Reflections on the ‘Directors’ Cut’ show at Portland Museum of Art
Art is what brought me to Maine — specifically, Andrew Wyeth's paintings. I first discovered Wyeth's work in the large coffee table book with text by Richard Meryman that came out in 1968 and appeared in my hometown library soon after. Every Saturday I'd pore over that book, sketching from the paintings in my artist's notebook and soaking up Wyeth's relationship to the two locations that so inspired him: Chadds Ford, Pa., and Cushing, Maine.
Chadds Ford reminded me of rural scenes in Ohio I was beginning to explore with my camera the summer of 1970. But Cushing and other locales in the St. George River watershed that Wyeth painted seemed like another world. Those paintings haunted me. Looking at “Wind from the Sea,” I imagined how a cool ocean breeze entering a warm stuffy upstairs room of the Olson House must have felt after Wyeth opened the window. Or, gazing at Wyeth's watercolor portrait of his longtime friend Walt Anderson, “Gunning Rocks,” I sensed how sun, wind and salt spray had weathered the fisherman's face no less than the rocky island off Port Clyde referenced in the painting's title.
I can honestly say, “That book changed my life.” It put the notion in my mind, at age 17, that somehow, some way I would become an artist. It also made me want to live in Maine.
Life is full of luck. How else to explain the unexpected offer from an older woman artist I'd met in the life-drawing class I was taking four years later at the local community college, who asked me, “Would you like to work at our art gallery in Maine?” There must have been 20 other 20-somethings in that class Marvel Wynn could have invited, but I'm pretty sure none of them dreamed about going to Maine as much as I did.
A lucky break, wouldn't you say? I was 21 and that summer of '74 working at Marvel's gallery on Southport Island changed the trajectory of my life. I fell in love with Maine, its incredible beauty and its people. The next summer I came back to stay.
It took a while to find my calling — as a journalist, instead of the watercolor painter I thought I'd become. My life has been enriched by literally hundreds of people who've shared their stories with me in the 30-plus years I've been a journalist here, as well by places that likewise became my friends: Katahdin, Old Speck, Moosehead Lake, Monhegan, the six rivers of Merrymeeting Bay that make up my particular watershed, to mention just a few.
But Maine gave me something else that I didn't anticipate when I first came here: Art museums that hold their own, collectively, against the vast collections of the world-class Cleveland Museum of Art, the hometown haunt of my late teens and early 20s. That realization came rushing back to me just the other day as I paid a visit to the Portland Museum of Art to check out its “Directors' Cut” exhibition featuring selections from the collections of the eight museums on the Maine Art Museum Trail. It runs through Sept. 20
It's an awesome show, a veritable Who's Who of American and Maine artists who've been inspired by Maine's still ponds and granite-faced mountains, crashing waves, working waterfronts, river-powered mills and the people who choose to live here. From Bowdoin College, Winslow Homer; from the Farnsworth Art Museum, three generations of Wyeths. Marsden Hartley and Dozier Bell from Bates, Alex Katz from Colby, Berenice Abbott from the University of Maine, Rockwell Kent from the Monhegan Museum, Charles Herbert Woodbury from the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Melonie Bennett from Portland … to mention just a few.
As I made my way through PMA's summer exhibit, the thought hit me: Art might have brought me to Maine and its beauty and people have kept me here. But its museums, unfailingly, have engaged my heart and mind and nurtured my spirit.
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