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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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