William Irvine Art Essay

 A William Irvine Art Essay 
with My Irvine Adventure...

While painting from a balcony overlooking the Yellow House in Stonington Maine, it was one of those super hot days, so I grabbed a chair from inside and in the shade of my painting parasol I took a fifteen-minute break. I took in the harbor view, watching a lobsterboat racing across the view. I've seen this. I've seen this in a painting, a William Irvine painting. Oh, wow, this is what he painted, the streaking lobsterboat with the long, long single line of its wake. I was astounded. A painting memory had come to life. I recognized it. I'd seen it online in my online painting research.

On my way home, I stopped in Blue Hill Books, a great bookstore, and was astounded to find two art books about William Irvine. Of course, one was by Carl Little, who I'd only seen weeks ago at his talk and my art opening in York, Maine. I didn't know Carl had written a book about William Irvine. And there it was in his book, not one but two of these paintings of a lobsterboat racing across the canvas, Heading Out and also The Return. I was excited. I purchased both books.

William Irvine, A Painter's Journey
Carl Little, forward by Richard Russo
Marshall Wilkes, Inc., Ellsworth, ME, 2014, 108 pages. $39.95
On amazon HERE. $28.92

William Irvine: At Home
William Irvine
Marshall Wilkes, Inc., Ellsworth, ME, 2018, 108 pages, $28.95
On amazon HERE. $21.81

Could this adventure get better? Yes.

On my journey south I stopped in pouring rain at Camden with my big red umbrella. As I'm walking up Bayview Street, gallery row, my eyes pop as I look in the window of Harbor Square Gallery. There's a William Irvine painting, whoa, more than one. I go in, strike up a pleasant conversation with Jonathan, who also has an Iceland connection,  and he shows me to the upstairs gallery where they are about to hang an Irvine painting. I'm astounded, what serendipity. For the first time I beheld a lobsterboat and line wake by William Irvine...

1
Painting to be Hung for Sale
William Irvine (1931- ), Scottish/American
Harbor Square Gallery
37 Bayview Street, Camden ME 04843
www.harborsquaregallery.com

Source: Courthouse Gallery Fine Art
Irvine was born in Troon, a small coastal village on the Atlantic coast of Scotland. He was captivated by art as a young boy and majored in art at Marr College, a progressive secondary school in Troon. When the family of whiskey magnate Johnnie Walker heard about two budding artists at Marr (Irvine and his best friend William Crozier), they invited the boys for a private viewing of Walker's art collection. This was Irvine's first opportunity to see paintings that were not reproductions but originals by the masters. Irvine went on to graduate with a degree in drawing and painting from the Glasgow School of Art in 1953.

2
The Drifting Cloud
William Irvine (1931- ), Scottish /American
Oil on canvas, 40" x 30" (w x h)
$8,000 USD
Courthouse Gallery Fine Art
6 Court Street, Ellsworth, Maine 04605
www.courthousegallery.com

Source: Courthouse Gallery Fine Art, Daniel Kany
In 1960, he met and married Stephanie Schram, an American student studying in London. In 1968, the young couple moved to Downeast Maine. Irvine was immediately drawn to the fishing villages of Corea and Jonesport, whose tidy houses reminded him of the white farms dotting the green hills of Scotland. Here, harbor, boats, islands and the sea and sky, inspired bold work fueled by two driving forces: abstraction and representation.

3
By William Irvine (1931- ), Scottish/American
Courthouse Gallery Fine Art
6 Court Street, Ellsworth, Maine 04605
www.courthousegallery.com

Source: Courthouse Gallery Fine Art, Daniel Kany
Maine proved to be a turning point. Irvine combined abstraction with figurative work, producing bold new seascapes, landscapes, narrative scenes, and still lifes. He used his poetic sensibility and the richness of his textural compositions to bring these antithetical elements into balance. Irvine believes "Every artist is born with a small set of poems, and it is the exploration of that personal mythology that defines him as an artist." His paintings of the men and women living and working in these coastal villages, as well as his experimental seascapes became lifelong themes.

