
Tyan Fairbank, M1, Class of 2024
18×24 Oil on Canvas.
This painting is my representation of a paragraph in Chapter 3 of Moby Dick. When the pandemic first began, I had so much more time for reading and decided to finally tackle this classic. As I read, I immediately envisioned this as a real painting and ended up creating it as a Christmas present to my boyfriend, since Moby Dick is his favorite book. The paragraph I reference is below.
“In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.”