Geoffrey Huband, who lives and paints along England’s ruggedly beautiful southwestern sea-coast in Cornwall, is perhaps best known for his cover art on the  novels of Douglas Reeman and Alexander Kent.

Huband made his formal debut in America in September 2002, when he was invited to show his oil painting entitled With All Despatch, which is featured in his Bolitho Collection of limited edition prints, at the prestigious 23rd Annual International Marine Art Exhibition at the Maritime Gallery at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.   The Maritime Gallery is also exhibiting other examples of his work.

Huband began sketching ships as a young boy in the Midlands, far from the sea.  His work has long been known in the picturesque villages in Cornwall, along the “English Rivera” as well as in London.

Following is a Q & A with Geoffrey Huband:

What was the genesis of your early interest in the sea?
I don’t know where it came from originally.  All I know is that as a kid I used to spend all my time drawing nautical subjects.  I used to lie on the floor drawing ships.  I have no idea why I did. But I think one of the earliest recollections I have is being excited by the shape of a ship, its sails, and just the way it moved.  It was in the Saturday matinee ... Captain Blood, one of those old Flynn-type things ... I saw this ship and it stuck in my mind.  I couldn’t have been very old, seven or eight, I suppose.  This was in the Midlands, away from the sea ... didn’t have any connection with the sea.  Dad was a printer and my grandfather was an engine driver.

When did this interest in ships take form in serious drawing or painting?
I’ve still got drawings that I’ve kept from the age of six or seven, and ninety percent of the drawings are about ships.  I sort of understood the shape of them.  I was just fascinated with anything I saw that was associated with those kinds of shapes.

What mediums did you work in early and how did you progress?
I did lots of drawings, and mostly watercolors.  But they nearly always had something maritime, and it was always sailing ships, as well.

Do you recall your first “serious” painting?
When I was an art student in the sixties, I never regarded maritime painting as even being on the agenda.  It was sort of the era of Look Back in Anger, and reality plays.  We were much more likely to be sent out to paint the local iron foundry or the gas works or the rubbish tip.  Anything a bit picturesque was definitely out.  Anything from the imagination wasn’t taken seriously, so I avoided maritime subjects whilst I was in college.  I would have never presented anything like that to a college professor.  But because my dad was a printer, I used to do my own Christmas cards, and invariably I used to do something maritime.  

I remember the day I actually decided to have a go at marine painting, the thing I really loved.  I’d been working in Mousehole in Cornwall as a freelance artist.  I went there when I was about twenty-four, set up a studio, and painted local harbor scenes.  There were always boats in them, but water fascinated me as well.  So I kind of found my way into maritime subjects by the back door. 

There was an artist in a studio adjoining my studio, and someone came around to see me, and said they’d just bought a maritime picture from him.  They were thrilled with it.  I saw it (Geoffrey laughs), and I couldn’t believe it.  Then they told me how much they’d paid for it.   In those days it was probably a few hundred quid, or something like that.  I thought, ‘You paid that much for this picture ... I’ve got to have a go!’  That actually was the point at which I decided I would renew my interest in maritime painting.

Was your focus at this time going to be on painting ships?
Yes ... it was the first time I thought of purely painting ships for the sake of painting ships.  And whilst I felt I could do a better job than this piece of work I’d seen, I think on reflection what I really learned was at that stage how little I really knew about ships.  I loved the shapes, I loved what they looked like, I liked the way they moved.  I really didn’t know very much about the material, I just thought I did.

So what did that generate?
Well, that started the research.  I had a lot of books about ships, but a lot of information, particularly the historical stuff, was actually quite inaccurate.  And without being a nail or rivet counter, as it were, I hadn’t been that fanatic about it, because it was the shape of things that interested me.  It wasn’t how many of this, or how many of that, it was just how the things looked.  And I realized you really needed to know exactly how they were put together, how they worked, and I proceeded to do that with a degree of conviction.

Where did you go to find that information?
I started with books, but very rapidly found my way to the National Maritime Museum (in Greenwich, London), which at that time was just about the most wonderful resource you could possible have.  It was full of ship models.  I went on many, many occasions.  I knew what I was looking for ... I knew the type of ships I  was looking for, I knew the period I was looking for, I knew the kind of research I needed to do.   

Were you working at that time mostly on naval vessels?
No, because I was still fishing around in the marketplace ... I was still doing paintings of coastal scenes, because I had to earn a living.  The kids were growing up, so there had to be a fair sprinkling of stuff that we knew would sell.  And I realized, too, that there wasn’t a strong demand for maritime paintings.  It was small among a certain group of people, a niche thing.  And I was dubious about whether you could actually make a living doing just maritime stuff.  As time progressed, I still continued doing the village scenes, but I moved slightly away from that toward painting village life, people involved in village activities, basically, because I had always been interested in the Newlyn School of painters (a colony of artists based in or near to Newlyn, a fishing village adjacent to Penzance, Cornwall, from the 1880’s until the early twentieth century), and that’s what they did.  And I was working in the area where they worked.

