Picnic Beach Island Peaks

Picnic Beach Island Peaks

on Peaks Island, in Casco Bay, Portland, Maine October 30, 2022, painted November 27, 2022 10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$300

Two More Carrots Too

Two More Carrots Too

painted 11/24/2022, 7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith and Schmincke Horadam watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence, on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$150

Giving Thanks to Two Carrots Too

Giving Thanks
to Two Carrots Too

painted 11/24/2022, 7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith and Schmincke Horadam watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence, on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$150

Rock Solid Peaks Study 1

Rock Solid Peaks Study 1

near Picnic Beach on Peaks Island, Portland, Maine, painted plein air October 30, 2022 7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$150

Rock Solid Peaks Study 2

Rock Solid Peaks Study 2

near Picnic Beach on Peaks Island, Portland, Maine, painted plein air October 30, 2022 7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$150

Breakwater New in Color

Breakwater New in Color

rebuilt on the Kennebunkport, Maine side of the Kennebunk River by Colony Beach photographed on August 9, 2022, painted November 4, 2022, 7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$150 - Private Collection

Fall Sky Space Study 1

Fall Sky Space Study 1

with the autumn foliage in the iconic field behind my home painted October 30, 2022, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$300

Fall Sky Space Study 2

Fall Sky Space Study 2

with the autumn foliage in the iconic field behind my home painted October 30, 2022, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$300

Fall Foliage in Maine Art

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Fall Foliage in Maine Art
by Noted Artists...

...who live or lived, or summer or summered in Maine John Marin, Jill Hoy, Janet Ledoux, James Fitzgerald, Charles Woodbury, William Thon, and Alan Bray.

1
Hoy Blue Rock Barren
Jill Hoy (1954- ), American
Oil on canvas, 40" x 40" (w x h)
Portland Art Gallery, Portland, ME, $7,000 HERE

Jill Hoy lives in Stonington, Maine and Somerville, Massachusetts, summering in Maine since 1965 when she was ten-years-old. Her fabulous paintings are color-charged while capturing the essence of Maine. I had the pleasure of meeting her once at her Stonington Gallery. Her website is HERE

2
Tunk Mountains, Autumn, Maine
John Marin (1870 - 1953), American
Oil on canvas, 30" x 20" (w x h), 1945
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Known as watercolor painter, John Marin's extensive collection of watercolors in major museums, Tunk Mountains, Autumn, Maine is a rare painting of his in oil. It shows his painterly approach and how he used oils like watercolors. He thinned his oil paint, making translucent washes of color, quite similar to watercolor paints. He used color in his composition, as he did with his watercolors, interspersing bright color with natural earth tones in contoured planes.

3
Autumn Magic (woods)
Janet Ledoux (1958- ), American
Oil on linen, 20" x 30" (w x h)
Barn Gallery, Ogunquit, Maine, Sold $1,950

Born in Devil's Lake, North Dakota in 1958, Janet was raised in Hartland, Connecticut and graduated from the Paier College of Art in New Haven, Connecticut in 1980. She's lived in southern Maine most of her life, recently moving to mid-coast Maine in a new home she and her husband built. Janet is a friend and a fabulous painter, who's art I admire and own. I've painted with her for years in our Kennebunkport drawing group and in Stonington, Maine. Her web site is HERE.

4
Katahdin South Side
James Fitzgerald (1910-1973), American
Watercolor on paper, 26" x 20" (w x h), circa 1960
Farnsworth Museum of Art, Rockland, ME

James Fitzgerald, born on Boston, made his first visit to Monhegan Island, Maine in 1924 but painted on the west coast for many years. In 1943 he moved to Monhegan Island, where he lived and painted for the rest of his life, though he died at 63-years-old on a painting trip in Ireland. For the last twenty-five years of his life, he visited Katahdin and the region around Baxter State Park, finding its inland waters and mountains to be as compelling subjects as Maine's coastal islands. Fitzgerald's Monhegan home and studio are on the National Registry of Historic Places and are a member site within the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Historic Artists' Homes and Studios program.

5
Autumn Landscape
Charles Woodbury (1864-1940), American
Oil on canvas board, 10" x 8" (w x h)
Private Collection

Charles Herbert Woodbury of Massachusetts spent his summers in Ogunquit, Maine, then a small fishing village, where he founded one of the most successful summer art colony schools. In 1928, Woodbury (along with Gertrude Fiske and a group of other area-artists) founded the Ogunquit Art Association. His wife, Marcia Oakes Woodbury, born in 1865 at South Berwick, Maine, also was a painter. See his art and read about him in this 2002 catalogue book, Painting in Motion, by Vose Galleries, Boston, online HERE.

6
Golden Autumn
William Thon (1906-2000), American
Oil on board, 23" x 48" (w x h)
Midtown Galleries, New York, NY Sold, $3,125

William Thon had no formal art training apart from 30 days at the Art Students League. He began painting in oil but during his stay at the American Academy in Rome he discovered watercolor as a serious medium and loosened his style, his work more abstract though the sources recognizable. He moved to Maine where he lived for fifty years in Port Clyde. He found inspiration at an abandoned quarry near his home in Maine, painting spidery trees with rectilinear slabs of granite interspersed. While still based in nature, these were by far the most abstract of his paintings thus far. Thon died in Port Clyde, Maine in 2000.

7
Ghosts
Alan Bray (1946- ), American
Casein on panel, 20" x 24" (w x h), 2013
(I'm reminded of an old empty farm house
foundation on the woods walk behind my home.)

