John Marin

by MACKINLEY HELM

1

JOHN MARIN, the painter, is as purely American as Buffalo Bill. He is as Yankee as baked beans and Bill Thompson, his friend who hauls lobsters off Washington County, the most easterly parcel of land in the state of Maine. And he is as frugal and plain, in his life and his painting, as the New Jersey spinsters who raised him. It was doubtless the poignantly native quality of this Yankee’s pictures that moved a ranking English critic to give Marin “top marks” at an exhibition of two hundred years of American art in London last summer.

Marin’s paternal grandfather, Jean-Baptiste Marin, was a French immigrant with an old Spanish name, but Marin, growing up on his maternal Grandfather Currey’s peach farm in Delaware in the late seventies, favored the family of the mother who had died at his birth. He looked like aunts Jenny and Lelia and Uncle Dick Currey, who were all tall and slim, their peaked faces distinguished by thin, straight noses and the kind of pale, transparent skin that shows wrinkles early.

While Dick Currey tended stock on the Delaware farm and shot game in the woods, John Marin drew animal pictures, and from earliest childhood he had the knack of showing his feeling for motion. Years later, when he learned to use color and began to paint orchards and circuses — as well as city streets, islands, and oceans — he knew how to make everything move on paper and canvas. Trees, birds, and ships; clouds, wind, and water: all these live and move freely in the Marin paintings.

Back in New Jersey, where the Curreys came from, Marin spent eight years in school in Weehawken — ten miles from Rutherford, where he was born December 23, 1870. There was never a day in those years, so he says, when he would not have preferred to be outdoors with Uncle Dick Currey. There was never a lesson, outside of geometry, that he felt had stayed learned. He regrets that the lost years in the eighties cannot be added on to his life as an artist.

Still full of ideas at seventy-six, he mourns also the five useless years that came after school, when he tried to fit himself into his era’s conventional middle-class pattern. He worked in a wholesale notion house, where he mixed up his orders, and then in a second-rate architect’s office. There were only four years, between twelve and thirty, that an artist could salvage: two pleasant years of fishing and sketching in the woods near Weehawken, and painting and drifting as far afield as St. Paul and Richmond; and two years in the Pennsylvania Academy. He was in his twenty-eighth year when his aunts admitted that since he was a failure at everything else, he might as well go to art school. His father, who kept him in cash while the maiden aunts reared him, agreed to finance him.

Marin won an academy prize for his drawings, but not for the drawings that he made as a student. He won the prize for his Weehawken ink sketches of wild fowl and river boats, drawn from close observation and endowed with motion. He learned in academy classes only to draw plaster figures which could not be thought to have a life of their own.

“There was a boy in my class,” Marin says, “who could transfer a Greek torso to paper and make it look nice and real — as real as the plaster cast that he copied. But I thought to myself. What’s it for? A man paints a boat so it looks like a boat. But what has he got? The boat doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t move in the water, it is blown by no tempest. That copy-boat might sell boats, but it cannot be art. Art must show what goes on in the world.”

Although Marin is now a venerable member of the exclusive American Academy of Arts and Letters, he never took up with the academic tradition. He has never shown nature merely as it appears on the surface. The nearest approach to photographic representation in the whole of his work occurs in a set of three etchings of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Madeleine, and the Opéra, a bread-and-butter commission from a dealer in Paris.

Marin’s father sent him to Paris in 1905, on Aunt Jenny’s demand. “My father forked up once again,” Marin says, “and I hit Paris in my thirtyfifth year.”

He had been knocking around for another five years, after his spell at the Pennsylvania Academy, and as far as aunts Jenny and Lelia could see, he hadn’t got anywhere. He had made about a hundred small oils, but they found no market. They only spoiled him for farming and other serious business.

In Paris, after a few weeks in professional studios, Marin fell back into vagabond habits. He roamed for four years around Europe with the apparently aimless uncertainty of his long years of loafing at home. He “ knocked out ” some etchings, as he wrote twenty-five years ago in his “Notes Autobiographical”; made a few paintings, together with hundreds of sketches, in Belgium and Holland, England and Switzerland; and learned to play a slick game of billiards with American artists who lived in the Quarter.

