Original Studies ‘Sea Sick Series’ by Jack Gunter

Series of 8 original paintings that started the ‘Seasick Series’ by Jack Gunter

Egg tempra on Masonite 8 x 8 in. Each number 1-8 and the 8th one is signed and dated J.G. 1990

Memoir. Chapter 61

Jack goes fishing in the real ocean and gets really seasick

My dad and mom arrived for a visit. While Ruth was entertained by the Farrey’s, Pop and I drove over the border into Canada, hopped into a vintage DC-4, and flew to the west coast of Vancouver Island to fish for salmon.
It was rare and wonderful to spend a weekend with my father, heavy now with a bad back. His first question in all our phone conversations was the same: “Are you making any money yet?”
“Dad,” I’d tell him, “I’m living on an island with mile-high mountains at my back, the silhouette of the Olympic Mountains on the horizon at sunset, a peek-a-boo glimpse of fourteen thousand-foot Mount Rainier through a gap in the trees to the south, in a cliffside cabin where I occasionally see Orcas or whales spouting in the view of the bay from my porch.”
His retort was, “But did you make any money?”
As we motored out into a storm-chopped Pacific Ocean, he watched dawn burst over jagged mountains and said, “Now I see what you mean.”

At dawn, the charter boat captain looked at us, the Stanwood Rotary Club plus dad, and some Boeing machinists on vacation. He said, “There’s a blow coming our way, mates. It’s going to be lumpy out there, flat-landers.”

He was right. If you color some bubblewrap blue-green and call it the Pacific Ocean, our vessel would be an ant negotiating the swells. I began to throw up early. Vomiting began again when we anchored twenty miles off shore and rode each wave like a roller coaster. The Stanwood guys laughed and made jokes about seeing me under a bench in Pioneer Square. I’d punish them later with art.
When we landed at two o’clock in the afternoon, I was wiped out and barely remembered being driven up island to Tofino where my friend Steven motored us to the sliver of granite in the Pacific Ocean named Wickaninnish Island, a trip already arranged.
I woke up to the sound of surf. Three naked children ran across dark basalt with large Pacific Ocean rollers crashing on the rocks behind them. The kind native face of Stephen smiled. “Welcome back,” he said.
My eyes found Suzanne, a shaman whether she admitted it or not. She beamed.
This is how the day ended on the most miserable day of my life. Back home, I started to sketch. I was close to the pain. I painted one hundred fifty originals in the next two months—crazy horizons, waves we navigated like a bacteria negotiating the tongue papilla, views from the deck as my mouth heaved over the side. I saw a lot of feet clothed in yellow Helly Hanson slickers. I noticed my initial drawings of the huge waves had a mammary shape, one of my favorites. I wondered, in my
impaired state, what would happen if we were hit broadside by one of the rogue waves known to vibrate across the Pacific. What if the wave was pink with a nipple on top, I pondered.
What followed was a thirty-six-foot strip of four-foot panels on which a rouge breast wave sweeps the boat up to the six-foot nipple and releases it back to the ocean. I still have this series; it seems to be hard to place in a normal person’s home.