Alan Bray, born and lives in Maine, currently Sangerville, Maine. The New Yorker Magazine described his work as "meditations on landscape, rather than attempts to open a window on the world." On plein air Alan Bray said, "I have never been able to paint Plein Air. I have great admiration for those who can and appreciation for the spontaneity and verve that is so integral a part of the process." If I recall correctly, he was in Jeana Dale Bearce's drawing class with me in the 1960s at the University of Maine in Portland (now University of Southern Maine). His website is HERE.

Fall Sky Space Above

Fall Sky Space Above

An oil painting with the autumn foliage in the iconic field behind my home painted October 27, 2022 10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$450

Fall Sky Space Study 3

Fall Sky Space Study 3

with the autumn foliage in the iconic field behind my home painted October 30, 2022 10" x 8" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.
$300

Fall Foliage Art by Noted Artists

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Fall Foliage Art by
Noted Artists
Carl Sprinchorn, Wolf Kahn, Alma Thomas,
Werner Drewes, Tom Thomson,
Maurice de Vlaminck, and
Georgia O'Keeffe

Five works in art museums, one in a private collection, and one auctioned at Christies, Nov 8, 2022, for $15,275,000 USD after an estimate of $4,000,000 – $6,000,000 USD Note: The artist, deceased 36 years previously, of course realized none of the this money. Details below...

1
Gloria October, Shin Pond, Maine
Carl Sprinchorn, (1887-1971), American (born in Sweden)
Oil on canvas, 34" x 26" (w x h), 1946
Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine

I can look at this painting for hours, a favorite of mine.

Carl Sprinchorn made his first visit from Manhattan to north-central Maine in 1910. It was at the invitation a family friend to visit Monson, where there was a small community of Swedish immigrants. In the winter Monson was home to camps of loggers. He return to visit Monson and other locales in the North Maine Woods over the next thirty years. He spent most of his time there between 1942 and 1952. Sprinchorn's paintings, drawings, and watercolors from the Maine woods became his most popular works.

2
Green, Orange and Gray
Wolf Kahn (1927-2020), American (born in Germany)
Pastel on paper, 1997
Private Collection
Wolf Kahn was a resident of New York City, but during the summer and autumn, lived at a farm he and his wife, painter Emily Mason, bought in 1968 in West Brattleboro, Vermont. Maine's coastline interested him during vacations to Deer Isle Maine with its visual effects. In the late 1960s the coastal foggy conditions influenced a shift in his painting. Years of his monochromatic work with varying tonalities reformed to intense color. Kahn reminisced, "I began to let the color come through on my canvases . . . my pastels were always intense, and finally my painting caught up with them."

3
Autumn Leaves Fluttering in the Breeze
Alma Thomas (1891-1978), American
Acrylic on canvas, 50" x 40" (w x h), 1973
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Alma Thomas, an African-American artist and teacher, lived and worked in Washington, D.C.. She's recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century, best known for exuberant, colorful, abstract paintings created after her retirement from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington's Shaw Junior High School. In 2021, years after her passing, a museum sold a Thomas painting for $2.8 million.

4
Sunlit Forest (Autumn Forest)
Werner Drewes (1899- 1985), American (Born German/Poland)
Color Woodcut,
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Werner Drewes, a painter, printmaker, and art teacher, is one of the founding fathers of American abstraction. He was one of the first artists to introduce concepts of the Bauhaus school within the US. In addition to oil painting and teaching, he was a prolific printmaker. Drewes produced at least 732 fine prints, including 269 etchings and dry-points, 30 lithographs, 14 cello-prints, a lone silkscreen, and 418 woodcuts, of which 255 were in color, the one above a woodcut example.

5
The Pool
Tom Thomson (1877-1917), Canadian
Oil on canvas, 32" x 30" (w x h), 1915-1916
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada

Tom Thomson, during his brief 40 year life, produced roughly 400 oil sketches on small wood panels and approximately 50 larger works on canvas, including the one above. Although he died before the formal establishment of the Canadian Group of Seven, Thomson is often considered an unofficial member and his art is exhibited with the Group's art. He enjoyed and painted in the outdoors, his last few years in the wilds of Algonquin Park, a provincial park Ontario, Canada, where this painting above was painted.

6
Autumn Landscape
Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958), French
Oil on canvas, 22" x 18" (w x h), circa 1905
MoMA, Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Maurice de Vlaminck, a French painter, is one of the principal figures in the 1904-1908 Fauve movement, united in their use of intense color. He was one of the Fauves at the controversial 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibition. In his landscape paintings at this time he ignored the details, the landscape expressing mood through color and brushwork, like this one above.

7
Autumn Leaf II
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), American
Oil on canvas, 21"x 32" (w x h), 1927
The Paul G. Allen Collection
Christies NY Auction Nov 2022,
Estimate: $4,000,000 - $6,000,000 USD, Sold: $15,275,000 USD

Georgia O'Keeffe painted the art above in 1927, the year same year the Brooklyn Museum held a retrospective of her work. This was two years before O'Keeffe first visited New Mexico. She and Alfred Stieglitz, married in 1924, lived primarily in New York City but spent their summers at his father's family estate, Oaklawn, in Lake George in upstate New York, likely where this art was painted or inspired.

On November 9, 2022, achieving $1.5 billion in sales in a single evening, "Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection" was the biggest art sale in auction history. Pursuant to Mr. Allen's wishes, the estate dedicated all proceeds from these sales to philanthropy. Christies, with its commission, is not a philanthropy. The paintings are in private collections, investments for a few, and not shared in museums where all could enjoy this fine art. See this fabulous collection as an online flip book HERE.

A Murder of Rocks to Crow About

A Murder of Rocks to Crow About

on the far side of Peaks Island at Picnic Point, Portland, Maine, painted plein air October 30, 2022, 7" x 5" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper.
$150