4
The Lobster Boat Race, Stonington
William Irvine (1931- ), Scottish/American
Oil on museum board, 36" x 26" (w x h), 2012
Courthouse Gallery Fine Art
6 Court Street, Ellsworth, Maine 04605
www.courthousegallery.com

Source: Courthouse Gallery Fine Art, Daniel Kany
A few years later, Irvine and Stephanie bought a house in Blue Hill, Maine, and the old attached barn became Irvine's studio for the next forty-two years. In 1985, Stephanie died after a long illness. Irvine married Margery Wilson in 1995. They built a house and studio on the shore overlooking the sea in Brooklin, Maine. Living in such close proximity to the ocean provides Irvine with daily sources of inspiration.

5
The Lobster Boat Passes Through the Clouds
William Irvine (1931- ), Scottish/American
Oil on canvas, 40" x 30" (w x h)
$8,000 USD
Courthouse Gallery Fine Art
6 Court Street, Ellsworth, Maine 04605
www.courthousegallery.com

Whisky Wolf Media produced a documentary on Irvine's life, William Irvine: A Life Behind the Canvas premiered at The Grand in Ellsworth in 2023, and aired on Maine Public Television in the spring and fall of 2024. It can be streamed there.

6
Daybreak Departure
William Irvine (1931- ), Scottish/American
Oil on canvas, 72" x 36"
$14,000 USD
Greenhut Galleries
146 Middle St, Portland, ME
www.greenhutgalleries.com

William Irvine on Regionalism
Maine has its own character, soul if you wish. I felt it the first morning I woke up in Maine, in an A-frame on Tom Leighton Point in Washington County, lobster boats droning offshore, gulls crying, the smell of herring bait. A smudge of islands on the horizon. I had arrived from Scotland, and our two souls bonded. It was love at first sight... So, does it matter where we live? I think it does, for each artist finds his comfort zone, a place he feels connected to. Van Gogh in Provence, Marin in Addison, de Kooning on Long Island. It is a place that allows us to communicate with our surroundings. We use the props at hand, be they hills or harbors; in my case, clouds, islands, and boats... Read the whole article by William Irvine on Maine Arts Journal HERE.

7
Waiting at the Door
William Irvine (1931- ), Scottish/American
Oil on Panel, 16" x 12" (w x h)
Sold
Courthouse Gallery Fine Art
6 Court Street, Ellsworth, ME 04605
www.courthousegallery.com

Having married an American girl while in London, he moved with his wife to Maine in the late 1960s, first to Washington county, then Blue Hill and finally Brooklin, where he lives and paints today at 94 years-old. Maine's finest galleries carry William Irvine's art, Courthouse Gallery Fine Art, Ellsworth, Harbor Square Gallery, Camden, Gleason Fine Art, Boothbay Harbor, and Greenhut Galleries, Portland.

8
Early Riser
William Irvine (1931- ), Scottish/American
Oil on board, 16" x 12" (w x h), 2018

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Girl at the Door
by William Irvine

She has left the shadows behind
caught in the corners of her bed
and the cloak of her dreams
shed like yesterday's clothes.

With a magician's hand
she opens up the sea
and the sun
and a single gull
like herself
about to soar.

See this in:
William Irvine: At Home
William Irvine
at Marshall Wilkes, Inc., Ellsworth, ME, 2018, 108 pages, $28.95
Also on amazon HERE. $21.81

Maine Surf in Watercolor by 8 Artists

Maine's Rocky Coast
Surf in Watercolor 

by Eight Noted Artists, 

the earliest born in 1849 

and the oldest died in 1995, 

with their art in these six museums:

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME
Monhegan Museum of Art and History, Monhegan Island, ME
Portland (Maine) Museum of Art, Portland, ME
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Surf, Splash, Waves

1
The Sea, Maine (Deer Isle)
John Marin (1870-1953), American
Watercolor and charcoal on paper, 20" x 17" (w x h), 1921
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Source Wiki edited and added to:
John Marin (1870-1953), American, spent his first summer in Maine in 1914 and almost immediately the rocky coast there became one of his favorite subjects. Over the rest of his life, Marin became intimately familiar with the many moods of the sea and sky in Maine. "In painting water make the hand move the way the water moves," Marin wrote in a 1933 letter to an admirer of his technique. Though he painted at many places along the Maine coast, he never painted on Monhegan Island, where many famous artists of his day painted, because he preferred to find his own places. Eventually he had a home at Cape Split in Addison, Maine.

