Flying Fish Meet Sailing Ships at Maritime Display

At the center of Fisherman’s Wharf is the Ventura County Maritime Museum, repository of ship models and paintings done in excruciating detail. The displays are not exactly Easy Listening.

“Genealogy of the Ship,” for example, traces all modes of transit over water from 4,000 B.C. through today in a 36-model collection. A lighter display, by contrast, might show photographs of Port Hueneme’s current role as host to Wallenius Lines’ cargo ships--cargo ships so vast, so huge, so heavy as to contain 6,300 automobiles.

Just when you think it’s all about displacement and ballast and screw size, magic floats down from the ceiling: silk banners. Seemingly weightless, diaphanous and brightly colored, these silk banners have fish painted on them.

Each of the 20 banners is about 18 inches wide by three or four feet tall. Each bears one large, vertically positioned fish in luminous blue, green, yellow, crimson, pink, cobalt--it depends upon whether the fish is a leopard shark, yellow striped sheepshead, green striped grunt, sea bass, hummu nuku or great white shark. The fish are starkly and beautifully wrought and somewhat representational.

But look long enough and you’ll see they’re jiggered and distorted and tweaked, always, in service to showing off color and form. In this sense the fish banners leave the realm of the purely decorative and become art.

Five points to an otherwise barnacled museum. Nothing leavens a 1909 painting of the New York, a dark-hued steamer on brooding seas by Hoboken, N.J., artist Antonio Jacobsen, than a happily distorted and winsome portrait of a neon pin stripe grunt.

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Each banner is signed by Natasha, who actually is Natalie Wilson of Santa Barbara. Wilson has been painting on silk for some time. But these banners are a specific grouping from a specific technique that took time to evolve.

Much of the “painted” silk available these days is accomplished by successive immersion of the silk in different dyes. Wilson instead keeps the colors separate by using a resist solution to contain dyes that she applies directly to the fabric; that is, she’s figured out what it takes to paint on silk as she would on canvas. No blurring. Distinct images.

The silk is then steam-set for four hours or more to help the dyes resist fading, followed by a pressing. The resulting colors are deep, vivid, luminous.

Wilson trained at San Jose State University and UC Santa Barbara and for some time thought of herself as an abstract painter in oil and acrylics. But she was always struck by how Europeans had borrowed inspiration from ancient Asian cultures in silk painting and, over the course of centuries, created an art idiom in it.

In a like spirit, she continues to experiment. Alongside her dangling fish here, she’s got one mammoth 3-by-5-foot silk panel that is an entire underwater scene devised with an alternate technology: using wax to create the images of fish, jellyfish, coral, rocks. The depictions are even clearer than on the banners, and the multiple subjects within a single scene create a greater sense of depth. Where she’ll go from here is anyone’s guess.

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Beneath the banners, off in a corner of the museum, three visitors sit in white plastic patio chairs and watch a video of the famous marine painter John Stobart, a Brit living in Massachusetts. Stobart is discussing how he creates wharf paintings that transcend being merely correct renderings of docks and ships in historical detail.

“I get a feeling for the scene,” he says, attempting to look over a Greenwich, Conn., inlet that is sliced through by a roaring Connecticut Turnpike. “The space, the play of the light, the sense of drama that nature creates is what helps me bring the subject to life.”

Not everything in a maritime museum can meet such lofty standards. But much in this place does, and helping it rise to such heights is the counterpoint achieved by having something as ephemeral and inexact as a temporary silk art exhibit.

Just as it was with so many of the sloops and cutters and ketches and yawls and barkentines on display, it’s all about discovery.