My encounter with the voyage of the SS Endurance was a fortuitous one. I was visiting a former client who owned a wooden boat shop and was flipping through his latest issue of a boating magazine called 'The Brass Bell'. I saw an image in the magazine that immediately grabbed my attention. And I said, "Can I borrow this?" It was an image of the SS Endurance wedged into pack ice and heeling to its port side. I went home and read the article; I had never heard of the SS Endurance until that point. After I read all that I could find on Wikipedia, I got on Amazon and started ordering books. I was hooked (pun intended)!
After doing some research on the SS Endurance and Ernest Shackleton, I felt such an intense connection with this story. My own journey away from the stability of my job as a professor had felt like a leap of faith of biblical proportions--like Peter getting out of the boat in a storm to walk on water toward Jesus. I was in place in my life where I felt an instinctive attraction to boats. I decided to get my feet with the project by starting a small painting of the Endurance trapped in the pack ice. It's called, "The Fight Will Be Good."
More on that in my next blog!