I SAW Fighting Temeraires (refusing to be tugged to their last berth to be broken up) happens to have been many people’s favorite among de Veyra’s paintings. It is a take, or variation, on J.M.W. Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire.

    To those who do not know what a Temeraire is, it was actually a British warship, HMS Temeraire, which was, during Turner’s time, one of the last second-rate “ships of the line,” so called. It played a distinguished role in the Battle of Trafalgar. In short, it was a distinguished sailing warship of the Royal Navy.

    Now, in Turner's Fighting Temeraire, the warship was being towed by a paddle-wheel steam tugboat toward its final berth “to be broken up.” In other words, broken up for scrap. We know, of course, what Turner’s painting was trying to say. A sailing warship in the age of the steam? C’mon!

    So, obviously that is also what de Veyra tried to do in I Saw Fighting Temeraires with the fossil-fuel power stations using coal, natural gas, or petroleum to produce electricity. Because the power stations in the painting are not nuclear power plants. De Veyra was, in fact, particularly inspired by the striking image of the Bełchatów Power Station of Poland, which is a power plant powered by brown coal (lignite), and then by the chimneys of the now-closed Carbon Power Plant of Utah.

    But de Veyra was also trying to quote Turner and his obsession with the lightness and fluency of oil paint and how that was able to create an ephemeral atmospheric effect resembling thick clouds or fog or smog as well as turbulent water. De Veyra wanted to quote that Turner obsession (but using quick-drying acrylic) for the reason that—and this should be noted—Turner actually also Romantically or proto-expressionistically celebrated the smokes of the Industrial Revolution.

    So, here, de Veyra is flipping over Turner. Because this is hardly pro-Industrial Revolution. With this, the artist was making an anti-Industrial Revolution sort of Turner, because de Veyra’s Turner in the piece is saying, “these fossil-fuel plants are fighting Temeraires that need to be tugged now to their last berth.”

    We might also remember that Turner was a master of composition for dramaturgy. In The Fighting Temeraire, he placed his big obsolete ship in the fog and put the black contemporary tugboat in the fogless front. De Veyra reversed that for his “Temeraires,” because he was here trying to present the current Temeraires as “refusing to be tugged to their last berth.” So they remain black at the front and at the back, in silhouette, and the artist placed them on the canvas’ left side, with the smoke from their chimneys going rightward (leftward to the viewer), to make the front power station look like a steam train going leftward (rightward to the viewer), meaning going on and not stopping.

    Now, de Veyra’s “tugboat” is what’s at the bottom front, a house with solar panels. And although the coal-powered power stations are refusing “to be tugged to their last berth,” the house with solar power still wants to fight. Thus there’s that road from the house going upward and out on the painting’s bottom left. But although the house with the solar panels is in a cloudless hill, it is so minuscule and drowned in darkness that you can hardly see the blueness of its solar panels.