On the sunny morning of September 11, 2001, with the painting virtually finished, I found myself debating one final change. I had painted a lightning strike on the horizon, but I had begun to think that lightning might be overstating things a bit. I was just about to paint out the bolt altogether when my daughter called me from New York with the first word of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center. I left the lightning in the picture.