2
Neptune Churn
Vincent Andrew Hartgen (1914-2002), American
Watercolor on paper, 26" x 20" (w x h)
Gift of the artist
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine

Source Museum Notes edited and added to:
Vincent Hartgen was head of the art department at the University of Maine in Orono, Maine when I was a student in the late 1960s. He grew the art department while he also painted abstract watercolors inspired by the Maine landscape, coast and nature. During his life he was awarded the Black Bear Award, the Distinguished Professor Award and even became an honorary doctor of fine arts at the University of Maine. Born on January 10, 1914, in Reading, Pennsylvania, Hartgen was an artist from an early age. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and during World War II (1942- 1945) he was a camoufleur, or a person who designed military camouflage. Hartgen arrived at the University of Maine Orono in 1946 and taught until his retirement in 1982. He passed away on November 27, 2002, at the age of 88. He was a prolific artist, creating an estimated 2,000 signed paintings and drawings and an equal number of sketches.

3
Pounding Surf, Portland
Frederick J. Ilsley, (1855-1933), American
Watercolor on wove paper, 12" x 9", 1932
Portland (Maine) Museum of Art, Portland, Maine

Source Cincinnati Art Gallery edited:
Frederick Julian Ilsley (1855-1933) was born and died in Portland, Maine. He was a self-taught artist, and a member of: the Portland Society of Artists, the Salmagundi Club, the Rockport (MA) Art Association, the American Artists Professional League, the Hayloft Club, the American Federation of Artists, and the Brushians Club, Portland Maine. He exhibited at the Society of Independent Artists 1925, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts 1931. Ilsley worked as an engineer for Cumberland County Power and Light, and later the owner of his own business, Ilsley & Cummings, company of civil engineers on Exchange Street in Portland. As a member of the Brushians Club he traveled with the group at least once a week to paint throughout Maine and New Hampshire on painting excursions. He was known to other members of the Club as the Politician and looked to by the group to add spice and insight into conversations.

4
Seascape with Rocks (Monhegan Island)
Henry Newell Cady (1849-1935), American
Watercolor on paper, 19" x 14" (w x h)
Monhegan Museum of Art and History, Monhegan Island, Maine

Source askART and Wiscasset Bay Gallery, edited:
Henry Newell Cady (1849-1935), was born and died in Warren, RI. He was known for his seascapes of the New England coastline with a sensitive touch for capturing the effects of sky and sunlight conditions as they affected the sea and rocky shoreline in ever-changing rhythms. As a self-taught painter, Cady exhibited amazing ability at a young age. One of his paintings from 1869, when he was twenty, of seacoast waves crashing on the rocky New England shore, hangs in the John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, RI. Cady attended Brown University, studied art at the National Academy of Design, and was a member of the Providence Art Club. Cady exhibited at many prestigious exhibitions, was an illustrator for several national magazines, composed piano music, even after he began to go deaf, and photography.

Untitled #4776 (Monhegan Island)
Ted Davis (1908-1995), American
Watercolor on paper, 14" x 10" (w x h), 1956
Gift of James B. Wyeth
Monhegan Museum of Art and History, Monhegan Island, Maine

Source askART edited:
Ted Davis (Louis Theodore Davis) (1908-1995) was born and died in New York, NY. For nearly fifty years he summered on Monhegan Island. He likened the island to a big cruise ship. It never went anywhere, but the passengers and the atmospheric changes were constantly changing. From the late 1940s to the end of his life, Ted's work became increasingly abstract yet it always contained elements of the natural environment. The early work, influenced by Hans Hoffman "push-pull theory" used Marin-esque brush strokes to imply a setting, rather than utterly define it. Ultimately, these brush strokes resolved themselves into blocks of color--a fish shack, a boat, and a buoy. From the 1960s to the 1990s he created prismatic layers of thin color, each layer overlapping and intersecting another. Was it the sun that shone through the center of these works? Ted Davis was a beloved figure on the Island. Many collectors and friends were devoted to his work and through him were educated to the world of modernism. His artistic skill was summed up by the painter and The New Yorker cover illustrator and fellow summer islander, Charles E. Martin, who called Ted "the best watercolorist on the island."

