Painting in Maine

"Waiting Tug, Bath Maine", James Wolford

Growing up in Maine affords a person an environment with a wealth of natural beauty along its rocky eastern coastline, and no shortage of landscape painters who have drawn inspiration from the state’s rugged terrain.  For those looking for a simple life and a lot of natural beauty, The Downeast just might be your kind of place.  And if you’re a painter, all the better.  As a younger artist, I did very few andscape paintings of Maine. I suspect that was somewhat of a missed opportunity for me back then.  Today I think I’d be perfectly content to simply paint Maine landscapes – for a while.  

The state has historically been a fertile source of inspiration to landscape painters.  The style of paintings from Maine have historically been Realist and Modernist works, but regardless of style, a commonality of simplicity pervades those works.  They don’t speak of majesty or the sublime visions captured by Hudson River artists, or the artist’s who travelled west to document America’s manifest destiny.  Paintings of Maine are about harmony with what is simple and small.

In Dr. Bruce Chamber’s catalog essay for the exhibit “Maine: A Legacy In Painting, 1830 to the Present“, he wrote  that in Maine “[t]here seems to be a special joy attached to Maine, a magnetic attraction not only to its unique beauty but also to its soul-cleansing power.  No artist who has ever painted in Maine has left there unchanged.”  Indeed, while landscape paintings from Maine exhibit an idealized sense of place, it is also frequently concerned with an identity of the state, and by extension it’s people.   That identity is often one that exhibits a place that is removed from the hustle and bustle of metropolitan areas, exempt from the eccentricities and trappings of sophistication, devoid of epicurian desire, and content in its rustic dependance and vulnerability to the natural forces of earth and atmosphere.  Landscape paintings of Maine are highly stylized images of a land that attempts to communicate an imagined place that is fabricated on its exclusion from other places, as well as the state’s own uniqueness. 

"Weatherbeaten", Winslow Homer

In the summer of 1883, Winslow Homer moved from New York to Prout’s Neck in Scarborough, Maine, (my childhood home). Except for vacation trips to the Adirondacks, Canada, Florida, and the Caribbean, where he produced dazzling watercolors, Homer lived at Prout’s Neck until his death.  It was there that he painted the great themes of his career: the struggle of people against the sea and the relationship of fragile, transient human life to the timelessness of nature.   Despite Homer’s themes, so much of what defines the state is not captured in most artworks, which is a toughness of living.  From the extreme winter climate, to many of the people’s involvement in the fishing and timber industries, the living in Maine is hard.  That difficulty is regarded as good for the human soul to the mostly white, Protestant inhabitants.  This aspect to Maine living is integral to the perception of a specialness of place.

"Mt. Katahdin, No. 2", Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley did many paintings of coastal regions of Maine and Mt. Katahdin in Acadia National Park.  His simplified forms and palette reflected not an illustration of actual Maine, but rather a generalized sense of place evoking the promise of Shangri La.  Maine served greatly for Hartley’s regionalist approach in painting, and no doubt the social climate of Maine helped incubate some of Hartley’s more radical ideology.  Dr. Donna Cassidy (from my alma mater the University of Southern Maine) has written an excellent book “Race, Region and Nation” on Hartley’s affinity for racist, totalitarian ideology espoused by the Third Riech following Hartley’s trips to Germany in the late 1930’s.  Maine has its own version of a wretched past of brutal ethnic cleansing of Native Americans in the early 1600’s.  Today, when the invisible hand of globalization, or political or social movements reach Maine, it often reveals an intolerant dark side to the pristine images being presented in the artworks.  But this dark side is rarely, if ever incorporated into the painted works, which is why the paintings are highly stylized, abstract pieces despite their beauty.

Another spot that has been marketed to the point of it becoming mythical in public perception is Monhegan Island.  Some have even gone so far as to dub it “The Artist’s Island“, which is not an unfair moniker.  Robert Henri wrote of Monhegan “this is the real deal”, referring to it’s dynamic topography and vistas along each coast, after visiting it for the first of many times in the painter’s lifetime.  Hundreds of artists since the 1800’s have ventured to Monhegan for artistic inspiration and source material.  Rockwell Kent and John Marin drew heavily from the island in their paintings.  There is today a thriving artistic community on the island during the summer months.  There’s also the Monhegan Artists’ Residency administered every year by the Farnsworth Museum, in which two beginning artists are granted the opportunity to spend six weeks on the island to work on their art.  It’s an artist’s Galapagos Island, which I was fortunate to have stayed on during the summer of ‘91 during my residency.  Monhegan, and Mt. Desert have both been instrumental in continuing and fomenting Maine’s idealized sense of place, especially within New York state.  Many New Yorkers continue to gobble up property in Maine for their summer vacations.

"The Squeeze", Alan Bray

There are a few painters living and working in Maine today who do some fine work that continues in the tradition of landscape painting.  Alan Bray creates mysterious paintings of tucked away places in Maine that are exceptional.  There is a quality of fetishism in his works that spooks, but which is part of a naturalist’s experience.  Eric Hopkins does wispy aerial cartoons of the many islands that dot the coast of Maine.  Peter Poskas has done wonderful paintings of Monhegan Island, and other locations in New England.  James Wolford does wonderful illustrations of various locations in Maine, with an emphasis on the architecture of Maine, repleat with sentimentality, but beautiful nonetheless.  And I haven’t even mentioned Neil Welliver, Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, Alan Magee, or many many others.  For such a small state, it has produced many artisans and crafts people, and lured many others from outside Maine to visit and draw inspiration from.

"Clear Morning, Monhegan Light (Maine)", Peter Poskas

This is not to say that there aren’t other forms of painting in Maine.  There are working artisans and teachers in Maine who work in various abstract forms of painting other than landscapes.  The colleges art departments in Maine all have strong emphases on modern art and an effort to pursue one’s individual creativity.  There is a summer program, the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, which is nationally recognized as one of the best summer programs in the country for exploration in painting .  But most younger artists who work outside the traditional form of landscape painting, who don’t tow the line of marketing Maine’s idealized sense of place, are forced to leave Maine to find an audience for their works, Richard Prince, Dozier Bell and Astrid Bowlby are of particular note.  While Maine is wholly inhospitable for sustaining artists professionally and financially, it’s abundant offering of inspiration for creative endeavors is virtually unparalleled across the U.S. 

"Scarborough Beach Rescue", Wes Freese