The Art of Pemaquid Light
By Eight Master Painters
Note: Only one of these eight lighthouse paintings includes figures, and the artist who painted that one, who's painted many lighthouses, only included figures in this painting of Pemaquid Light.
At Pemaquid
Gary Akers, American
Watercolor on paper, 7" × 10" (w x h)
Collection of Art in Embassies, Washington, D.C.
The artist's web site is HERE.
Source: Artist's website and US State Department, edited
Gary Akers paints in watercolor, dry brush and egg tempera. With his wife, Lynn, he lives in Union, Kentucky, in the winter, painting in his restored 19th century log cabin studio. In the summer he's in South Thomaston, Maine, where he paints the coast. In 1995, they purchased the Georges River Road School, also known as The Green Schoolhouse, located two miles down the St. George peninsula for his studio/gallery, where he's had a gallery show the first week in August since 1989. He's a member of both the American Watercolor Society and the Kentucky Watercolor Society. He's published two books of his paintings, Kentucky: Land of Beauty, 1999, and Memories of Maine, 2003.
2
Pemaquid Point Light
Cabot Lyford (1925-2016), American
Watercolor, 1960
Source: Wiki, edited
Cabot Lyford Lyford retired from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1986 after a 23-year teaching career. He and his wife then moved to their summer home in Pemaquid, Maine, on Pemaquid Harbor, which the couple had originally purchased for $7,000. He maintained art studios in both New Hampshire and New Harbor, Maine (Pemaquid Point).
He was an American sculptor known for his depictions of animals and the female figure, usually in black granite or wood. His sculptures are located in public parks, museums and schools throughout Maine and the US. Some of Lyford's well-known sculptures: The Whale on the waterfront in Prescott Park, Portsmouth, NH; My Mother the Wind, made using seven tons of Australian black granite, 1975, on Four Tree Island in Portsmouth New Hampshire facing the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. It's now a city landmark. According to his son, Matt Lyford, it's an anti-war sculpture which shows a mother and child escaping a battle." Life Force, a seven-ton dolphin from Deer Isle granite, outside the Regency Hotel in Portland, Maine. Remember, a black granite sculpture of a goose, stands in the peony garden at the headquarters of Maine Audubon in Falmouth, Maine. Lyford created Remember in the aftermath of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, choosing black granite because the color recalled a seabird covered in oil. His sculptures are in the permanent collections of the Portland Museum of Art, the Colby College Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine.
3
Pemaquid Light: Last Light
David Dewey (1946- ) American
Watercolor on paper, 29" x 27" (w x h), 2017
The artist's website is HERE.
Source: Wiki and Caldbeck Gallery, edited
David Dewey, born Phillipsburg, NJ, is an American landscape painter, known for his watercolor works. In 1968 he received his BFA from Philadelphia College of Art, and in 1974, his MFA from Washington State University. Jessica Nicoll, curator of the Portland (Maine) Museum of Art in Maine wrote: "His compositions create tension between the seen and unseen, between the illusion of reality and the fact of invention." He's the author of The Watercolor Book, Watson-Guptill, 1995.
David's paintings are in Bowdoin College Museum, Brunswick, Maine; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; The Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Newport Art Museum, Newport, Rhode Island; The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, Addison Museum of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts; and Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He's represented by the Caldbeck Gallery, Rockland, Maine. And I've taken his watercolor workshop twice; it must be good.
4
Government Property
(Pemaquid Point Lighthouse)
Andrew Newell Wyeth (1917-2009), American
Watercolor on off-white wove paper, 28 x 20" (w x h), 1954
Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Source: Wiki, edited
This was painted when Andrew was 37-years-old, six years after he painted Christina's World. Wyeth said that although he was thought of as a realist, he thought of himself as an abstractionist: "My people, my objects breathe in a different way: there's another core—an excitement that's definitely abstract. My God, when you really begin to peer into something, a simple object, and realize the profound meaning of that thing—if you have an emotion about it, there's no end." Wyeth primarily painted with egg tempera (which uses egg yolk as its medium) and watercolor. He avoided using oil paints. His father, N.C., used both. In 1977 Andrew Wyeth became the first American artist since John Singer Sargent to be elected to the French Académie des Beaux-Arts. In Peanuts when Charles Schulz's dog house for Snoopy burned down, the Van Gogh was replaced with a Wyeth.
