Telfair CAM: The World of William O. Golding.

When it came time to change out the exhibition and update the Telfair Children’s Art Museum (CAM), we at FREN knew there were going to be a lot of changes. The children mascots were out in favor of running with their pet chameleon Cammy as the sole representative for the space, we wanted to put in more physical murals throughout the space to make good use of every square inch of wall, and a new theme needed to be decided upon. FREN and the Telfair quickly settled on showcasing an artist from whom the museum had collected nearly a third of his known artworks, William O. Golding.

William O. Golding was an African American boy of about eight years of age when he was kidnapped (shanghaied) from Savannah harbor around 1882. Unable to return home for over twenty years, he lived life as a sailor, serving as a merchant marine, whaler, and naval crewman for a time in the Spanish-American War. He kept on sailing until the 1920s when chronic bronchitis kept him from returning to sea. He retired back to Savannah where he set about drawing many of the ships and places he’d seen along his extensive travels, as well as other famous (and infamous) ships of maritime yore. His drawings depict a substantial time for nautical technology as the sailing ships he started on as a child were eventually replaced by steam powered ships. For both types of ships, his deceptively simple drawings show a keen and accurate understanding of how all of these ships were constructed, all recollected from his memory. You can check out his artwork here.

My contributions to this project were extensive, as all original drawings in this exhibition were executed by me. Even Golding’s ships as seen in the digital exhibits were traced by my hand to get a clean, sectioned result which could then be easily animated. Mimicking Golding’s flat colored-pencil/crayon style was a major part of this project for me as we wanted to have a map of the world amalgamated from all of his many drawings, but I would need to redraw and, in many cases, invent new assets to help bridge the gaps between these distant ports. Apart from these illustrations, I also drew the interior of a submarine in the upstairs Tunnel Gallery in more of my standard style. It’s a complicated mess of piping and portholes which was made more complicated by the fact that the windows when printed need to line up with the actual holes in the walls for the screens. All in all, this was probably the most difficult project I’ve worked on, primarily from the amount of content I had to create and the research which went into making the exhibit accurate and relevant.