The Art of Maine in Winter

This winter I'm embracing the cold by painting it.

Warm vs. cool colors, tight vs. loose:

I have fun mixing the different colors and shades of the snow, which is not truly white from a colorist's perspective. I certainly start with white but mix in blues, grays and purples for shadows, and sometimes yellows, oranges and pinks for the lights. The warm lights against the cool shadows create the contrasts of snow...I think I have a long way to go to achieve this however, and my phone also did not capture the colors very well.

Each winter I enjoy flipping through this book I got several years ago at Port in a Storm, a book store in Somesville, ME that closed a few years ago. It is compiled and written by Carl Little, a Mount Desert resident. It features paintings of a wide range of styles...

...including "Fox Hunt" by Winslow Homer, which my parents and I saw at the Homer exhibit in the Portland Museum of Art last month. I recommend going to the PMA just to see their collection of Homer paintings...

...also in this book is "Afternoon on the Sea, Monhegan 1907" by Rockwell Kent which I saw in 2008 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Bold contrasts are what always draw me to his paintings, and Monhegan's dramatic landscapes must have been the ideal muse for him. An American Modernist painter, he was also a writer and printmaker, and a transcendentalist and mystic who read Emerson and Thoreau.

"I don't want petty self-expression," he wrote, "I want the elemental, infinite thing; I want to paint the rhythm of eternity."

Kent lived and painted on Monhegan Island for five years in the 1900s.

Lois Dodd, an American abstract impressionist, is a contemporary painter I admire. In fact, I admit I would like to paint more like her. She lives in NYC and visits Maine and her paintings are also featured in Little's art books. Lucky us, the PMA is currently showing a special exhibit of Dodd's paintings, up until April 7. I cannot wait to see it. Below is "Snow in Cove" (1982).

The Great Marsh in Snow

It's January at last and I'm back at school after a wonderful 2 week break, glad to leave last month behind. December is difficult. I find there's too little sunlight, too little time to get outside (let alone paint!), and too little courage to face the darkening days. This December brought a particular heaviness with the tragedies in Newtown. Each day over the past 4 weeks has haunted me with at least one thought of that awful day....but with the sadness also comes a renewed love and appreciation for life and loved ones, for my young students in particular and their great joy of life! A tragedy sometimes helps one find even more reason to teach, make music, make art: create hope.

Though January is the beginning of a cold, grey season, I celebrate the slow return of of the light this month. I'm thankful for a classroom with many windows and a workplace where I can step outside during the day and see children play. I'm thankful for the beauty of a fresh snowfall and the chance to play in it. I'm thankful for old friends who invite me out for a walk in it!

On a recent visit to the island over the holiday, my childhood friend, Emily happened to be home and called the house one morning after a storm that brought a couple inches of snow. She wanted to know if we would take a walk with her to the marsh via the Sputnick Trail, known by islanders as "Bo-bo Road" because there is a "broken-down truck" in the middle of it and that is the way it was pronounced at one time by a very young Fernald boy.

The marsh is possibly the most beautiful place on the island. The woods we walked through open out to a plane of yellow grass and heather which meets a saltwater pond separated from the ocean by a cluster of trees named "Dead Man's Island" (unsure where the name came from), which confronts the sea beneath a dramatic view of Cadillac and surrounding mountains. I painted this scene of it last weekend, hopefully the first of many of this motif.

I don't love winter, but I do love it's colors.