And much of daily life aboard a ship is rather like much of daily life on shore: full of banal things like doing the dishes, doing laundry, and a hundred other similar chores.
The French term for the feeling these activities inspire in a person is, "ennui." Sounds exotic. In English, we call it, "boredom."
When artists paint such regular, every-day things, we call them, "slices of life."
The following oil on panel I did was from an experience I had aboard the USS Wasp (LHD-1) a few years ago, while deploying with a Marine Corps Osprey Squadron, VMM-263.
In it, I tried to express the "ennui" involved in doing the laundry in a "laundromat" type room, well below deck, along with the heat and relatively cramped space.
