Week #31, Seafood Industry V

Dusti Bongé, View Towards Deer Island, 1939, watercolor on paper, 10 ¼” x 13 ¾”.

This July happens to have five Tuesdays, so we get one more of our Biloxi seafood industry scenes.

This small watercolor of the scene is offering us a slightly different and interesting perspective. Again, it’s a bird’s eye view, like so many of Dusti Bongé’s depictions of Biloxi are. However, this sketch presents a much broader panorama. It offers a long distance view from the land looking over all the seafood factories and onward across the water toward Deer Island, the barrier island that sits just of the coast in the Gulf, south of Biloxi and Ocean Springs.

The colors in this work are almost fauvist. The varied array of factories and equipment are all rendered in Dusti’s typical flat color surfaces in a range of bright hues of orange, red, green, blue, yellow, with just a few black marks outlining edges and structural elements. Deer Island is shown just as it is: a swath of golden beach with dense green trees. The panoramic view in concert with the bright colors all together offer a real sense of the tangle of the seafood industry’s various components and the calm waters beyond.

One of the reasons Dusti’s early works depicting the Biloxi seafood industry along the waterfront are so compelling is that they are a genuine part of historical records. It is also telling that in a coastal town where the beach was lined with genteel, elegant, southern homes, Dusti chose instead to represent the gritty, lively pulse of the messy industry that put Biloxi on the map.

With the ever recurring hurricanes we endure here on the coast the place keeps perpetually changing. And the Biloxi of today looks nothing like the Biloxi of Dusti’s early artistic years. It was a unique coastal scene busting with life, color and, yes, boats, factories, steam pipes, oyster mounds, fish camps and piers, all veritably captured in Dusti’s work.