The writer of this blog is in the paradise of the South, homebound by an enormous snowstorm. Looking for an alternate reality, I reflect on Maine, summer of 2021, and the accounts of friends who vacationed and hiked in Maine – and of the many artists who over the years found that Maine was not only the inspiration but the centerpiece of their life’s portfolio.

Many artists, American and European, outsiders, have adopted Maine, particularly the coast, as a subject and also a retreat, and for some, a permanent home. One appeal seems to be the isolation. For others, the rugged and beautiful coast with its unpredictable and changeable weather. Yet others focus on the charming resort towns filled with tourists, the rocky beaches, cooler weather and a more relaxed utopia.

Look now at three painters who have interpreted the wildness and the calm of this peninsula state.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was born in Boston, and after a successful career in NYC moved to Prouts Neck, Maine, 12 miles south of Portland, in 1884. 

One of his earliest paintings from there is The Life Line, 1884.

The dramatic scene portrays a drowning vessel and a precarious attempted rescue amidst monumental waves and winds. There is the crispness of freezing temperatures and the surge of nature’s uncontrollable challenges in Homer’s brushstroke, not to mention the dark grays of the palette and the white of the ice caps. The red flag is a symbol of not only danger but aid, and notice the light blue/green patch of light behind the figures – perhaps an indication of hope.

The themes of struggle and potential tragedy amidst violent storms and the power of nature are prevalent in Homer’s works. 

Homer hired a local architect to build a Shingle-style home and studio for him. From the second story of the studio he had views of the coastline and the sea. 

This view is from the cliffs of Prouts Neck and continues his passion for the more dramatic elements of nature as monster waves crash on whale-size boulders with great power. The painting is dominated by grays that obliterate the horizon.

Notice the dominance of the uncontrollable sea, the explosive waves, imagining the sound as they crash in to the rock barriers.

Homer also painted more passive views of the coastline, as in West Point, Prouts Neck.

Homer’s first teacher was his mother, a watercolorist. He later studied briefly at the National Academy of Design in NY, but he is mostly self-taught, starting out as an illustrator before he was hired by Harper’s to record in drawings the battles and encampments of the Civil War. After the war Homer focused on pleasant family scenes and children, before returning to a family carriage house in Prouts Neck in the 1880s. The Prouts Neck paintings were the most mature and most dynamic of his career, influenced by the freedoms of Impressionism and the looser brushwork of the Expressionists. Homer had many lives and painted in many locales, including England and the Bahamas, in watercolor and oil. He is one of the most admired and prolific American artists.

Prouts Neck has an interesting history. It was recorded on a map by explorers in 1604, but was known as Black Point because of the darkness of the forests. By 1728 a family with the last name of Prout “owned” the property until 1788 when it was transferred to the Lilly family. By the 1870s it was sold off in parcels and the name of Prouts Neck was returned. It served as a location for sea captains.

Today it is an exclusive seasonal summer gated community resort.

Moving into the twentieth century and the strong influence of European abstraction, we observe many stylistic changes in the paintings of John Marin (1870-1953). Marin painted in Maine from 1914-1953, mostly watercolors but some works on canvas, summering in Small Point or Dear Island or Cape Split.

The Sea, Maine, 1921, is a plein-air (done from direct observation, en situ’) watercolor and charcoal of Maine’s rocky granite coast. His expressionistic and fractured technique references the Cubism that Marin observed during his Paris trip of 1910-1911. The direct charges of the charcoal dominate the subject that is both restful and electric. The sketchiness and the centering of the scene are a Marin signature. The untamed quality in Marin’s coastline compared to Homer’s is less literal and more graphic. There is a slight reference to a small cabin and a walking man. or is that an illusion?

Sunset, Casco Bay, 1919

Casco Bay, Maine, hosts a series of islands that are visible from Portland but likely observed by Marin from West Point or Small Point. Marin wrote to his dealer, Alfred Stieglitz in NY, that the view was ”one fierce, relentless, cruel, beautiful, fascinating, hellish place…and I have to make watercolors.”

Marin did two versions of Sunset, Casco Bay. This one was previously owned by Georgia O’Keefe before finding its permanent home in the Wichita Museum of Art.

