Week #28, Seafood Industry II

Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Cannery Wharf), c. 1940, pastel on paper, 10" x 15 ½”.

A slightly more muted seafood industry scene this week. This work is clearly a quick sketch rather than the more finished drawing we showed last week. As such, it is less stylized and more representative of the somewhat ramshackle appearance of many of the seafood factories, which were often elongated, mostly windowless, utterly utilitarian, nondescript sheds.

When Dusti Bongé first started her career she regularly sketched these scenes in sketchbooks, or on sketchpads, rendered in pencil, pen, or pastel. The sketches offered her a way to experiment with how to capture what she saw. They were never an attempt at realistically depicting her surroundings. She would sketch some scenes that visually intrigued her multiple times until she achieved her desired expression on paper of its particulars as she experienced it. Of those sketches, the ones she really liked she might recreate again in watercolors or oil paintings.

This works has all the elements of her back bay scenes. Factories, boats, masts, water and her favorite oyster processing steam pipe just left of center. The limited color palate of the drawing offers a very elementary way to distinguish its various elements. All the main building components are indicated mostly by green vertical surfaces and red roofs, and the remaining elements of the composition are in blue-grays and pale tans. There may even be a mound of oyster shells to the far right rendered in pale blue. Again, the boat and water are in the lower foreground, this time anchoring the whole as the point toward which all the buildings in the middle and background cascade in perspective.

Dusti signed the work in the lower left “D. Bongé” suggesting she herself was pleased with the result.