Stephen Lawrie sits at a booth in the Pioneer Bar in Sitka and points to a painting behind the counter. It’s a portrait of Art Petraborg, whose windswept white hair whisks across a canvas filled with dark clouds.
“He’s got braided sideburns,” Lawrie points out. “Are you kidding me? I mean, that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.”
The two met nearly 50 years ago when Lawrie started trolling, and he still remembers their first interaction. Lawrie’s 30-some paintings hanging in the bar look to capture these types of stories.
The collection is called “This Thing We Call the Ocean Part II: Names discovered, stories told.” It’s similar to last summer’s exhibit — in name and content — but this time it also honors some people from the past.
“They are no longer with us, but they formed sort of the core, or they set the tone for fishing in Pelican and in Sitka,” he says.
A downtown bar might not be a traditional gallery space, but Lawrie prefers it that way.
“This is where ordinary people come and that’s the audience that I’m interested in,” Lawrie says.
Earlier this summer, Lawrie accepted the People’s Choice Award for one of New Zealand’s most prestigious painted portraiture contests, the Adam Portraiture Award competition. He was recognized by the New Zealand Portrait Gallery for a painting of him and his sons aboard the fishing vessel Born Again. It hangs with his other works at the Pioneer Bar.
The bar’s walls are typically covered in small, framed photographs of fishermen, their boats, and the ocean. But Maite Lorente, who helped Lawrie curate this collection, says there comes a time when you start to ignore the photos.
“If you want to see a work of art that you have in your place, or you really want to see it, once time has gone by, you need to move it. You need to shake it,” Lorente says. “When we remove these paintings, those stories come back with a louder voice.”
Lawrie’s paintings help bring a new perspective.
“It feels different, not better, not worse, but different,” Lorente remarks.
Lorente helped Lawrie find stories and family photos for him to paint, though the artist seems to know quite a few of his subjects.
“He was so kind to me when he could have been really tough on me,” Lawrie remembers as he looks at a portrait of Jake Phillips.
Lawrie says he admires how fishermen would help one another, even when they didn’t have to. He knows fishing is a stressful job — he was a troller for 43 years — but he wants to capture the lightness of his subjects, not just their grit.
“Painting someone like Moses Johnson Senior there, that guy was one of the best fishermen in this town, just totally low key and not at all pushy. He was a really mellow guy. His biggest thing was his basketball when he was a young man, but he caught fish like crazy,” Lawrie says.
There’s a portrait of Bill Hills, a name Lorente came across when researching Greentop Harbor on Yakobi Island, not far from Pelican. Hills started fishing in Alaska in the late 1930s, a time, Lawrie notes, before float planes and U.S. Coast Guard helicopters.
“You’re on your own,” he says, “so it becomes a community of people keeping an eye on your neighbor, even if he cuts you off every now and again. You’re still keeping an eye on him.”
Lawrie remembers a time when there’d be picnics on the beach if fishing was slow. He says the shortened fishing season has made the job more competitive over the years, and he hopes his paintings are a reminder of how essential a close-knit community is to fishing in Southeast.