Marius De Zayas, a caricaturist whom the late Alfred Stieglitz discovered, published a cartoon of Marin playing poker with some of his friends, and when the painter met his father in Venice, sometime thereafter, Marin père was quick to inquire what the son, now close to forty, had to show for the father’s investment. An oil painting sold to the Luxembourg? A page in a French periodical? A handful of etchings? A few water colors in an Autumn Salon? The father was shocked to learn that the son scarcely knew the names of museums and galleries.

2

MARIN returned to the States just before his fortieth birthday, quite untouched by Paris, and it was then that he hit his real stride. Marsden Hartley, that fastidious painter, seeing some of his pictures in Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery in 1909, had said that Marin had taken water color out of the class of embroidery. He had invented a new kind of serious, rapid, and pictorial shorthand. “It is like golf,” Marin wrote to Stieglitz, who had bought a camera in Berlin in the eighties and within a year was hailed as a genius. “The fewer strokes I can take, the better the picture,” Marin said. The new Manhattan buildings and bridges and the old river boats were just the right subjects for this brisk, new style. And Stieglitz himself was on hand to encourage him — to “make me feel good,” as Marin soon said in one of his letters.

Although Marin had been diffident about showing himself to the great people in Europe, like Whistler and Sargent, — “I was never one to push myself forward,” he says of himself, — he had made a few friends, one of them Edward Steichen, who lived in Giverny, the Norman town to which Monet had retired and where Cézanne liked to paint. Steichen and Stieglitz had recently set up their Photo-Secession shop in New York, at 291 Fifth Avenue, across from the old Holland House where solvent artists liked to go for their lunch.

“ Along with our art-in-photography photographs,” Steichen had one day said to Stieglitz, “why not show the anti-photographic in art?”

They showed paintings and sculptures by Henri Matisse, the first of the so-called “Wild Cats” — Fauves — and paintings and drawings by Rodin, Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rousseau, and Picabia. Then Steichen got up an exhibition of paintings by Marin and Alfred Maurer. Maurer, the son of a Currier and Ives staff painter, was an academician who had lately gone “modern,” while Marin’s paintings of street scenes and bridges in Paris and London were as “anti-photographic” as anything Steichen had seen from American sources. Stieglitz stepped in and promised Marin enough money to live on (not without shrewdly noting that living was cheap in Weehawken) and, receiving his work in return, gave him his first oneman show at Photo-Secession in little more than a year.

Partly because New York had livened up during his absence and partly because it seemed fresh after Europe, Marin settled down to paint New York’s streets and rivers. Paris, he had thought, was a beautiful woman in a gray room. New York was a man, quick and dynamic, striding along in the bright, sparkling air. Marin had already sketched New York’s old buildings, old wharfs, old sailing vessels; but now he caught the city’s new motions — the horizontal stretch of the bridges, the fiat sweep of traffic on river and street, the vertical motion of the new Woolworth Building, which he showed bent towards the earth to meet the fastmoving Island.

The letters to Stieglitz describe the excitement of piling New York’s “great houses one upon another with paint as they do pile themselves up there so beautiful, so fantastic.” He began to give them a life of their own in his paintings, as though they were sentient. Then he married Marie Hughes from upstate New York — he had kept her waiting while he roamed around Europe — and set out to discover the countryside. Hating studios worse than the plague of mosquitoes which stung him outdoors, he painted landscapes in Lewis County, New York, and the Berkshires, until at last he found Maine.

Most of the marine water colors from 1915 to 1919 were painted at Small Point, where Marin spent summers with his wife and son, John IV, at an ancient hotel. He bought an offshore islet, christened it Marin Island, and proceeded to make it the subject of some of his most lyrical pictures. He liked the Maine coast, he told Stieglitz, because the ocean was handy and he felt expansive.

Marin sounded the praises of Small Point in wartime letters that read like Walt Whitman poems. He wrote on July 31, 1917: —

