Both Chase, the subject of John McPhee’s Looking For a Ship, and the BOWDOIN are at the Maine Maritime Academy, in Castine, where Gardner’s family has lived since the eighteenth century. It was natural that the three should come together.
Chase and his four-year-old daughter, Lilly, stood in Gardner’s studio overlooking the Penobscot River on an early January afternoon. They had come to check out Gardner’s next project and, in passing, to chat about the BOWDOIN.
Chase had suggested that Gardner make a model of the old schooner some time ago, but when Gardner discovered Massachusetts modelmaker James Shoesmith had already made a model of her, he backed off. He holds Shoesmith in such high regard he couldn’t imagine trying to make a model of the same vessel. That Shoesmith works in a completely different style, with totally different results, didn’t occur to Gardner for a long time. Shoesmith attains utter perfection by measuring every iota of a vessel and bringing it down to scale. He chose to depict the BOWDOIN in her original state at the time of launching in 1921.
Gardner reaches for artistic effect and in so doing creates the essence of a vessel. As the owner of one of his models once said, “If you look at the model and just focus on it, you have no feeling that you’re not looking at the real thing.”
Chase kept after Gardner, saying, “If I could raise some money to pay for it, would you make it?” Of course, he had no idea how hard it was going to be to come up with that money.
He called and called prospective donor after prospective donor. No dice. He was about to give up, he said, when he received a call from a man who admitted he had done pretty well in the stock market recently and would be willing to make the first pledge.
Eventually Gardner realized there was a different way to show the vessel. He chose to depict the BOWDOIN embedded in the snow, ice and sea water of a Greenland winter, a scene he found in an old photograph.
When he started, he had no idea of how he was going to produce the effect of sea water and sea ice; snow, he figured he could fake somehow. The sea ice and sea water problem, however, plagued him for weeks.
Finally he got his answer, or at least part of it, at a place in Trenton, Maine, called Display Concepts, where he discovered a Plexiglass product called Green Edge. The Plexiglass has a marvelous combination of the blues and greens in sea water. If one focuses in on the scene Gardner has created, with igloos, snowshoes, sleds and foot-tracks, the effect is remarkably life-like.
“I discovered a way to fracture the plastic so it would transmit light,” he said. “Once I found the ice … yeah, that was very important.”
What he did was to attack the Plexiglass from underneath with picks, hammers and so forth until it developed a frosted quality very much like that found in the photographs.
Beneath the middle layer of frozen water, above which lies the top layer of snow, he set a deep expanse of the blue-green Plexiglass and beneath that, he constructed his ocean bottom.
The model is an extraordinary achievement, worth traveling to Castine to see. Gardner’s BOWDOIN is on display at the Maine Maritime Academy’s recently restored, 200-year-old Dirigo House, popularly known as the Yellow Brick House. The building, right in the center of town, just up from the waterfront, is now being used for faculty offices and as a public information area.
No artist ever achieves what he first sees in his mind’s eye. Human effort always seems to fall short, and Gardner is no exception. He sees all the short cuts he took to achieve an effect and to finish the job. When pressed, however, he does admit, “I don’t know of another model in ice.”