Sailboat Art

LAKE NORMAN, N.C. -- Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:  A guy buys a beautiful white sailboat.  Then at the marina on Lake Norman he looks around at all the other beautiful white boats and decides, his looks exactly like all the rest.  So he buys about 50 cans of paint and splatters his pristine white sailboat in dozens of different colors.

This actually happened.  A man splattered his sailboat with paint from stem to stern.  There isn’t one small part that isn’t painted.

It looked like a floating Worshack Test.  And in a way it was.  One person looked at it and saw a piece of junk, a waste of good money.  Another person said it was a work of art.  The second person was right in at least one way … it was a work of Art … Art Gingrich, boat owner, amateur painter.

Art calls his boat “a concept.”  He calls himself an “abstract expressionalist who’s been frustrated for years and years.”  The frustration must have come from his career as a professional photographer … often shooting weddings.  Something about the color coordinated world of bridesmaid dresses and tuxedos ate away at Art and you might say he snapped one day sitting on his white sailboat.  He said it felt like a “Clorox bottle” … so perfect and clean and orderly he just couldn’t take it anymore.  And so he started painting.

This is one of those stories you have to see to believe.  And through the magic of video you have that option with all our stories.  Amazing!