Rockport artist Elizabeth Harty’s “400 Glosta” poster captures the salt of the sea spirit of America’s Oldest Seaport in an original block print that is not the city’s official quadricentennial poster, but certainly could be.

Harty, who makes her home and art in what was originally a 17th century Rockport tavern, is quite an original herself.

Though not native to Cape Ann, like many local artists and writers, she summered here as a child and returned like a homing pigeon to its influential roots. In her case, this followed a long career as a commercial artist illustrating for clients that included the Washington Post. “They’d send me the stories and I’d illustrate them,” she says of her work for D.C.’s famed daily.

That talent for capturing the spirit of a story in a picture is very much evident in her “400 Glosta” poster. Like Lanesville’s famed Folly Cove Designers, Harty is a skilled block printer reproducing from images she carves into linoleum blocks. But as a painter, she also works in mixed media, exploring, in her words, “the relationships of texture, color, shape and line,” and incorporating them with the technique of collage

This she has done to whimsical and authentically “weather-beaten” effect in her poster

Here are images that belong uniquely to Gloucester. St Peter, patron saint of fishermen, Our Lady of Good Voyage cradling a fishing boat bound for the sea, the fish that the fishermen bring home from the sea, and the seagulls that follow them into port. and there in the port, the iconic sails of a Gloucester schooner, and anchoring it all, the red brick and mortar grandeur of City Hall.

In the 20-so years that Harty has lived on Cape Ann, she has lovingly produced varied versions of all these images, both in acrylic paintings and block prints that have done a brisk business sold locally greeting cards

Block printing, says Harty, allows her to manipulate the process to achieve the weathered quality of a hard-working waterfront.

That, says Harty is the spirit she wanted to celebrate in her “400 Glosta” poster. “I just really did it for fun,” she told the Times, but she had second thoughts when it came to selling it, as the Gloucester 400+ Committee has strict copyright guidelines.

Luckily for her, her spelling of Gloucester as “Glosta,” and use of the number 400 without the plus, got the green light from the committee, and it is “flying out the door” where it’s on sale at Gloucester’s Pop Gallery and Rockport’s Seaside Boutique and Beads as a limited edition signed original print. It is available as a poster, also signed, in Gloucester at Pop Gallery, Art & Antiques, Alexandra’s Bread on Main Street, at the Building Center Gift shop and the Gloucester Stage Company. Prices begin at $50, vary accordingly, and prints are sized for standard frames.

Harty’s extensive collection of colorful abstract acrylics can be seen at https://www.elizabethharty.com/ElizabethHarty.com/Bio.html. Or, you can stop by Machacha, the Rogers Street Mexican restaurant that celebrates south of the border with a gallery of Harty’s spicy acrylics. Her works have also hung in galleries and in showrooms at the art associations in Rockport and Gloucester. Fifty of her abstract acrylics are now on view in two retrospectives Danvers-based Cell Signaling Technology, a supporter of the arts.