6
Thundering Sea (Monhegan Island)
James Edward Fitzgerald (1899-1971), American
Watercolor on paper, 26" x 20" (w x h)
Monhegan Museum of Art and History, Monhegan Island, Maine

Source various edited:
James Edward Fitzgerald (1899-1971), known for his watercolors, was born in Milton, MA and died at Isle of Aran, Ireland. In 1924 at 25-years-old he made his first trip to Monhegan Island. In 1928 he shipped to the West Coast as a seaman aboard a freighter, then settled in Monterey, California from 1928 to 1943 where he lived and painted. In 1943 he sold his studio in the Monterey hills and moved to the former home of his friend Rockwell Kent on Monhegan Island, ME where he spent much of his later career painting in his unique style. This house is now a part of the Monhegan Museum. He made many trips to Jamaica, Nova Scotia, the Canary Islands, and the Isle of Aran off the coast of Ireland.

7
Sunken Ledges (Ogunquit)
Charles Herbert Woodbury
Watercolor on paper, 29" x 21" (w x h), 1933
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

Source Wiki edited:
Charles Herbert Woodbury (1864-1940), born in Lynn, MA and died in Jamaica Plain, MA, was a close buddy of John Singer Sargent and a President of the Boston Watercolor Society. His earliest work was part of the group later known as the Lynn (MA) Beach Painters. While an undergraduate at M.I.T. he became a regular exhibitor at, and at 19 the youngest member of, the Boston Art Club. After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with degree in Mechanical Engineering, in 1886 Woodbury had great success painting up the New England coast in the towns and beaches of Nova Scotia, exhibiting the results. From January to June 1891, he was a pupil of the Académie Julian in Paris, and then went to Holland, where he studied the techniques of the modern Dutch painters. Returning to New England, he settled in Boston for his winter studio and spent his summers in the small fishing village of Perkins Cove, Ogunquit, Maine. In 1897 he founded one of the most successful of the summer art colony schools that even survived his death, the Ogunquit School. In 1928, Woodbury, along with a group of other area-artists, founded the Ogunquit Art Association. Woodbury was one of the most sought-after teachers of his generation, having begun teaching on a regular basis while a freshman at M.I.T. Ironically, he had little formal training himself other than a few months of classes at the Academy Julian in Paris. Woodbury maintained a close friendship with John Singer Sargent and a pleasant acquaintance with many of his contemporaries including J. Alden Weir and Childe Hassam.

8
The Washerwoman
Sears Gallagher (1869-1955), American
Watercolor on paper, 19" x 15" (w x h)
Monhegan Museum of Art and History, Monhegan Island, Maine

Source Wiki edited:
Sears Gallagher (1869-1955), was born in South Boston, MA and died in Roxbury, MA. He was an American artist proficient in drawing, etching, watercolor and oil painting. His work consisted largely of landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes depicting his native Boston and northern New England, especially Monhegan Island, Maine. Illustrating magazines and books provided steady work and income, and his etchings and prints attracted popular demand. Gallagher took his art seriously, adapted new techniques, and was open to the influence of European Impressionism. During the height of his career his watercolors were favorably compared to those of Winslow Homer and F. W. Benson, and his etchings and drypoints to those of James McNeill Whistler.