MY DEAR STIEGLITZ: -
There was a time about two weeks gone when I should have written to you. Then the mind was, if anything, clearer. Now it’s hot. . . . But there are degrees, and how much hotter other places in this poor old scrapping world. And what are they scrapping about? . . .
We up here get but few glimpses of the outer world. . . . a fish boat looks big, a sail boat looms up, the eagles soaring overhead are big, or is not their bigness a something of the imagination. As, if you were floundering, how big a plank would look. As, if in the wilderness lost, what a little light would mean. As, in a city, one light means little or nothing. As, in a world harbor, the insignificance of one little boat. . . .
A native to show the traveler the way.
A pilot to steer the boat through, knowing the channels.
Can you trust him, blurts out this awful word — trust.
Ignorance, stupidity, knavishness, selfishness. No.
Kindliness. Kindliness and intelligence. Yes.
Until then, we will have no peace, no rest. . . .
And one might go on, talk of art in its different forms. As to whether in the tearing up, the making of new paths. As to how much new road, real road, will be made. . . .
I want an answer to the question, a real answer, a true answer, the only answer. Who can give it?
There is an answer, there must be the Only answer.
And that, I suppose, is why the whole of nature scraps, unconsciously, periodically scraps. . . . The beast cries out, one of its answers is food, food of some kind. When we are no longer hungry, no longer cry for food, death comes. . . .
I have just been in for a swim and feel better. The water delicious, the sands to the touch of the feet. Big shelving wonderful rocks, hoary with enormous hanging beards of seaweed, carrying forests of evergreen on their backs. The big tides come in, swift, go out swift. . . .
Wonderful days.
Wonderful sunset closings.
Good to have eyes to see, ears to hear the roar of the waters.
Nostrils to take in the odors of the salt sea and the firs.
Fish fresh, caught some myself.
Berries to pick. . . .
Big flying eagles.
The solemn restful beautiful firs.
The border of the sea.
Good night.
My island looks tantalizingly beautiful.
My boy is brown and well, full of life. My wife is brown and well. I am brown and well. . . .
Your friend,
MARIN

Got the two checks all right, many thanks.

Nibbling at work!

When he could not work, he fished small-mouth bass in the interior—“the finest sport in the world,” he said in one of the letters to Stieglitz. “You first have to know his whereabouts. You have to dress to suit him. ... be wily, firm, not too firm, fast, yet not too fast, slow, not too slow, and sensitive. . . . You have to take a few years off to become a consummate bass fisher.”

In 1919, the Marins pushed on to Stonington, a harbor town on Deer Isle which you reached in those days by steamer from Rockland. The town of Stonington and its harbor became a favorite motif with Marin, as Mont Sainte-Victoire was one of Cézanne’s favorite subjects, and it was in the Stonington paintings that one of Marin’s well-known devices took shape — the use of dark, slashing lines around the various parts of a picture. He had already “framed” subjects with dark bands of color to keep them from sliding off the edge of the paper. Now he began to point out, by means of frame within frame, how the several parts of a picture “asserted themselves,” as he said, in respect to each other. Each tree, island, and ship was thus given its particular place in the general tension set up in the pictures.

3

IN 1933, after trying out New Mexico and New Hampshire, Marin moved down to Cape Split, in Addison township, and there he began to give to oil paint the rapid feeling of movement that had always pertained to his use of transparent colors. In a nostalgic letter written not long ago from his home in Cliffside, New Jersey, to one of his Down Eastern friends, he said that Cape Split lay nearer his heart than any place in the world. His wife liked it there too, and until her death in February, 1945, she made pets of stray cats and spiders and kept a neat house for her husband and son on a rocky bank on the western pitch of the Cape.

Marin’s house on Cape Split was built by one of the Longfellows to house summer boarders — although the Longfellows really belonged to t he nearby town of Machias. His neighbors, the Wasses and Tabbutts, the Looks and the Nortons, the Crowleys and Plummers, — descendants of British colonists who came around 1765 to fish cod in Wescogus River, — are all fond of music. Leo Wass, after a day with his lobster traps, plays Bach by ear on the fiddle, and his father plays jigs at the home of Mrs. Bill Thompson, born Susie Wass and a cousin of Mme. Nordica, who was Lillian Norton. Sometimes John Marin joins in and plays the piano.

When I was first taken to call on the painter, one fall afternoon, we walked down a lane of blue spruce connecting Cape Split with “Windslip,” the house where I stayed. We passed the burial grounds of Jason Look’s family, crossed a bar to the Cape, turned up a rough road through the woods to a clearing, and approached the glassed-in veranda of Marin’s white cottage. Marin was playing the first of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions on an old-fashioned Chickering. His hands chased each other over the keyboard and his shoulders moved with the quick play of phrase against phrase.

“That is the kind of music my piano likes to have played on it,” he said, when he discovered us there. “That music is full of movement and life. Did you hear how the little tunes struck at each other? That is an example of balance and force.”

