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It is both accurate and misleading to tell you that Brooke Lanier paints pictures of boats. The Philadelphia artist's vessels are never freighted with the fish-story romanticism of classic portraits of tall ships. Nor does she give us the cosmic collisions between surf, sky, and sailor's muscle that we find in the canvases of J.M.W. Turner and other seafaring impressionists. Instead her boats float somewhere beyond the undertow of high drama. They're awfully big, and they're not entirely decommissioned, but it's also not clear if they're moving. Instead, Lanier treats old ships much in the way that an urban explorer treats old factories: as the site of surprise, juxtapositions, and personal and occasionally inscrutable encounters with maritime history. Close observation, her paintings imply, might be all the care and refurbishment they need.