Blue in the Abstract Essay

Blue in the Abstract
Visual Essay
Eight Artist's Views
4 Men, 4 Women  /  1 French 7 American

1
Waterloo Bridge
Claude Monet (1840-1926) French
Pastel on paper, 1901
Private collection

Source: Wiki and Antiques & Fine Art News, edited
Waterloo Bridge was sketched by Monet in January 1901 from room 618 on the 6th floor of London's Savoy Hotel, the drawing is one of only 26 pastels of the River Thames to survive from this period. All other versions are held in museum collections.
        Monet arrived in London in January 1901 and stayed as he always did at the Savoy. From his hotel he could look to the right onto Charing Cross Bridge and to the left at Waterloo Bridge. He intended to paint the Thames in oil on canvas, however his paints, brushes and canvases did not arrive, frustrating Monet. He found himself, unable to work. In despair he wrote to his wife Alice and complained his luggage was missing and he resorted to working at "many pastels" describing them as being "like exercises" preparing him for the task ahead. A week after his arrival in London his artist's materials arrived and he conceded that things had gone well; "It is thanks to my promptly made pastels that I saw what I had to do."
        Waterloo Bridge is a series of 41 impressionist oil paintings of the 1807-1810 Waterloo Bridge painted by Claude Monet between 1900 and 1904. While Monet began all of the paintings in London, he completed many of them in his studio in Giverny.

2
Tent Door at Night
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) American
Watercolor on paper, 25" x 19" (w x h), 1916
University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM

Source: Wiki edited
Georgia O'Keeffe could've painted Tent Door at Night in the summer of 1916 in Virginia or the fall of 1916 in Texas. She taught at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina in late 1915, where she completed a series of highly innovative charcoal abstractions based on her personal sensations. In early 1916, O'Keeffe was in New York at Teachers College, Columbia University. She mailed the charcoal drawings to a friend and former classmate at Teachers College, Anita Pollitzer, who took them to Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 gallery early in 1916. Stieglitz found them to be the "purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while" and said that he would like to show them. In April that year, Stieglitz exhibited ten of her drawings at 291.
        In 1912 she's taken a summer art class in 1912 at the University of Virginia from Alon Bement, who was a Columbia University Teachers College faculty member. After further course work at Columbia in early 1916 and summer teaching for Bement, she became the chair of the art department at West Texas State Normal College, in Canyon, Texas, beginning in the fall of 1916. O'Keeffe, who enjoyed sunrises and sunsets, developed a fondness for intense and nocturnal colors. Building upon a practice she began in South Carolina, O'Keeffe painted to express her most private sensations and feelings. Rather than sketching out a design before painting, she freely created designs.
        O'Keeffe taught and headed the art department at West Texas State Normal College, watching over her youngest sibling, Claudia, at her mother's request. In 1917, she visited her brother, Alexis, at a military camp in Texas before he shipped out for Europe during World War I. While there, she created the painting The Flag, which expressed her anxiety and depression about the war.

3
Composition in Blue and Black
Samuel Francis (1923-1994) American
Oil on canvas, 51" x 77" (w x h), 1955
Christie's 2022 New York auction sold $13,557,500

Source: Wiki edited
Samuel Lewis Francis (1923-1994) was an American painter and printmaker, BA (1949) and MA (1950) in Art from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied botany, medicine, and psychology. Because he worked and exhibited in the United States, Europe and Asia, Sam Francis is credited with helping secure international recognition for postwar American painting. His work has been seen most often in Europe and Japan.
        His art is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California, The Kunstmuseum Basel, the Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Tokyo, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou-Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris. During his lifetime his work was featured in 113 solo exhibitions in museums and galleries. Since his death in 1994 he has been the subject of over 90 solo exhibitions.
        In 2013 Symphony in Blue, a 1958 watercolor and gouache on paper set the record for a Sam Francis work on paper, selling at Sotheby's for $1,145,000.00. Composition in Blue and Black is his highest priced sold painting at $13,557,500.

4
Untitled
Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) American
Oil on canvas, 32" x 23" (w x h) 1962
Monhegan Museum of Art & History, Monhegan Island, Maine

Source: Wiki edited
Lynne Mapp Drexler (1928-1999) was an American abstract and representational artist, painter and photographer who worked on Monhegan Island, Maine. Her tendency to create vibrant paintings using a free brush stroke was influenced by Hans Hofmann and the work of Henri Matisse. Her work has been honored posthumously with soaring prices and is now in the collections of Her works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, Brooklyn Museum, Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York, Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, Virginia, Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Portland Museum of Art, Maine, Prentice Hall Collection, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, Massachusetts, Queens Museum, Queens, New York, Tamarind Print Collection, Los Angeles, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

