Paintings by Joshua Petker

“It has been said that all sailors are trying to get home and that once home, all sailors long for the sea. The relationship between human beings and the sea, ships, and voyages has been an integral part of the human psyche throughout time and there are many famous shipwrecks in the history of literature and the artistic imagination. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Byron’s Don Juan, or Poe’s MS Found in a Bottle are all stories that weave the romantic longing for existential experience with the helplessness of being trapped at sea; they are about miscalculating the ability of one’s ship amidst a storm. The sea is a metaphor for the uncertainty experienced as human beings within the expansiveness of space and time, and the body is the vessel for our individual consciousness, navigating the weather of life, ignoring or rejecting the inevitability of our eventual demise in search of the next horizon. The aim of these paintings is to celebrate and lament this escapist pursuit.” -Joshua Petket