The Newlyn School of painters had a tradition which was essentially painting day-to-day subjects.  I suppose the painter in that group of artists that I admired most is Stanhope Forbes.  He just painted village life, fishing boats in harbor, that sort of stuff, and I liked his style and I liked his technique.  He was a very direct painter, and that is something I try to carry through into my marine painting. 

At the time, I never really regarded maritime painting as being serious, proper painting, so it wasn’t anything I publicized too much.

What changed this for you?  Was it your involvement with Douglas Reeman?
That made a big difference, a huge difference, because I then tended to concentrate on almost nothing else.  But that came about with a fairly significant kind of life change, as well.  At the time I got involved with Douglas, I was still primarily painting general subjects around Cornwall, some maritime subjects, for people who wanted those kind of pictures.  But in the winter I went to Spain to paint daily activity pictures associated with maritime subjects -- fishermen mending their nets, boats hauled up on the beach -- because I found that in southern Spain the fishermen still worked in groups much in the same way as they would have done sixty years ago in Mousehole.  But now they don’t do that anymore ... the fishing industry of that type is gone. 

The reason I switched to maritime painting was that I had an accident whilst riding my bicycle, and I found that the only thing I had time for was maritime painting.  But I guess before that about a third of what I did was probably marine paintings very much in the vain of what we’re doing now, because that was the type of painting that brought me to Douglas in the first place.  I was doing those sort of paintings, but they were in tandem with my other work.  I didn’t really know which was the serious work, which way I was going to go.

Do you have a different view of maritime painting today?
Yes, I’ve got a total commitment to maritime painting.

What about the critics?  Do they look at maritime art more positively than in the past?
I think there’s a very, very slight shift, but I think in what one might call the main stream of art there’s still no good opinion there.

And yet there is a demand for good quality marine paintings.
I think there is, and I think it’s become slightly more respectable, probably because there are not necessarily more or better painters around, but there are more painters who are getting better known and appreciated.  I think that makes a difference.

Has this recognition been driven to some degree by the resurgence in the last few years in both the UK and US for nautical fiction?
It has to be.  It’s difficult to know without examining the evidence, but my general feeling is that Douglas’s work and that of other maritime authors have nourished a need for people who like reading this stuff.  It all perhaps originated with Hornblower, and then they cast about, wondering what else is there like this.  A few years ago there wasn’t very much.  Now there is, and they want to be associated with it.

Do you sense a synergy between the written words of maritime authors and the work that you and other artists produce?
Undoubtedly, and I think they probably regard it in much the similar way.  I think probably that writers of maritime fiction or maritime history would still not be highly regarded in the same way as people in what you might call main stream writing.  I don’t see an author of maritime or historical fiction getting the Booker Prize, for instance, any more than you see a maritime artist getting the Turner Prize.  So I think in that respect there’s a similarity, but nonetheless there is still a big market there, and a huge amount of interest.  And we’re in the happy position now of having much more information available to us than the people who were living at the time.  The depictions at the time were often simply that, just a sort of imaginative representation.  Not many of the artists had access to the real details and real facts.

Do you have a favorite ship from the Bolitho novels?
Well, there are two extremes, really.  I love naval cutters.  I just like them as ships.  They fascinate me.  I read about them.  I like them because they totally behave differently on the ocean to a large ship.  You can actually get close up to them to see what’s going on.  You can see the hands-on process of what seamen are doing.  And these things can dash and dart about.  They can do things that other ships can’t do.  They’re a pretty good foil to much larger ships that sit in the water, but don’t move in the same way.  So you’ve got this contrast between the cutter, bouncing around in choppy seas, and a larger ship, which just sits there, largely unaffected by a sea-chop, or just moves very, very slowly.  At the other end of the scale, there’s the grandeur of the seventy-four, that I find most interesting.  There are so many actions with frigates, as well, but I suppose they’ve almost become a cliche.  I like painting frigates, they’re beautiful ships, but it’s quite nice to find something else to paint.

What other naval subjects from the Age of Sail have you painted?
I used to try and work through series when I got involved in research.  I did quite a bit of research into what I thought were historically exciting events.  So I painted a series of pictures of Cook’s Endeavour.  I also did a series of Bounty pictures.  I got involved with a guy who was technical advisor on the Mel Gibson film, Bounty.  He was a bit of a fanatic, really.  He even had Bligh’s knife and fork, with which he ate his meal’s, and Bligh’s tea set.  I did some work for him.  And I also did some illustrations for the National Maritime Museum’s bicentenary publication about Bounty and the mutiny.

And, of course, you can’t paint maritime pictures without reference to Nelson.  I did quite a few different subjects there.  I used to like researching what was happening (during Nelson’s time).  There are pretty good publications about Trafalgar, and I would look at reproductions of what happened at a particular time, and assemble a painting from that.  There’s no end to different events that took place during Trafalgar.  It wasn’t just the “breaking of the line.”  Captain (Henry) Digby (of HMS Africa) received the sword of the captain of the (one-hundred-and-thirty-gun) Santissima Trinidad.  I painted that subject ... the small sixty-four-gun vessel and this monster ship.  I tried to pick as many different or interesting subjects as I could. 

