For as long as I can remember, ships have held my imagination like a horizon line that never stops calling. I grew up far from the ocean, in Missouri, surrounded by farmland and rivers, but without the salt tang of sea air or the cry of gulls in the morning. Perhaps that distance made the ocean more alluring — exotic, foreign, a realm of both beauty and danger. When I read, it was often about ships: Two Years Before the Mast with its brutal honesty about life before the wind, Patrick O’Brian’s novels filled with taut rigging and human intricacies, and the biblical journeys of Paul and Jonah, each crossing revealing faith and frailty in equal measure.
The ocean in scripture is never neutral; it is the stage for transformation. Paul’s missionary voyages, often interrupted by storms, embody perseverance and divine calling (Acts 27, New Revised Standard Version). Jonah’s voyage, on the other hand, becomes a confrontation with himself and with God — a reluctant journey that forces him to face his deepest resistance (Jonah 1:1–17, NRSV). Both stories teach that to board a ship is to step into uncertainty, and that uncertainty has the power to remake you. As Carl Jung observed, “The sea is a favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives” (Jung, 1964, p. 255). To set sail is to surrender, at least in part, to forces larger than oneself.
This surrender is what first drew me to one of my most cherished books, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923/2012). The opening image of the ship that comes to take Almustafa home is both an ending and a beginning: “And he descended the hill, a sadness upon him, and there came towards him the ship that was to bear him away” (p. 3). The vessel becomes a liminal space between the life he has lived and the life he is returning to. My tattoo of a ship on my left arm is, in part, a tribute to that scene. It is a reminder of passages — of the bittersweet beauty in arrivals and departures, of the way one must sometimes leave in order to arrive.
Because of this long relationship with ships, I have always been drawn to naval-themed works of art. The creak of imagined timbers, the curve of sails in oil paint, the shimmer of light on painted water — these elements are familiar to me, as if they were part of an ongoing conversation across centuries. But ships are not just a part of my reading and my faith life; they are part of my play. I have spent countless hours in Sea of Thieves, sailing with friends, chasing treasure, surviving storms, and sometimes going down with the ship in a blaze of cannon fire. There is joy in that world — the camaraderie of a shared voyage, the thrill of danger, and the simple pleasure of seeing a horizon rise to meet you. In some ways, the game is a distillation of what ships have always meant to me: the blend of adventure, beauty, peril, and fellowship that makes the sea so psychologically magnetic.
So when I saw Watching Tides Rise in person, I expected a kind of recognition. Instead, it stopped me cold.
The work presents a tall ship under sail at sunset, the sky glowing in soft hues, the water catching the last light. At first, it feels like a traditional seascape. But then you see it — the illusion ruptures. The painted scene is being peeled back, the canvas itself gathered and pulled into the frame as though someone is revealing that it is, in part, a fiction. Below, thick, black textured paint suggests tar, oil, or scorched earth, an unsettling counterpoint to the romanticized image above.
What made this encounter singular was its placement. Across from Watching Tides Rise hung an older, more traditional ship painting — the kind of piece I’ve seen countless times in museums. The juxtaposition was electric. The older work carried the weight of tradition, the formal romance of the sea. The newer piece echoed that romance but also questioned it, folding the image back to expose its own artifice. It was both homage and critique, a ship that sailed in two directions at once.
Psychologically, the sea has always carried a dual charge — it is both a site of longing and a source of fear. As Alain Corbin (1994) writes, “The sea, from being a space of horror, was transformed into a space of desire” (p. 3). For centuries, artists have painted ships as symbols of human mastery or endurance, braving the elements in defiance of nature’s unpredictability. But Watching Tides Rise resists that simple narrative. It suggests that the beauty we project onto the sea is layered over something darker, something we might prefer not to see. The pulled-back canvas becomes a metaphor for revelation — the moment when the sea ceases to be just a backdrop for human drama and instead asserts its own presence, power, and cost.
In standing before the work, I found myself returning to Gibran’s ship, to Jonah’s reluctant passage, to Paul’s storm-tossed persistence, and yes, even to those nights on Sea of Thieves when the wind turned against us and the deck pitched underfoot. All these vessels move through waters that are more than they seem — waters that contain mystery, peril, and transformation. My tattoo is a daily reminder of this truth: that the journeys worth taking often unsettle as much as they fulfill. Seeing Watching Tides Rise was like watching that reminder come alive, not as a static image, but as a living question about the nature of the sea and of the stories we tell upon it.
Perhaps that is why the piece stayed with me long after I left the gallery. It reframed a subject I thought I knew intimately, showing me that even the most familiar symbols — ships, sails, the meeting of sea and sky — can still surprise us. It left me with a quiet, persistent thought: the tide is always rising, and what we think we see is only part of the truth. The rest waits, just beyond the frame.
References
Corbin, A. (1994). The lure of the sea: The discovery of the seaside in the western world, 1750–1840 (J. Birrell, Trans.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1988)
Gibran, K. (2012). The prophet. Vintage International. (Original work published 1923)
Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and his symbols. Doubleday.
The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version. (1989). National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.