Artist Reid Stowe
Reid Stowe has had two lifelong passions, making art and sailing, usually long distance, and there are fresh developments in both. His first show with Chase Contemporary opened on March 23rd at their West Broadway gallery, and at the end of the month, he set off on Anne, the schooner he built by hand at the age of 25. This would be the first of a series of voyages with a crew of wannabe astronauts he will be observing. Their reactions to the pressures of being cooped up in cramped quarters will be closely monitored. This is a project that has the backing of NASA and the support of the Mars Project, a core interest of Elon Musk.
It’s been a long trip for Reid Stowe, who is now in his early 70s, and sometimes a strange one. He built his first boat, a small catamaran, on a waterway near his home in North Carolina at age 20 and named it Tantra, after another of his passions, tantric yoga. “It only weighed 1,400 pounds,” he says. His art was an add-on to the weight. As an art student at the University of Arizona, he had carved figureheads and been influenced both by the Nazca Lines in Peru and Richard Long, a Brit who made art by walking through the land. It was also a time of Extreme Performance, a time when Philippe Petit, also a former art student, wire-walked between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Stowe would perform aboard his boat wearing a mask. In 1973, he made a solo crossing of the Atlantic, fortifying his marine charts with images of goddesses. “I was painting for my protection,” he says.
Needful protection. Stowe was aware of the story of another artist/sailor, Bas Jan Ader, a Dutch Conceptual artist, who had taken off alone from Cape Cod in a 13-foot pocket cruiser on July 9th,
1975, his departure celebrated by a group singing sea shanties. Ader called this Performance piece, In Search of the Miraculous, and estimated it would take two and a half months. His boat was found floating off the Irish coast ten months later. His body was never recovered.
Reid Stowe’s voyages grew longer, and he frequently took along a paying group. In 1986 he sailed to the Antarctic on Schooner Anne, his second boat, built when he was 25, with a crew of eight artists, including painters, musicians, and a comic. “Usually, it’s just scientists who get to go there,” he says. For five months they circumnavigated Antarctica, threading their way through icepacks and lashed by icy 100-MPH-plus winds. It was in Antarctica that Stowe decided upon a future project. A biggie, a record-beater: one thousand days at sea.
That was for the future, though. Further voyages followed in the meantime, and much more art, sometimes the two being intertwined. “I invented GPS Art,” Stowe says. This was inspired by Richard Long’s walks through various landscapes, and Anne became Stowe’s drawing instrument on the seascape, his course being recorded by the Global Positioning System. He made The Odyssey of the Sea Turtle, his first piece, in 2008, intending a voyage that would outline a turtle. “It was contingent on my understanding the winds and the currents,” he says. But he had to contend with strongly contrary winds when he reached the bottom of the shell in the middle of the South Atlantic. “I ended up not drawing the flippers at the bottom,” he says. “So now it’s the sea turtle hatching out of the shell.” It was followed by others, such as Whale GPS Chart Painting, 1964-2019, upon which he collaged relevant documentation, such as a self-portrait he painted at the Equator, the chart he used upon his 1973 Trans-Atlantic crossing, and the GPS charts that had defined the whale-shape.
The Big Trip was never off Stowe’s mind, though. On July 20th, 1989, some months after his return from Antarctica, President George Bush announced plans for a trip to Mars. “They were planning to send six to eight people. Men and women,” Stowe said. It was instantly clear to him that the physical and psychological pressures of being cramped together long-term in an extremely small space that he and his crew had endured on the Antarctic trip indicated real parallels between that experience and those on a space capsule.
It was also clear to him that the likeness would be all the stronger when he and whoever he chose to accompany him would be self-banned for three years from getting fresh supplies of food, drink, or equipment upon his forthcoming Big Trip. Which he promptly renamed 1,000 Days at Sea: The Mars Ocean Odyssey.
Reid followed up by writing a piece indicating that ocean voyaging could be a learning experience for fledgling astronauts, and he gave talks on the subject. This got NASA’s attention. Meetings followed, at which they discussed the use of Schooner Anne to check the suitability of the wannabes—NASA termed them analog astronauts—and this was plain sailing. But then there was a squall. Stowe, an old-school hippy, had financed his voyages from early on by smuggling pot from Latin America and the Caribbean. He was now indicted for bringing in a hefty load, the bust being in his SoHo loft. “They never found my main grow room,” he says.
Stowe served a nine-month sentence, and when he got out, NASA was out the door. But The Mars Ocean Odyssey project continued, and on April 21st, 2017, Stowe and Soanya Ahmad, his young
wife, set sail from Hoboken. Marine excitements began early, with them being run down by a container boat in the early morning on Day 14. They lost their bowsprit, and Stowe carpentered a replacement, but it was kind of a stump, making the boat harder to maneuver. Some months later, Soanya found she was pregnant. She insisted that the voyage continue, so Stowe called Jon Saunders, holder of the then-long-distance sailing record, on a sat phone. He took her aboard his craft eleven miles off Australia, and Stowe headed for the Pacific. That was Day 306.
Sheer survival required Reid’s constant maintenance, including the patching of sails and the fixing of devices, as when his desalinator stopped working. “I had four big water tanks,” he said. “I had to sail to Galapagos on the Equator so that I could lower my sail and catch rainwater.”
Artmaking also continued, and an artwork can record a sailing experience, sometimes a scary one. As on Day 657, when Schooner Anne was overturned by a monster wave rounding Cape Horn. Stowe was knocked out, but Anne righted herself, and another icy wave brought him back to his senses. He saw that the sail he had spent forever hand-sewing was now wholly shredded, which was bad. But also good. “I instantly thought I’d make a great painting out of that,” he said, “and got to work on usable areas of the sail.” The Capsize Painting, a five-by-seven-footer, includes the grommets, rope, and piles of sawdust produced by the necessary boat repairs, along with collaged material from his personal documentation.
The last year of the 1,000 Days was the easiest, and Stowe was painting several hours a day. “I could paint in my pilot house in all weathers,” he says. When the weather was good, he worked on deck, laying out the canvases and working in all media. He made something like a hundred artworks.
“As I sailed up into the South Atlantic Ocean, the weather grew much nicer, and I drew a GPS drawing of a giant heart in the South Atlantic Ocean. It was satellite verified, and that was meaningful for me that I was able to do that with a disabled boat with torn sails. I was in the Trade Winds, and those beautiful waves were rocking me all the time. I counted them numerous times. There were thirty thousand waves a day, rocking.”
Stowe had picked the date and time of landing six months in advance. “I looked at the tides,” he said. “There, tide would rise and put me on the dock in midtown Manhattan at one o’clock on Thursday, June 17th. It was perfect—the motor worked, the sails worked. I saw my woman, my daughter, and my son, Darshen, for the first time. And I saw a lot of people I love.”
Reid Stowe is in the Guinness Book of World Records as having made the longest such journey, 1,152 days, without ever touching land.
And it continues. “I call her the Starship Schooner Anne now,” he says. His first journey with the eight analog astronauts will task them straight out from Manhattan into
the ocean for two weeks before returning at the beginning of June. Until then, he will be engulfed by an equally demanding presence, the New York Artworld. Go see the remarkable work that has come directly out of a remarkable life at Chase Contemporary.
