Our totem poles are our masts on the Chesapeake Bay, festooned with flags and often fastened at the top with ballooning saucy-colored spinnakers. This narrow pole is ubiquitous in this widespread watery land.

The Chesapeake Totem Pole Boat that I have created is layered with iconic images from deck to boom to spreaders. I cherry-picked from every region.

A bit of Eastern shore is in the figure in the lower right- the one in camouflage with the famous (and infamous) hunting dog, the Chesapeake Bay retriever.
(My husband had a hulking angular yellow-eyed Chesapeake named Nautilus who quickly was just called Naughty).

The lady in this poster, a guide in colonial garb, is often seen rounding a corner of a street in Annapolis suddenly, delightfully, emerging from another century.

Omnipresent on both shores are the yellow and black Labrador Retrievers, the boys with lacrosse sticks, and Mr Heron, our own raucous primeval very vertical-standing bird.

Everywhere, in the fall, is the skipper, a solid block of foul weather gear, scanning the horizon.

Looming up in the center is the almighty crab, who causes our senses
to come alive to the undersea life of the bay and the gustatory pleasures of picking, hammering, and more picking.

The primitive style of this poster is drawn from the wooden signs of shopkeepers in the days when George Washington crossed the bay many times, on his way to Philadelphia from Mount Vernon.

The whimsy is mine; born from admiration for works of the past that incorporated that playful device.

- NANCY HAMMOND, 2015