5
The Sea, Maine
John Marin (1870-1953) American
Watercolor and charcoal on paper, 20" x 17" (w x h), 1921
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Source: Wiki edited
John Marin (1870-1953) was an early American modernist artist. He is known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors. Marin spent his first summer in Maine in 1914 and almost immediately the rocky coast became one of his favorite subjects. Over the rest of his life, Marin became intimately familiar with the many moods of the sea and sky in Maine. "In painting water make the hand move the way the water moves," Marin wrote in a 1933 letter to an admirer of his technique.
        Marin had a retrospective show in 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art. Late in life Marin achieved tremendous prestige as an American painter, an elder statesman of American art. In 1950, he was honored by the University of Maine and Yale University with honorary degrees of Doctor of Fine Arts.

6
Dunes and Sea II
Milton Avery (1885-1965) American
Oil and charcoal on canvas, 72" x 52" (w x h), 1960
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Source: Whitney Museum of American Art edited
Dunes and Sea II was inspired by the coastal landscape of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where Milton Avery spent four successive summers, 1957-1960, staying at an artists' colony in Provincetown. Avery first produced a half-scale gouache-on-paper version of the image during the summer of 1960, and subsequently completed the oil painting in his New York City studio. To achieve the bold, luminous color and stark spatial juxtapositions that were the hallmarks of his late work, Avery applied his oil paint like watercolor, in multiple layers of thin, diluted wash; he then manipulated the paint within each shape on the canvas with the aid of a rag, which enabled him to create subtle modulations of tone. Dunes and Sea II was one of the increasingly large and reductive images, marked by a unity of form and color, linking Avery's representational style to the abstract canvases of the New York School and Color Field painters.

7
Genuine Blue
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) American
Acrylic and marker on canvas, 7'11" x 7'7" (w x h), 1970
Christie's 2023 New York auction sold $3,317,000 USD

Source: Christie's edited
Genuine Blue was painted in 1970 in the the months after Helen Frankenthaler's return to the U.S. from Morocco. It was Frankenthaler's trip to Morocco that brought about critical new developments in her work. Helen Frankenthaler. In this painting she creates a narrow channel in the work that traverses through the immense cerulean and lapis blue canvas, inflecting it with touches of gold and green.
        Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter, one of the most distinctive colorists of the 20th Century. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American abstract painting, exhibiting her work for over six decades from the early 1950s until 2011, while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

8
Study of Blue and Green after J. M. W. Turner
Violet Oakley (1874-1961) American
Watercolor on paper on board, 10" x 7" (w x h)
Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Gift of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2015

Source: Wiki edited
Violet Oakley (1874-1961), a Pennsylvania artist, was the first American woman to receive a public mural commission. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, she was renowned as a pathbreaker in mural decoration, a field that had been exclusively practiced by men. Oakley excelled at murals and stained glass designs that addressed themes from history and literature in Renaissance-revival styles. Oakley painted a series of 43 murals in the Pennsylvania State Capitol Building in Harrisburg for the Governors Grand Reception Room, the Senate and the Supreme Court.
        She received many honors through her life including an honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree in 1948 from Drexel Institute. At the 1904 Saint Louis International Exposition, Oakley won the gold medal in illustration for her watercolors for The Story of Vashti, and the silver medal in mural decoration for her murals at All Angels' Church. In 1905, she became the first woman to receive the Gold Medal of Honor from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1915, Oakley was awarded the Medal of Honor in the painting category at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco for her 1912 portrait of Philadelphia poet Florence Van Leer Earle Coates as The Tragic Muse.
        The Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has an extensive collection of her art called The Violet Oakley Experience online HERE.

Monet and Me

Monet and Me
That Sky Shape in the Trees
by Bruce McMillan

I painted a series of paintings in my back fields in different seasons. I was intrigued by a certain shape of a sky space in the trees. It was prominent in my watercolors. After this, while researching art in various Monet series, I stumbled upon his Morning on the Seine (Matinee sur la Seine) series of twenty-two paintings. I was amazed that he'd also been intrigued by that same unusual sky shape in his trees. It was a focus in each one of his of his series of twenty-one paintings. I was astonished.