Pemaquid Light Maine Coast
Carroll Thayer Berry (1886-1978), American
Wood engraving on paper, 12" x 9" (w x h)
Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, Maine
Source: Wiki, edited
Carroll Thayer Berry was an American artist who grew up in Maine, and whose work is often said to be emblematic of New England, especially the seacoast. In addition, he was one of the first U.S. artists to be assigned to camouflage in World War I.
He was born and raised in New Gloucester, Maine, where his father was a dairy farmer. In 1905, reluctant to follow a farming career, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, with the intention of becoming a marine engineer, and worked as a mechanical draftsman in Massachusetts.
In 1910, Berry joined an architectural firm in Portland, Oregon, and was sent to Panama to participate in the construction of the Panama Canal. After a year, however, he contracted malaria and was sent back to the United States to recuperate. While in the U.S., he took art classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Subsequently, when Berry was sent back to Panama as an inspector of construction, government officials were so impressed by his artistic abilities that they commissioned him to paint a series of large murals of the Canal's construction for the walls of the administrative building.
After World War I, Berry settled in Chicago, where he worked as a designer of installations and interiors for office buildings. He met his second wife, Janet Laura Scott, a successful illustrator, who later illustrated books about the Bobbsey Twins.
During the Depression, Berry and his wife, Laura, left city life and moved back to New England, where they bought a house in Wiscasset, Maine. Their home became a meeting place for craftsmen and artists of the region. Meanwhile, with World War II on the horizon, the Bath Iron Works commissioned Berry to document (through a series of paintings) their construction of fighting ships for the U.S. Navy. The Berrys sold their house in Wiscasset following World War II.
They bought a home in Rockport, Maine, as well as an old three-story brick building on Main Street, a short walk from their home. It served as Berry's studio for the rest of his life. It was there, equipped with a 19th-Century printing press, that Berry perfected his printmaking skills, in the process of which he made use of wood engraving, woodcut and linoleum block.
Berry's work is fall within three distinct periods: His early linocuts and oil paintings are experimental, and reflect the changing artistic trends of the early 1900s. In the era of the Depression, he turned to the more affordable medium of the woodblock, which eventually evolved into the iconic style of his wood engravings. Finally, around 1973, his interests shifted to Jay Hambidge's theory of dynamic symmetry, a system of proportion and natural design that promoted the use of geometry in artistic compositions.
6
Pemaquid Lighthouse
John Fulton Folinsbee (1892-1972), American
Oil, circa 1930-1939
Source: Wiki and US State Department, edited
John Fulton "Jack" Folinsbee (1892-1972) was a landscape, marine and portrait painter. He was a member of the art colony at New Hope, Pennsylvania. He is best known today for his impressionist scenes of New Hope and Lambertville, New Jersey, particularly the factories, quarries, and canals along the Delaware River.
He was born in Buffalo, New York, a middle son. At nine-years-old, he attended children's classes at the Art Students' League of Buffalo, but received his first formal training with the landscape painter Jonas Lie in 1907. He contracted polio at fourteen-years-old, which rendered his legs useless, weakened his right arm, and left him permanently wheelchair-bound. He attended The Gunnery, a boarding school in Washington, Connecticut, from 1907 to 1911. In 1914 he married Ruth Baldwin, who he'd met in Washington, Connecticut. The couple moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania in 1916, and had two daughters, Elizabeth, Joan.
From his wheelchair, Folinsbee could manage plein air paintings as large as 30" x 24". Larger works were painted in his studio from drawings and oil sketches. To paint a large work, he'd lean a canvas against the studio wall and sit on the floor before it, his withered legs tucked under him.
In the mid-1930s, Folinsbee and his family spent their summers in Maine. In 1949 he bought a farmhouse at Murphy's Corner, between Bath and Wiscasset. Despite his intense wariness of the ocean, he embarked on a new aspect of his career, a marine painter. His Off Seguin (Ellingwood Rock) was awarded the 1952 Palmer Marine Prize by the National Academy of Design. With the prize money, he bought a 25-foot motorized Hampton dory (flat-bottomed open boat) that he named Sketch and equipped as a floating studio.
