If you’ve gone out for crawfish in the Sea of Abaco, you recognize this immediately. Not from the surface — from below.
This is the view you only get if you're lucky.
The sand is white and bright under you. The purple angles are real shadows, thrown by antennae and slats and bodies layered inside a working trap. The dark band in the painting is the interior space of the trap itself, heavy and structural, doing its job. The lobsters aren’t decorative. They’re stacked, contained, waiting.
Maitland Lowe set these traps. He was part of the fabric of Hope Town — Bonefish Dundee, lobster man, the one who took us out during season to check his traps and shoot the bugs. He’s gone now. The traps, the water, the routine — they continue.
Why would you want this on your wall?
Because it isn’t a postcard of island life. It’s the underside of it. It’s the part most visitors never see — the labor, the structure, the honest exchange between sea and livelihood. It carries the memory of someone who knew these waters intimately, and of the particular way this community works with what it harvests.
If you love the islands for what they actually are — not just the beaches but the work of the locals — this painting holds that truth. It’s specific. It’s earned. It belongs to someone who understands what they're looking at.