On different continents and over a hundred years apart, Monet and I had both been drawn to the same fluid moving shape of the sky in a break in the horizon's trees. This shape is the focus of our art, independently seen and unknowingly painted in every one of our series of paintings.

1
Matinee sur la Seine / Morning on the Seine
Claude Monet (1840-1926) French
Oil on canvas, 36" x 32" (w x h), 1897
Painted in Giverny, France
Christies London auction
sold $18,500,000 USD (14,397,500 GBP)

These are four of the twenty-two canvases Claude Monet painted of Matinee sur la Seine (Morning on the Seine) in summers of 1896 and 1897. The setting was a brief journey from his home, taking the artist just a few moments to get there, where the Epte tributary feeds into the Seine River in Giverny.

2
Matinee sur la Seine / Morning on the Seine
Claude Monet (1840-1926) French
Oil on canvas, 37" x 32" (w x h), 1897
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

Looking upstream on the Seine into the rising sun, on the left is the Giverny bank and on the right is the Ile aux Orties, a small wooded isle. Trees on both sides dominate the scene, those on the left Giverny bank are full.

3
Matinee sur la Seine / Morning on the Seine
Claude Monet (1840-1926) French
Oil on canvas, 36" x 35" (w x h), 1897
White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
NW Washington, District of Columbia

Monet usually started his paintings on the bateau-atelier, his specially designed studio-boat, , which he left anchored mid-river for the duration of the summer, rowing out to it each morning in a skiff, before completing the paintings on dry land in his studio.

4
Matinee sur la Seine / Morning on the Seine
Claude Monet (1840-1926) French
Oil on canvas, 36" x 35" (w x h), 1897
Christies NY 2017 auction sold $23,375,000 USD

The art critic Maurice Guillemot, who came to Giverny to interview Monet in the summer of 1897, described one early-morning session: "3.30 a.m. His torso snug in a white woolen hand-knit; his feet in a pair of sturdy hunting boots with thick dew-proof soles; his head covered by a battered brown felt hat, with the brim turned up to keep off the sun; a cigarette in his mouth (Monet) pushes open the door (of Le Pressoir), walks down the steps, follows the central path through his garden and comes to the river. There he unties his rowboat moored in the reeds along the bank, and with a few strokes reaches the bateau-atelier at anchor. A local man who accompanies him, unpackages his stretched canvases and the artist sets to work."

5
The Sky Arrived

in the back fields behind my home in Shapleigh, Maine painted plein air May 27, 2021, 18" x 14" (w x h), watercolor and ink on rough extra white watercolor paper, framed, $900. Also online HERE.

Also used as the postcard to promote Maine Audubon's 2021 Brush with Nature plein air event.

6
Summer Sky Summer Field

on a ponds walk behind my home on July 1, 2020, painted July 6, 2020, 10" x 8" (w x h), watercolor and ink on rough extra white watercolor paper, framed, $300, also online HERE.

Also used in Carol Douglas' Watch Me Paint art class posting, "How did you get that color?" featuring my watercolors and my palette concluded with an assignment for her students to paint from my painting.

7
Fall Sky Space Study 1

with autumn foliage in the iconic field behind my home painted October 30, 2022, 10" x 8" (w x h), watercolor and ink on rough extra white watercolor paper, framed, $300, also online HERE.

8
Fall Sky Space Study 2

with autumn foliage in the iconic field behind my home painted October 30, 2022, 10" x 8" (w x h), watercolor and ink on rough extra white watercolor paper, framed, $300, also online HERE.

The Sky Arrived

The Sky Arrived

in the back fields on Fort Ridge behind my home in Shapleigh, Maine painted plein air May 27, 2021 15.5" x 13" (w x h), Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, selected for light fastness and permanence, and lightly sketched using ink on 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper.
framed, $2,500

The plein air set up...

I was honored to not only be juried into Maine Audubon's 2021 Brush with Nature plein air event, but beyond words when they selected one of my paintings submitted, this one, to promote the upcoming plein air event, painting Sept 9-12, 2021.