As he warmly invited his callers to stay for the sunset, his smiling eyes and small, wrinkled mouth, under gray curls and bangs, recalled to me something Marsden Hartley once said about Marin: “There is always a play of earthly humor about to fall like an autumn leaf from his face.”

“Can you promise us a real Marin sunset?” I asked.

“I think it will be mighty fine,” he replied, looking out upon Pleasant Bay from his studio window. And as. a matter of fact, it turned out to be the most glittering sunset of the early fall season.

As the sun began to go down behind the Tunk Mountains and the headlands beyond Dyer’s Island — west of Cadillac Mountain — Marin excused himself from the talk.

“I want to make notes of this sunset,” he said. “It is really something quite out of the ordinary.”

Since he was only sketching, and not painting a picture, he allowed me to watch. He worked on an 8” x 10" pad in his lap, a paint box on a wooden chair seat before him, a porcelain bowl filled with water on a table near-by. With his right hand he roughed in, with black crayon, the three elements of the picture—sky, headland, and bay; and laid on the color with furious strokes of a half-inch brush in his left hand. His hands fought each other over the paper as they had done while he played the Two-Part Invention.

The outdoor colors changed rapidly. A feathery patch of red cloud became purple, the purple thinned out to show a red lining. A sky passage turned acid yellow even while Marin laid a mixture of yellow ocher and cadmium on the dry painting surface. A dull robin’s-egg blue became brilliant turquoise.

“See that blue spot out there?” Marin said, dabbing impatiently. “That is a ‘light’ color. You can’t put it on paper. You can’t even get it with mixtures of color — viridian, cerulean, French blue, chromium oxide green, or what have you. So you just put down a color that the paper will like, a color that looks all right in itself. If the paper likes it, it doesn’t matter if it’s not a transcript of nature.

“Sometimes,” he went on, “I like to paint a red ocean, with Light red, maybe, between Venetian and Indian red, or maybe spectrum red. Red is more exciting than gray. It is not the color that makes an ocean on canvas look like a real ocean. What makes the painted ocean look real is a suggestion of the motion of water. A red ocean with motion will look more like the sea than a patch of gray paint without movement.”

His “notes” well laid down by the time darkness drew in, Marin spoke of the connection between his painting and music. “I don’t know any big musical words,” he explained. “All I know about music I have learned by myself. But I think that Handel and Bach and those fellows before Handel’s time — those English fellows like Orlando Gibbons — gave their music real action. I try to make the parts of my pictures move the same way, only I always make them move towards the center of the paper or canvas — like notes closing in on middle C of the keyboard.

“I take my skiff and row out to one of the islands, Sheep Island, Eagle Island, Norton Island, out there in the bay in front of my house,” he said, in an illustration of his use of motion and color. “I see rocks upriver and the water flowing. All right, I put down the rocks on my paper. Then I show how the water runs past the rocks. The water is more white than colored, you notice, but you have to use color — never mind what color — or you couldn’t show how the water runs along on white paper. Now, I say to myself, the most important thing about a river is that it runs downhill. So I put on the color with strokes that show how the water runs downhill past the rocks. Simple, isn’t it?”

And it is true that Marin’s pictures seem simpler to look at when you realize that they are painted by a child of nature. Whether at home on the Cape, or farther afield on the offshore islands (Outer Sand, Crumple, Jordan’s Delight), or in the interior, towards Tunk Half Way and the village of Centerville, Marin lives from sunrise to dark in communion with the natural world. He knows the movement of clouds, the direction of wind, the ebb and flow of the tides. He studies beaches and swamps, trees and flowers, birds and beasts — everything that has life and structure. Hence for every rule in his painting there is a likeness from nature.

“Take the idea of balance,” he said. “Think of the wonderful balance of squirrels. They scratch themselves equally well with hind paws or fore paws without losing their balance. I like my pictures to have that kind of balance when I have put down enough things to cover the surface. I stand them up on their end, turn them upside down, until I see that, like the squirrels, they have got balance in every direction.”

Marin insists that the human eye is a nicer judge of true balance than rulers and calipers. Mrs. Marin had a good eye, he says, for that sort of thing. She could always tell whether his pictures had equilibrium. “That picture don’t seem to me to weigh right, John,” she would say, once or twice in a season, and Marin would have to admit she was right.

