About the artist

by John Stobart (Foreword to the print catalogue William Gilkerson ~ Marine Arts, Boston, 1999)

The following pages present for the first time a complete chronology (to date) of the collected prints and lithographs made from works by William Gilkerson. When I first met this artist' he was living aboard his seagoing gaff ketch Griffyn in Sausalito, California, sailing the Northwest Coast as his work permitted. (Prior to that, he had skippered an 1894 cutter around Europe; earlier, as a teenager he voyaged before the mast on a Norwegian ship plying between New Orleans and Ecuador.) Bill's artwork and mine were first shown together at the San Francisco Maritime Museum in 1973, when I learned firsthand of his passion for our field. After our show, he insisted on dragging me across the Mendocino cliffs to show me the rusty remnants of ringbolts from which lines had once moored lumber schooners in that perilous anchorage.

In the generation that has passed since that time, I have watched Bill become an internationally renowned marine artist, still driven by his passion for the sea. To quote the famed naval historian Jean Boudriot on Gilkerson: 'Now that this artist is so at ease with his subject that he can view it globally as well as from the perspective of its detail, he can let his talent flow, calling forth his inventiveness, sensitivity and tact ... I idealize the marine painter, hoping to recognize him in Gilkerson, whose work is so precise that even amateurs recognize it. The sea is his profession. His ships sail naturally; the wind blows through his pictures, and in them the ocean is restless."

Bill has had plenty of opportunity to observe these elements during many a long deck watch in the Pacific, the North Sea, the Caribbean, and other waters. John Swain Carter, director of Philadelphia's Independence Seaport Museum, comments on Gilkerson this way: "Experience is the key word in his work, and it can be argued that the majority of our greatest marine artists, past and present, were intimately familiar with the subjects they chose to paint. It is this familiarity with the ways of a ship that breathes life into the painted surface - familiarity with the routine of shipboard life . . . "

Besides the accuracy and expertise of Gilkerson's pictures, they are distinguished by their humanity, a quality which caught my eye at the outset. There is the feeling that his ships, skies and seas are only the settings for the miniature dramas of their crews. Maritime writer Peter Spectre expressed this very simply but eloquently in a profile of the artist: "His paintings have heart."

Gilkerson himself offers a more pragmatic analysis: "I don't think sailors have changed much over the centuries, just their ships and their gear." Getting the ships and gear and sailors right has been an ongoing preoccupation for Bill, to the point where his research has appreciably enriched our knowledge in many areas of Marine history. For instance he instigated and co-ordinated the international research project which successfully revealed the appearance of John Paul Jones's famed flagship, Bonne Homme Richard for the first time since that ship was sunk in action in 1779. Gilkerson's work has been too prolific to list here, except in the short summary that follows.

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