[Guest Post by Isabelle Laliberté]
I had wanted to do a transatlantic crossing by sea for a long time. This spring, after I finally qualified as an architect, I felt I needed a long summer break to recover from the seven years of study. After living in London for 10 years, I would go home to Montreal entirely by land/sea, to enjoy slow travel like in the old days: I would take the train from where I live in London to Southampton, board the Queen Mary 2 for eight days to New York, and then take the train for 11 hours to Montreal. I also had this romantic idea of the sketches of the sea I could do on board, mostly influenced by a painting by John Singer Sargent I saw at an exhibition five years ago.
I arrived early in Southampton so I would have time to sketch the ship at the dock. I was incredibly lucky and found her facing in to port, which is very rare: she is usually backed into port. I finally boarded and I felt like I had just slipped into the film Titanic! It is a really beautiful ship, and it remains mind-boggling to me to this day how such an enormous thing stays afloat.
We sailed from Southampton on a sunny early evening. I quickly realised that although it was mid-July, the North Atlantic is cold and windy, and I wouldn’t be enjoying the sun loungers in a bathing suit every day, so I bought a warm gilet and a raincoat/windbreaker that night. By late morning the next day, there was no land in sight.
There are never-ending activities on board: there is a planetarium, an enrichment lecture series, theatre, concerts, classes, a gym, a spa, pub quizzes, etc. For me, the luxury was to paint, read, and enjoy a cup of tea out on deck, wrapped in a warm blanket, staring at the ocean.
I had intended to sketch the view out of my cabin every morning, but quickly realised that the ocean wasn’t as exciting as that Sargent painting: it was often grey and flat. I had been afraid of being sea-sick on board, but I never felt queasy even once: the Queen Mary 2 is not a cruise ship but an ocean liner. The difference is that it is built specifically to cross the Atlantic, and has all the modern technology since it is only 11 years old, so it is incredibly stable even when we did hit a bit of rough weather. We “luckily” did get a couple of days of bigger waves, reaching 4-5m (13-16ft), but the ship is so large that even these waves didn’t appear very big (and we barely felt it on board).
I discovered rather quickly that sketching waves is incredibly difficult: they move constantly, and they move very fast. I did a few sea studies from the windows of a lower deck, and then took some pictures to attempt two pages in my main sketchbook. I struggled even with the pictures. My admiration of Sargent’s talent in capturing the seascape grew exponentially. Two days before arriving in New York, the weather warmed up and the sun came out more often, so we were able to enjoy the deck a bit more, and it allowed me to sketch on the top deck.
Arriving in New York by sea is rather special. The ship just barely makes it under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (12 feet/4 metres clearance). We went past the Statue of Liberty, and arrived just as the sun was rising over Manhattan. After breakfast, I had two hours before my disembarkation time, so I sat on a chair beneath a lifeboat to hide from the rain, and sketched the New York skyline.
I find that this quote from The Man in Seat Sixty-One summarises the experience of a transatlantic crossing best: “From personal experience, I now realise that staggering around a transatlantic liner in a dinner jacket with a martini is the normal, rational, reasonable way to cross the Atlantic. Heading for an airport and strapping yourself to a flimsy aluminium tube is an unfortunate and eccentric aberration.” Quite.
Isabelle Laliberté has just retrained as an architect. Originally from Montreal, Canada, she has been living in London, England, for 10 years. You can see more of her work on her flickr page.