Marin is always preoccupied with the balance of color as well as the balance of forms. Except when he “plays around,” as he says, with two colors, trying to see how nearly he can get the effect of a third hue without using it, he finds the balance he likes in red, blue, and yellow.

“Nature often reveals herself in sets of three things,” he says. “There is land between sky and water, gray between black and white, lukewarm between hot and cold.”

Sometimes he lets black stand for red. Sometimes he asks the spectator to see the yellow contained in Light red or the red casts in ocher. But the three primary hues must be present, he thinks, in one way or another, to make the balance of color complete. He likes old American flags better than new ones because in the old ones the white has turned yellow.

Marin’s newest paintings fall into two categories. There are lyrical paintings, like a peach-orchard series in which the trees are like ballet dancers swaying to music. Then there are landscapes — sometimes with nude figures—filled with ideas of the most deeply intellectual and professional character. It is as though the painter, rounding out his life now, were trying at once to give out the greatest amount of understandable pleasure and joy and at the same time explore his professional vision to its farthermost reaches. He liked the idea that perhaps some of his more difficult, more crabbed paintings were like written music, with bar lines and clefs, with measures and sharp and flat symbols; while the lyrical pictures that are plainer to look at are like the performance of sonata or symphony. The former need study, the latter give quicker delight.

As a painter strongly addicted to painting, Marin respects the flat surface of the paper or canvas he works on and likes to create “planes” of color and atmosphere instead of working with photographic perspective. Like Cézanne and Gauguin, he paints objects that move within space without taking the eye into distances which do not really exist on flat canvas. And even for this trickiest phase of his art, he finds a happy likeness in nature.

The earth is ideally flat, he observes, like the sea. He sees how hills are raised up and leveled, how valleys are dug out and filled. So that even when he appears to have carried anti-photography to its farthest limit, he is in reality following his feeling for nature.

When Marin says that his most serious problem at seventy-six is to “get a picture to travel on its planes,” what he means, really, is that he likes to put several views into one picture. He will paint houses in front of a valley in front of a mountain, and leave holes, so to speak, in the outermost view, so that the valley and mountain show through. Marin himself is not satisfied with a picture until each view is complete in itself; so that if he could lift off any one view by itself, what remained would be whole and complete. This conception is the spectator’s most serious “problem”; but when it is mastered, it explains most good “modern” painting since the time of Cézanne.

In spite of a lack of surface “meaning” in some of his paintings, Marin allows, as so many painters have failed to, for the bridge between painter and public. The painter, to be sure, must have his innings. He must be permitted to “show paint as paint ” on flat paper or canvas. But Marin believes that the artist ought to give pleasure, and supposes that the painter who can give the most pleasure is one who loves paint and does not hate subject matter. Hence he judges painters on two principal counts: on their adherence to their private vision of nature and on their affection for paint.

He prefers Braque to Picasso because Braque lives closer to nature, and likes Matisse better than either because he paints living and sharp things with love. He commends Mondrian for discovering “two facts of life,” namely, horizontal and vertical motion; but he thinks Mondrian left out the life which goes on in nature around the lines which go up and down and across. He likes the works of the American painters Maurice Prendergast and Marsden Hartley, who had sincere visions of nature’s vitality which they rendered with love. Of the old masters he admires Goya, who seems to him not to have copied nature’s creations but to have created freshly in paint after nature’s example. And he likes old Dutch paintings of flowers because of the tenderness with which precious objects are handled.

People have wondered how Marin can alternately “love” Cape Split and Manhattan, which he paints when he returns for the winter to Cliffside, across from Grant’s Tomb. But as Marin views it, Manhattan is not so far removed from Cape Split. He finds the same sky and, in the East and North rivers, a similar watery boat-filled foreground. Even the skyscrapers in the middle-ground “view” of his Manhattan water colors spring from the ground and move like the trees on Sheep Island.

4

AT Cliffside, two Currey ladies still keep an eye on the painter — Uncle Dick Currey’s daughters, the Misses Lyda and Retta; but with Mrs. Marin no longer on hand to see to his flannels, Marin has frequent, attacks of lumbago which interfere with his painting, and his heart, as he says, plays him jinx. Still, he likes to go to the theater when the Lunts are in town, and to hockey games and the circus. Where there is movement, he likes to be present.

