Nine years ago, after closing a successful, six-month exhibit of his ship models at the Maine Maritime Museum, in Bath, artist and modelmaker John P. Gardner and his wife, Elaine, were having lunch at Le Garage, in Wiscasset. As they gazed out at the two abandoned schooners rotting in the mud, Elaine said, “Why don’t you make a model of these?”
Johns replied, “I can’t. It’s beyond me. It can’t be done; it requires too much information I don’t have.”
But the possibilities nagged, forcing him to start researching the old vessels.
After eight years of talking to people who’d taken photographs and measurements of the HESPER and LUTHER LITTLE, combing museum archives and scouring books for information that would apply to the two schooners, and after building the models in his mind and dreaming about building them, despite the lack of a backer or a commission, he spent the past eight months bringing his plans to fruition.
On June 5, John Gardner put the finishing touches on the finest diorama he has ever made. He laid a broken topmast on the tilted deck of the HESPER up against the remains of the scuppers, placing the lines so they fell over the side and landed in the silted area between the two hulks. He tapped the wires in place first with his big, blunt fingers that work with such amazing delicacy, then with a screwdriver tip, then with needle-nosed pliers. Once they were where he wanted them, he touched them with glue on the tip of a paintbrush and a spritz of fixative. His final act was to take what looked like fine, dried silt or dust that he called verdigris between his fingers and sprinkle it here and there on the lines and between the remains of the two vessels, saying, as he did, “Now I play God,” and blowing the dust lightly to make it settle as if by wind and time.
The finished diorama, built to a scale of roughly 1/8 inch to a foot, lay on its specially-made case table, waiting for the protective lid to be set over it. It will spend the next six months on display at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. Where it ends up is anybody’s guess.
In some ways, it had been the most difficult diorama Gardner had ever attempted. He chose to show the rotting hulls as they looked in 1972, after they’d suffered fire damage and substantial decay, but at a point where it was still possible, in modeling them, to create a work of art.
In order to produce the effects he needed, not only did he set both hulls on fire, but after he’d smothered the flames, he took the heel of his hand and gently stove in the house on the HESPER, all of which, he admitted, required bravery. He explained, “The thought keeps going through your mind as you’re working on this little, tiny, intricate stuff, that there is a bigger picture, and the bigger picture is the death of these two vessels. And in your mind you’ve got to keep how the final product will look and you’ve got to have the courage to make it look that way. That means destroying them as well as building them. So it made it a challenge.”
In meeting that challenge, Gardner has transcended all his previous models and made an artistic breakthrough.
The beauty of Gardner’s work lies not in making models of perfect scale, but in making art. He described how he’d gone about leading the eye into the sculpture. “There were chances here to create all kinds of textures working against each other, and it’s a natural piece of sculpture because the bow of the HESPER leans into the hull of the LUTHER LITTLE, which keeps the LUTHER LITTLE from running off the page. The double row of pilings from the decayed wharf is offset and drives you right into the two boats. And these two islands up ahead retard the progress of the two hulls from further forward motion. The whole thing just bonds, you know?”
The key to a good model is the sharpness of detail, and from the infinitesimal spots of rust on the piling nails to the burned and broken bowsprit on the LUTHER LITTLE and steering mechanism of the HESPER, few could ask for crisper, more delicate detail.
“You want a good sharp line,” John explained, “and that’s why these woods like pearwood and lemonwood give good sharp detail. All the turnbuckles are made out of pearwood, the bowsprits are made out of lemonwood because of the detail, and the mast hoops here are made out of white holly. The bulk of the boat is basswood.”
But with the case protecting the models, the viewer can’t get close enough to appreciate all the nuances that make this diorama so spectacular: the impossibly fine turnbuckles, the moss growing in the hold and beneath the water line, the almost jewel-like pebbles on the shore. A chair and magnifying glass might help, as the viewer could spend considerable time studying each vessel and the shoreline from every angle.
“I’m glad it’s done, but I miss working on it,” John said. “It took a lot of years to get there.”