Antique Delaware River Whale Print - Whale Watching - Burlington New Jersey - Horrible Sea Monster

Treasures from THE PHILADELPHIA / DELAWARE VALLEY COLLECTION at The Willing Mind. By exclusive arrangement with The Grand Review.

Print size 20 x 24, and consciously formatted to work with a 20 x 24 frame, or custom framed as you see fit. For further easy, inexpensive framing options, please feel free to contact us.

WHALE WATCHING ON THE DELAWARE

You never know how many whale watchers there around until there is a whale to watch!

We move from Old City Philadelphia up to the Northern Liberties neighborhood. My loving young family, full of wide eyed joy and optimism, arrived and became very active in helping to shape NoLibs into the fun and funky place it was for a few years. We were willing to put up with the small arms fire and cars in flames because we knew it was getting better, and we were part of that change. Problem was we had shitty neighbors. It was bizarre. Five of our six immediate neighbors were just the worst sort of looney cruds and aggressive creeps, yet all very different from each other.

Finally there was a moment, far from the actual worst incident, but that final, final straw. I smiled as I realized we didn't have to put up with any crap from anyone, and I called a realtor. Our now restored 1860s house and extra corner lot brought a shockingly good price and we moved upriver to what I was convinced was the next big thing... historic Burlington, New Jersey. We were able to buy up three impossibly important early colonial properties, and I put together an early incarnation of The Grand Review in one early 1700s storefront next to the very handsome Burlington Quaker Meeting House.

Burlington predates the colony of Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia. It was the capitol of what was originally known as the colony of West Jersey and while mostly unsung these days it was, in its time, central to all things coming and going in the whole region. Because it was a port city, the ebb and flow of the town heads to the Delaware River, but the rise of Philadelphia and Trenton in the 18th century and road and rail bypassing Burlington in the 19th and 20th centuries saw the slow fade of the town, yet preserved its housing stock and commercial district and relationship to the river in a fascinatingly time capsule sort of way.

While managing all this in my new guise as real estate investor, I set up my workshop. From the back where I worked, I could see the length of my place to my storefront window and the street beyond, and I'd covered every inch of wallspace with framed examples of my work. Comically sleepy, the sidewalk out front usually had little more than ghosts wandering by.

Until one day...

Suddenly there were people all over the place. PEOPLE! Real people, smiling, walking hurriedly towards the waterfront. It didn't take too long to figure out they were all there to see a beluga whale that'd meandered many miles up from the sea, through the Delaware Bay, and on up the river. The little white whale (sorry, Ahab!) was in absolutely no hurry at all, but it was moving. Upriver. Downriver. Back upriver, &c.

As it would languidly swim north or south the folks, whale watchers all, would follow along as far as the promenade and sea wall would permit, then they'd rush back out of town, past my little gallery, and on to the next little riverside burgh to continue their wonder filled vigil.

Forgive me, but it ain't no crime makin' money, and I saw every one of those whale watchers as potential customers, enough of them to put my kids through college! I just needed something truly wondrous as a souvenir, a memento of this momentous moment... so I got to work.

It ends up that Burlington Island, the dominant visual feature when you look out onto the river from the promenade, was first visited by the Dutch in the 1620s. I found a truly delightful sea monster from Munster's Cosmographia, 1580s, and figured since everybody was basically in pantaloons and funny buckle shoes I wasn't stretching things too far. We took the Olde German text and turned it into a textured background, then worked and reworked everything until it all came together in a way that met the high standard we've set with all our finished prints. The whole process, from conception to realization, took about two weeks. During all this time, whale watchers kept coming and going, roaring first this way and then that way across the front of my store, and their comings and goings became part of the comedy of the moment.

As I finished, I hung out two copies in front of my ancient studio. If I'd been wearing suspenders, I'm sure I would have been leaning back with my thumbs hooked just so. Grinning. Beaming. The electric tumbleweed of excited whale watchers came up the street, away from the river, all wide eyed smiles and dust and arms and legs. As they roared past my storefront, I didn't bar their way and point. I didn't hail them in any way. I would chaw over what to say to them when they came back later that day or on the morrow, as they had for two weeks.

The beluga stayed at the edge of Burlington for exactly two weeks, then slowly meandered back towards the sea. The exploding peloton of whale watchers, that glee filled mob, moved downriver to the next town, then the next, then the next...

They never returned. I could've cried, but instead I added a great story to my quiver of crazy life adventures, and took a copy of this print to the framers. It has graced the wall of our kitchen ever since!

• Handmade item
• Materials: Art stock enhanced matte paper, archival ink
• Made to order
• Only ships within United States.

SHIPPING

All prints are shipped in a sturdy mailing tube for $8, which covers postage, tube and S & H.

BUYING MORE THAN ONE PRINT? Add a second print or any number thereafter of this or any other prints in our catalog and shipping is still just $8, total!!!

International shipping is available and reasonable. Please contact us for details.

A NOTE ON OUR PROCESS, OUR CHOICES AND THE QUALITY OF THE GRAPHIC CRAFTSMANSHIP THAT GOES INTO OUR PRINTS.

Every print we deem exciting enough to present to the public via our Etsy store or available here at our studio has gone through a number of steps. The first of those is always discovering and falling in love with an obscure image, always an original that we can hold in our hands. That image is speaking to us, sometime screaming “Don’t leave me here. See what I am, what I was, what I can be, what I SHOULD be!”

There is a real sense of excitement involved, and a great many smiles and knowing grins when we make that deal and bring that ancient print, that battered photo, that scrap of ephemera that contains some scrap of genius from an unknown commercial artist home with us, knowing already how we mean to approach its restoration.

There is the heady promise of a further hunt just as real as what drags a weekend fisherman out of bed at 3AM to work a favorite brook as we start our research, looking for that great backstory, and both ready and willing to tumble down as many rabbit holes as are revealed to us to get that story.

Then there is a meticulous digital restoration that is as often as much fun as riding a vintage Moto Guzzi on a winding coastal road. I don’t care if that sounds crazy, it really is like jumping in the saddle! So many choices, so many chances to take to subtly or spectacularly give new life to otherwise permanently obscure images.

This dedication and the ongoing rush of joy in the accomplishment of it, and the opportunity to share the results in our studio and here on Etsy, is the fire of passion that keeps these engines roaring. We make every effort to ensure our customers are not just satisfied but thrilled, and we happily stand 100% behind our work.