Boat after Bosch
June, 2004
Acrylic, 11"x14"

I spent a lot of hours looking at some paintings by Hieronymus Bosch (a Dutch painter, late 15th to early 16th century) in a very nice book which focused mainly on his 'Garden of Earthly Delights' triptych. The book is 'Bosch: The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Jacqueline and Maurice Guillaud. anyways, this boat was taken from the background of the Hell panel... a lot of other details caught my interest as well, but this is the first one I decided to do anything with. I wondered where this little boat was sailing off to and thought of all the lobster and fishing boats I see while I'm kayaking... I thought about all the bodies washed ashore or floating around in Bosch's Hell, and thought of all the commercial fishing stuff I find washed up on islands off the coast... no abstract meaning or anything like that was really intended here, it's exactly what it appears to be - just a boat dropping off a bunch of bodies, like a lobster boat dropping it's traps... my vision of the morning routine of a boat in the background of Bosch's Hell panel from the 'Garden of Earthly Delights' triptych.

A few random notes... though I was painting with acrylics on canvas board, I still wanted the colors to be similar looking to the original and the whole thing was painted with only three or so colors. It was also painted entirely from dark colors to lighter colors, which was one thing I remembered from high school art class as being sort of against the rules for painting with acrylics, I remember my teacher saying to paint dark colors over lighter colors when using acrylics. But for the effect and look I wanted, painting lighter over dark seemed to be ideal - also, most of the time I thinned the paint with water or a lot of gell medium so the paint went on very trasparent, so many layers were needed, but there seems to be a lot of depth to the colors in some areas.