He used to go on Saturday afternoons in the winter to An American Place, the gallery where, in later years, Alfred Stieglitz showed John Marin’s work along with pictures by Georgia O’Keeffe (Mrs. Stieglitz) and the late Arthur Dove. Stieglitz did all the talking. Marin listened and answered by letter. But it was a comforting friendship which Marin has mourned since Stieglitz’s death.

Stieglitz liked to get himself up as an unworldly romantic, yet professional dealers rarely got such high prices as he managed to get for his living painters. Although the cost of the large recent water colors — those which Marin himself judges to be A-1 quality — commonly ranges from $2000 to $5000, Stieglitz sometimes asked and quite frequently got as much as $8000. The highest price up to date for a Marin oil painting was brought by a picture called “The Hurricane, ” bought in 1944 by a Middle Western collector for a sum around $11,000. The average price for the oils has been somewhere between $3000 and $8000. Yet Marin always assented to Stieglitz’s crotchets and whims as a dealer: such as an occasional sale at a less fancy figure to an admirer who worked hard for his money — small choice papers of early date are still sometimes offered at $1000 or less — or outright refusal to sell to the purse-proud and arrogant.

Marin approvingly tolls the story of a vain woman from the national capital who swooped into “The Place” at the opening of one of his annual shows, glanced over the walls, pointed to the season’s showiest picture, and said, “I’ll take that!” “No you won’t,” Stieglitz said — and she didn’t.

One of the most persistent Marin collectors, after Duncan Phillips of Washington, who owns a roomful of Marins, is a color-blind friend who visits the painter in Cliffside and has, in the past, bought dozens of pictures from Stieglitz. This curious circumstance seems to the painter to prove that the transcription of motion from nature is more important to the truthfulness of a painting than the literal transference of color.

Marin’s friends on Cape Split never knew he was so well off and famous as his pictures have made him until Mrs. Gene Tabbutt, one of the neighbors, saw a magazine piece about “The Place” in 1944 and showed it around. Although they are clannish, the Down Easterners knew that they liked him. They relished his letters from Cliffside, signed “Ancient Mariner,” and wrote back fondly. But they were startled to learn that he was a lion; that art editors called him America’s “No. 1 Old Master,” They had always found him and his wife unpretentious. It had always seemed to Mrs. Thompson, for instance, that Mr. Marin chose to be commonplace, while Mrs. Marin, unlike summer folks generally, never put on any airs.

The Thompsons were touched when the artist wrote, after Mrs. Marin’s death, that he longed to return to them. “Enjoy the beautiful Earth while it is there to enjoy,” he said in a letter to Mrs. Thompson, the “Susie” of two recent portraits that are painted with evident love. “It’s our resting place.”

Both Susie and Bill have an eye for the “beautiful Earth.” Yet Marin can sometimes point to a thing or two that even the Thompsons have missed in their countryside — a red-berried witchwood at the end of the swamp, in exchange for Susie’s moosewood tree standing deep in the pine lot.

“I declare, John knows where everything is on the Cape,” Bill said, when Marin ‘came into Susie’s cookroom one day with a cap full of berries from the single huckleberry bush in the township.

Marin enjoys summer evenings with Susie and Bill. He sits in a red rocking chair in the kitchen while Bill knits green twine into heads and bait pockets for his homemade lobster traps and Susie fills the hot-water tank from the pump and readies the room up for next day’s early breakfast. The Thompsons never pester him with the talk that he hears in New York about whether he is an impressionist, abstractionist, realist. In his own mind, he’s a realist, creating from nature.

“The sea that I paint may not be the sea,” Marin says, “but it is a sea, not an abstraction.” And as Susie Thompson observed when he painted her portrait, his hands look, when he paints, as though they were trying to force some new creation up from the canvas, as nature pushes a sprout through the earth and creates a new tree.

The Thompsons have a fresh, unhackneyed way of looking at their friend Marin’s pictures. “They look like things you have seen in a dream,” Susie says, “and remembering Mr. Marin’s paintings is like remembering a dream.”

“They do grow on you,” Bill Thompson said, cutting a whore’s-egg thorn from his finger and reaffirming the outside world’s opinion. “But sometimes I have to tell John that a boat must look like a boat, not just go like a boat. I say, ‘John, a man has to haul fish from these boats.’ ”

And Marin agrees. A painted boat, however brief and symbolic the drawing, has to look like a boat. Otherwise, you really can’t show what it does.