With just two days left until the Dalvero Academy Journey of Transformation show ends its run at Mystic Seaport I am trying to get the last three posts up. One post a day. Sounds daunting, but then again it is the weekend.

Truth be told, this print was the last to get designed and the last to be silk screened. I thought of dropping Boston from the project altogether but hesitated. For the longest time all I had was dates and an old seashell ship that was found in box of childhood artifacts during the design stages which acted as a reminder that one port was still missing. The problem with Boston is that I wasn’t able to document the few days that the Morgan docked near the Constitution. Afterwords I had tried a few times to visit the Constitution but with each passing month those plans kept getting pushed off until it was essentially too late.

Sometime in the midst of all the planning and designing I started pulling reference shots of the Constitution and reading what I could find about it. I stayed true to a very early sketch for the longest time, for no apparent reason other than I had nothing stronger to push on. I kept imagining these two ships side by side—or bow to stern as I later found—in the harbor on full display to showcase the craftsmanship behind their restorations. As I put off resolving the design I turned the two ships bow to bow. Rather than the confrontation of two historically violent ships I pictured them as personified beings, telling war stories in a smokey bar. What better place than Boston to do it.

Locking in the first screen, hoping it all works. At this point I had three extra pieces of canvas and no ideas what to do with them if it didn’t work.

One of the more abstract prints in the series with layers of smoke and fire and cannons and harpoons slowly appeared with each pass. I crossed my fingers that the whole thing would hold up when the final color was laid down.

The palette was very primary, red white and blue with a little warmth of yellow. I wasn’t thrilled with the paper proof but by this point I had grown attached to the linen

Registering the final black screen. Regardless of what happened on last pass this was a joyous moment. Barring a disaster this was the last screen to be printed in the series.