Looking at the painting, you see it scream with color – an explosion of the palette. Interestingly the sun radiates cool rays, not warm ones. There is a small distant reflection of the sun at the horizon, and an effect of the sun on the fiery section of brush in the foreground. A single graphic black tree helps to stabilize the painting. The floating islands hunker down as the sun radiates over them. For those of you who are watercolorists, you will notice the beautiful washes of the rays to the left of the sun and the bleeds on the right of the sun and in the foreground field and cliff. Although the painting has a flatness, caused by the approaching sun that is closing us in, it also has recessed space in a more traditional format. 

Here is the other Sunset, Casco Bay.

Maine Islands, Philips Collection: This painting of John Marin’s has a couple of significant features. Although it was painted from a hilltop at Stonington Harbor, the view is not an actual site, more of an invention. This is one of the first uses of an “internal frame”, giving us the sense of looking out of a window, and yet the image breaks through the frame, giving more breath to the composition. Marin loved living and painting from the edge of the sea. He said that the eye sees many images of the same view, but the challengs is to capture the energy and the power, not to imitate the scene. The islands here appear to move, like small ships. They provide a stability, as does the “frame”, to the energy of the fluid watercolor washes of waves. What else do you see?

Many of Marin’s paintings seem spontaneous, quickly and speedily created. 

Maybe, maybe not. Marin once told Stieglitz that “Everything I have done up here I have had to work like Hell to get….”

These paintings are a fraction – a mere fraction – of the oeuvre of Marin’s Maine paintings.

Marin died at the age of 83, having enjoyed a magnificent and accomplished career.

And totally changing styles and mood, observe the quiet.

Island Farmhouse is one of the many iconic paintings of Fairfield Porter’s from Maine.

The house sits on Penobscot Bay. The scene is idyllic, an American arcadia.

Porter’s style is both realistic and abstract. The flatness and lack of modeling to create volume is what mildly interests Porter about abstraction. 

Many of Porter’s paintings were created during the height of Post War American abstraction (Abstract Expressionism) and yet in very few paintings does Porter exhibit a gestural and looser expression of brushwork. The abstract qualities of his work are the flatness and the structure. The realistic qualities are the identification of place, the descriptive elements of story and the calm and quiet, less energetic appeal of the Maine coast. The weather is rarely cloudy or stormy and we sense a summer of rest and family and observation.

One other “European modernism “ influence is Porter’s sense of color. His works have a sense of Fauvism, the bright and flat colors of Matisse, Dufy and Vlaminck, and also the intimacy of the paintings, particularly the interiors, of the Nabis painters, Vuillard and Bonnard, with out the nostalgia.

The following paintings of Porter’s are from a website called “Miss Moss”, who is a European woman who finds herself “visiting” Porter and identifying with the Americana of his scenes. 

The Dog at the Door is a 1971 lithograph in a portfolio with 9 other artists. It is 30×22.

View of Penobscot Bay, oil on board, 20×18, 1968.

The Narrows Clam Shack and the next painting, The Table on the Porch have an interesting sales history. It is always a curious guess how much an artwork will sell for at auction. In this case, Sotheby’s. The Narrows Clam Shack is actually a shack in Wareham, Massachusetts, where Porter stopped on his way to Maine in 1952. It is oil on paperboard. It sold at Sotheby’s for $68,750.

The Table on the Porch is a scene from the interior of the farmhouse. It sold at Sotheby’s for $326,500.

Porter’s success came in his late 40s. He was from a wealthy family that survived the Depression as real estate heirs. He was educated at Harvard, where he began in philosophy, wrote poetry and participated in leftist politics, untimately majoring in Art History. He graduated in 1928 and moved to NY attending the Arts Student League, was politically active as a Socialist, and began to write criticism for art journals and The Nation. His most successful period was the 50s and 60s during which he was a bohemian, a leftist, and friends of the New York School of intellectuals (Abstract Expressionists). He continued his family life married with five children in Southampton, NY and at the Maine family residence on Great Spruce Head Island. He is represented by many American galleries and museums. 

Porter is an American master of a simplified style of realism portraying the experiences of everyday life with the simplified detail of actuality, and with a flatness that creates three-dimensional space by scale, value and color.

The photographer Eliot Porter is his brother.

Fairfield Porter died at age 68 in 1975.