We are a nation that just can’t quit Moby-Dick.
In a new series of paintings now on view at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, painter Christopher Volpe shows why. He explores how Herman Melville’s dark whale tale charted a course to today. “I saw the parallel between the hubris of Ahab and the peril of America and the globe as we’re tempting the gods with continued fossil fuel extraction,” Volpe said.
He has painted a series of works that seemingly tear out of the novel’s pages. They’re now on view in an exhibition named after Moby-Dick’s first chapter, “Loomings.” Volpe says, “it seemed an appropriate one for a what's looming on the horizon. You know, just the sense of a sense of foreboding, hints that we're getting, hints of apocalypse.”
Apocalyptic darkness swirls in these paintings as Volpe charts Melville’s course from the 19th century to the 21st. When the world’s reliance on whale oil eventually gave way to petroleum.
Volpe’s dark, ghostly images of ships, storms and belching smoke aren’t rendered in black paint, they’re rendered in tar.
Sometimes Volpe will just grab a big brush and begin making lines, making shapes, making gestures. He’ll coat a whole canvas with tar and then go in and remove it with rags and look for the shapes within the gloomy whirls. And he does this all while wearing a gas mask because the tar is so toxic.
The symbolism, is not lost on Volpe. “There’s a great quote that art recycles the culture’s toxins,” he said. “And this is a kind of literal, literally I’m doing that. I’m taking this poisonous gunk — which wants to pull us down into dissolution and death — and I’m trying to invest it with beauty.”
Naomi Slipp, Chief Curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum says that, by design, Volpe’s paintings are shown in a gallery that looks onto a waterfront that once floated a whaling industry and now a thriving fishing one.
“You see the docks and the ships and the kind of activity of the waterfront as it continues,” she said. “Then you can come into the exhibition spaces and hopefully find exhibits like Christopher’s that speak to the larger challenges of addressing global warming, ocean warming and marine mammal health.”
It’s a conversation that Herman Melville launched in 1851. And, in his work, Volpe has realized it’s time to shape up or ship out.
“Maybe it’s time for a new kind of beauty,” Volpe said. “A beauty that doesn’t sugarcoat the darker side of reality, but redeems it somehow by making it visible and yet not repugnant, allows us to see things we wouldn’t ordinarily see and to be able to deal with them in ways that maybe we haven’t yet.”
“Loomings”: Christopher Volpe, now on view at the
New Bedford Whaling Museum through May 8, 2022.
