By Virginia M. Wright
Photos by Hannah Hoggatt
From our July 2024 issue
Eric Darling used to paint a surreal black-and-white world populated by “the Skullys,” a grim clan equipped with expressionless, oversized skulls on otherwise ordinary bodies. When he moved to the midcoast from New Hampshire, 13 years ago, Darling told a friend that Maine wouldn’t influence his art. “No way,” he insisted. “I’m not going to paint buoys and boats and all that stuff.”
Today, his Appleton garage studio is filled with depictions of lobsterboats, whales, seagulls, cresting waves, mountains, and fiddlehead ferns, rendered in vibrant reds, oranges, yellows, teals, blues, and purples. Strictly speaking, Darling’s earlier vow is unbroken: he doesn’t paint these scenes. Instead, he creates them with discarded lobster-trap rope. Another two tons of the polypropylene cord await his imagination outside, some of it stored in totes to help prevent further weathering of the ropes, whose colors Darling prizes. “I’m surrounded by rainbows!” he jokes.
Initially, Darling’s interest in marine rope had to do with cleaning up the shore in Cushing, where he and his wife, Lisa, lived before settling in Appleton, in 2016, with their three children. He’d collect flotsam on outings but had no plan to use it until he was invited to submit to an art show requiring work on wood panel. Not keen to paint on that surface, he created a multi-hued linear abstract by affixing horizontal strands of rope to it instead.
He riffed on that simple design until 2021, when the Maine Arts Commission awarded him a grant to create a large outdoor installation aimed at promoting spent nautical rope as an art medium. Still on display at Merryspring Nature Center, in Camden, the six-by-eight-foot landscape presents conical mountains and furled fronds under a planet-filled sky. After that, Darling felt inspired to explore more ways to use fishing rope in art and dedicated himself to a new body of work he calls the Drift Rope Project.
Darling has no formal training, but he’s always been drawn to making art. “I have to do it,” he says. He grew up on a farm in New Hampshire and studied anthropology at San Diego State University, where he and Lisa met. After graduation, they taught English in China, then moved to New Hampshire, where Lisa, a former glass artist, entered pharmacy school. They relocated to Maine when she landed a job at a Rockland pharmacy. Eric, meanwhile, worked from home, juggling painting with caring for their children.
Eric Darling transforms piles of old lobster-trap rope into tightly packed, linear landscapes in his Appleton garage. He keeps another two tons of the polypropylene cord outside in a wire-fence corral, several unrestrained heaps, a few dozen totes, and the bed of his pickup.
Created in a variety of colors, diameters, and braids, poly rope is strong and highly resistant to decomposition, which makes it an exceptional tool for fishermen but bad for the environment. It is recyclable, however, and is turned into products like buckets, garden furniture, pallets, and pipes. Darling sees preserving individual pieces of rope in his art, no matter the subject, as an homage to the working waterfront, and he now collects his rope at the Tenants Harbor waste transfer station and directly from lobstermen.
Darling begins each work with a sketch on paper, but the concept inevitably changes as he cuts rope with a heated blade and affixes the pieces to a birch panel with tiny, weather-resistant brad nails. “I have an image in mind — the challenge is how to get there,” he says. “But rope has all these layers that oil paints didn’t give me, and the responses are deeper. People want to talk about their connection to Maine or something about the rope that intrigues them. It’s a constant conversation.”
Eric Darling’s rope art ($225 and up) is for sale at Archipelago, in Rockland, Edgecomb Potters, in Portland, and at craft fairs.
