Aransas (passenger ship, 1905)

Ocean to Go

Mark Brennan’s Ocean in a Box series came out of a desire to capture what it feels like to face the ocean.

“I had this experience of standing on the outer beach in the winter and being struck — especially coming up from New York — by the vast space of water and sky that goes forever,” Mark says. “All you’re seeing is a tiny piece of this enormous body of water. It defies imagination.”

To convey the immensity, he bought a 30 foot piece of paper and went to work — only to discover it was physically impossible for him to work that large. He also realized that there would be no place to hang it, and even if there was, it didn’t accomplish what he was looking for.

He decided instead to go small, settling on 4-5” oil paintings on paper, nested in custom boxes made by his, Robert Mason. Robert works to Mark’s specs, delivering clean, contemporary frames of raw wood that are sanded down to a beautiful finish. Mark takes those frames and distresses them, using a combination of stains and adding ironware (clavos from Mexico). Each has its own rustic look, like it’s a centuries-old piece of a seafaring vessel.

Paired with its own box, each piece of ocean becomes an object. “I float the painting off the back of the frame, and deckle the edge so it sits like an artifact inside this box,” Mark says.

Mark says he doesn’t go in for poetic titles, adding a third element to his ocean paintings by titling them after shipwrecks.

“When there’s sunshine and the weather is calm, people enjoy their day at the beach and have no idea of the history of the place. There have been shipwrecks [on Cape Cod] for centuries. There’s so much narrative out there, I thought I’d tie it in — identifying each piece by giving it a real name, conjuring up the ghosts of the past.”