"One day I suddenly realized that the waves were a heavy sea duplicate what El Greco did in painting the heavy folds of his drapery. The quick turn of the waves is like that of his folds, in that the darkest dark is against the lightest light. The greatest contrast comes at the sharpest point where the wave turns up, where there is a dark, there is a light, it is that way in the folds of El Greco's garments. I've always been fascinated with the way he twists those big folds, exaggeration perhaps, but true in expressing the play of light on form." John Folinsbee
His work is in the permanent collections of Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. A bronze bust of him by his friend Harry Rosin is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Folinsbee was diagnosed with cancer in the late 1960s, which further weakened his right arm and he stopped painting in 1971. He died a year later in New Hope at eighty-years-old.
7
Pemaquid Light
Antonio Pietro Martino (1902-1988), American
Oil on paper, 40" x 27" (w x h framed), circa 1960
Collection of Art in Embassies, Washington, D.C.
Source: Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the US State Department, edited:
This painting is part of the Art in Embassies program, U.S. Department of State.
Born in Philadelphia, Antonio P. Martino was the son of Italian immigrants and one of eight siblings, all of whom were artists. His father was a mason and stonecutter, and his mother a buttonhole maker. At 13-years-old, he attended classes with his brother Giovanni at the Graphic Sketch Club in South Philadelphia, now the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial. He then studied with at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, now the University of the Arts, and took weekend courses at both the Spring Garden Institute and the La France Institute.
By 23-years-old, Martino exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1941, he and his brothers founded Martino Commercial Art Studios, featuring a variety of fine art and promotional design services. All of the Martino brothers participated in the business, which had a staff of twenty artists. While living in the city, Martino and his brothers spent weekend mornings painting in Bucks County, landscapes of New Hope and the Delaware River that showed an impressionist influence. By 1971, he moved to California to paint seascapes and landscapes, residing there until his death in 1988.
The winner of many national awards, Martino was elected as an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1938 and a National Academician in 1942.
8
Pemaquid Light
Edward Hopper (1882–1967), American
Watercolor and graphite on paper, 20" x14" (w x h), 1929
While driving, the coast Hoppers stopped
in Pemaquid between June 27 and July 3, 1929
Portland Museum of Art, Portland Maine
Source: Highlights from the Portland Museum of Art, edited
Interestingly, Pemaquid Light is the only one of his lighthouse paintings to include figures, a notable exception, given Hopper's renown for capturing the sense of alienation and loneliness associated with modern life in America.
Hopper established his lifelong practice of working in watercolor outdoors during summer sojourns in New England and in oil in his New York studio during the winter months. Between 1926 and 1929, he spent several summers in Maine visiting Rockland, Portland, Cape Elizabeth, and Pemaquid, where this watercolor was made. (After 1929, he summered in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.) In Maine, his favorite subjects included some of the state's iconic structures: the lighthouses. Jo (Josephine Nivison Hopper) described her husband's lighthouse pictures as "self-portraits," suggesting an analogy between such structures and Hopper, who was also tall, solitary, and taciturn. Pemaquid Light depicts the nineteenth-century lighthouse and its ancillary buildings, located at Pemaquid Point on Muscongus Bay in midcoastal Maine. The Hoppers stopped at this site between June 27 and July 3, 1929, while wending their way up the coast from their base at Cape Elizabeth, south of Portland.
In Pemaquid Light the top of the lighthouse is cropped off and the structure is seen from the back, rather than from a more picturesque vantage point showing it perched high on a surf-battered headland. Always a deliberative artist, Hopper first laid down a light pencil sketch to establish the outlines of the buildings. Broad washes of transparent colors—mostly blues and purples—depict the expansive sky, band of sea, and long shadows on the structures, with green and brown hues for the grassy foreground. He used more controlled strokes for architectural details and the area along the curved face of the lighthouse where sunlight turns into shade. This passage provides a sense of movement in an otherwise static composition, as these expressive strokes suggest the flickering effects of light reflecting off waves. Hopper allowed the bright white of the paper to show through the watercolor, imbuing the scene with the brilliance of a sunny New England day.