One of the pictures I admire was Norman Wilkinson’s portrayal of the rescue of a young girl from the water after the (French 74) Achille blew up at Trafalgar.  She had stowed away, and was rescued by British sailors, who were looking for survivors, and reunited with her fiance.  It was quite an interesting story.  I admired this painting because it was a different approach.

I was asked, as well, to do a painting of the Battle of the Saintes for a regiment, The King’s Own Scottish Borderers, who formed one of the first groups of marines to serve in a naval ship. 

How do you proceed with a client who commissions a painting?
Well, they’ve usually got some idea of what they want, in terms of the event they want depicted, or the kind of event.  Usually we can pick up by talking to the individual what kind of thing it is they really want.  It may not necessarily be what they’re asking for.  When they ask for something, they’re probably referring in fact not to want they want, but to something they’ve already seen.  But you can generally determine from what a person says the kind of picture you think that they may be wanting.  The more you talk to them, the more that picture actually forms in their mind ... you’ve got a mental reference library of subjects.  You try and think of in what context you would fit that information, so that you can have historical accuracy, and at the same time make a pleasing picture.

Your paintings are much more than pictures of ships.  Wind, overall weather conditions, the sea, and, particularly, people combine to create dynamic images.  A good example is With All Despatch.  How did you come to achieve this?
I never saw how you could separate the people from the ships.  To me, it seemed that they were an essential ingredient.  You simply couldn’t have a ship apparently sailing on its own.  I think it’s a fair possibility that it goes back to the Saturday matinee ... swarms of people moving from one ship to another, as they come alongside, with two ships rushing together.  They kind of move almost as one, and that’s the way I see figures on ships.  I don’t see them as individuals, I see the groupings as being more important.  The closest analogy I can make to that is the grouping of the figures in the flag-raising at Iwo Jima.  It tells you everything ... it isn’t the individual figures.

Viewing With All Despatch, one can almost hear the shouts of the seamen aboard the cutters and French corvette.
When I was a kid, I used to lie on the carpet drawing and making sound affects.  I don’t do that anymore, but I think if you’ve sailed, as well, you’re very much aware of what’s actually going on ... you’re going down wind, there’s a curious silence, the movement of the ships is different ... there’s a difference between the movements of the cutters and the corvette.  You know they’re going down wind, but you’re sort of swaying from port to starboard, but there’s a certain noise, there’s a certain clatter that’s going on.  But as these ships get closer, you realize there would be shouts and cries and the sound of the wind through rigging, a sort of drumming, the slap of canvas. Douglas actually wrote this way in his stories.  You immediately have a sense of time and place, because he describes exactly the type of sounds you hear.  The sounds are as evocative as what you see.  This comes back to the groups of figures.  They imply that there was sound there, as well.

Do you have plans to do more prints from the Bolitho novels?
Yes, there are a lot of paintings that would lend themselves well to prints, and there is the possibility of creating new paintings for the Bolitho Collection.

Earlier you spoke of the Newlyn School of painters.  Have other painters influenced you?
Well, in general terms, I would have said that the painter that I admire most, that influences me most, no matter what I’m doing, whether I’m sketching or painting any subject at all, has got to be John Singer Sargent.  As far as I’m concerned, he is the greatest painter of the last two centuries.  I admire him for all the reasons for which he was criticized, and that is that he was the most brilliant technician, and he could bring out any subject, with a minimum of brush marks ... everything appears to be done with an economy of effort.  He was essentially a portrait painter, but he did paint other things as well, but it’s just his rendering of textures and materials.  I used to go to London just to look at a portrait he had painted of some alderman or something like that.  I just liked to look at the waistcoat, and the way it was painted.  It was just superb.  It was silk and it was striped, but when you got close to the picture it was just slashes and dashes of paint.  When you stood back ten feet you could touch that waistcoat. You knew exactly what the texture was.  He was a brilliant technician, in the same way that I admired painters of the Newlyn School, Forbes, in particular.    

As far as marine painters go, I admire many, some of them living now, who produce some lovely work.  But if I have to look at the style and the directness, and the sort of bravura, it has to be Montague Dawson -- without being pretentious -- that I have more in common with.  I have a feel of the way he did the subject.  It’s what he leaves out, as well as what he actually puts in, which makes his paintings great.  He doesn’t need to put everything in, because he understands the shape of things, he understands the way things are.  And in his pictures you can hear the roar, hear the tremble of the rigging, you can hear everything.  You can hear the cries of the seamen, you can hear the cries of the gulls.  And you can feel and smell the sea.  I like to to feel that the sea is something dynamic that is moving, and should be painted with a certain amount of slash and dash and bravura, and not too much revisiting.  One day when I was out on the quay in Mousehole, a very old gentleman came up to me, who was old enough to remember Stanhope Forbes.  Forbes was always outside painting, and he had a reputation for painting with the style of a fencer.  He would stand well back from his canvas, step back a few paces and then step forward, and put on a dab of paint, and then step back again.  Obviously, he had a group of spectators there, fisherman and so on.  And this old boy said to me, “I saw Mr Forbes painting, and I said to him, ‘Well, boy, you can flourish un an kydiddle un, but that look like it growed there.’”  So we try not to flourish un an kydiddle un too much.