LONDON.- “James Dodds’ pictures look as though they’ve been created with the use of an adze, a caulking mallet and a rip saw, but that’s not surprising when you discover that these were the tools he once wielded as a shipwright before ever he picked up a paintbrush.”

These words from Yachting Monthly journalist Dick Durham give as good an insight as any into the former merchant sailor and apprentice shipwright whose latest exhibition of oils, some on wood, others on linen, opened at Messum’s in Cork Street, Mayfair on April 6.

From boyhood, when he first took to the wetlands of East Anglia in a dinghy, Dodds has lived and breathed boats and the water.

As Durham explains: “The disappearing shipbuilding skill of ‘lofting out’, of preparing a boat’s lines with battens, is alive and well in James’ work; which is why his paintings come as such a shock. The scantlings of his art are more than just the dimensions of an aesthetic – they work – in the practical sense of that word: you feel his boats would float.

“They hang there, powerful receptacles of adventurous voyage, ready to launch, simply awaiting your embarkation. They are the next best thing to owning a vessel for real.”

A particular feature of Messum’s exhibition is Dodds’ depiction of a series of Bermudan craft, Fitted Dinghies, the racing boats whose tradition goes back to the mid 1880s, although their origins are to be found 100 years earlier than that.

The mainstay of Bermuda’s inter-club competition today, Bermuda Fitted Dinghies resonate with Dodds, especially since the plasma red Bermudan cedar from which they are built is all but unobtainable today.

“Dodds abhors the loss of such majestic trees and tries to utilise timber where he can: obsolete pier planking, driftwood and even the roof of a family beach hut which was demolished in a great flood have all been used as ‘canvasses’,” writes Durham.

Two of the works on show at Messum’s – one of which was actually painted on cedar panel – have been presented to the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art. Stripped of its sails and rigging, the viewer is confronted by form and simplicity of the fourteen-foot vessel, which would have been manned by six or seven persons.

“These two images have enormous historical and cultural significance seen through art, which is at the heart of the Masterworks Museum mission,” says Tom Butterfield, the museum’s director.

A further five views of Bermuda Fitted Dinghies are on offer at Messum’s, alongside another 20 works that illustrate Dodds’ extraordinary talent.

Like boats, his works come in all sizes, from the modest to the monumental: Colchester Fishing Smack, for instance, is made up of five separate panels measuring 20 feet long in total.

“From his craft we can see how boats are put together; how timber becomes planking after being riveted to a rib-cage, how a bow can thrust aside seas after stems are backed up by aprons, how decking can support rope-hauling sailors with an underlay of beams and shelves,” writes Durham.

New Timbers on a Norfolk Crabber (oil on linen), is a fine example of this celebration of the master craftsmanship and simple beauty that inform centuries of British boatbuilding.

Not surprisingly, the Wivenhoe-based Dodds is a favourite with sailors – and is even annually invited to present the prizes at the Classic Boat Awards.

Dodds turned to art after an earlier life building boats. First he attended Colchester Art School, then Chelsea before finally taking his MA at the Royal College of Art.

Inheriting his talent for draughtsmanship from his father Andrew, an illustrator for the Radio Times who famously first depicted the Archers, Dodds uses curve and line to bring shape and flow to his compositions, reinforcing the sense of beauty and completeness in the strength that binds the vessels together, while focusing on textures such as rust and roughly hewn wood.

Dodds’ contribution to the historical and cultural understanding of Britain’s great sailing and maritime tradition is reflected in the collections of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, the Victoria & Albert Museum and The Sainsbury Centre at UEA among others.

Prices at Messum’s range from £500 for a limited edition woodcut print to £35,000 for the monumental Colchester Fishing Smack.

Sailors and boatmen everywhere – as well as art lovers – should weigh anchor and head for Messum’s in Cork Street at some point between April 6 and 22. James Dodds’ one-man show will strike a note in their mariners’ hearts like no other.