Maine's Mecca
Copyright © 2001 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
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| Harrison Bird Brown was one of the early artists to land on Monhegan's shores, where he depicted the headlands as awesome, mystical forces. |
Monhegan's headlands, specifically Black Head and White Head, have been rendered in paint over and over by artists since the middle of the19th century, putting them among the most painted spots in Maine. The list of artists who have teetered their easels on or near these bluffs is lengthy and reads like a who's who in American art.
Aaron Draper Shattuck, the first artist to make his way to this tiny scrap of ocean-bound land, painted the rocky tumble of White Head in 1858. He was followed by Harrison Bird Brown, Alfred Bricher, Paul Doughtery, Rockwell Kent, George Bellows, Robert Henri, Fairfield Porter, William Burpee, James Fitzgerald, Reuben Tam, Jay Conaway and Jamie Wyeth. That's just scratching the surface and only mentions one of many dozens of contemporary painters who have painted there. And then consider all the amateur painters who hike to the headlands with paintbox in hand. There may be as many painted images of the headlands as there are tourist snapshots of them.
In general, Maine is a much-painted landscape, but within this stretch of fir trees, primeval mountains and bruised coast are spots to which artists gravitate. There is Mount Katahdin with its distinct profile looming over an endless stretch of forest. There is Sommes Sound on Mount Desert where Fitz Hugh Lane and Thomas Cole painted in the 19th century. To the south, Nubble Light, the lone lighthouse perched on a rock just a good throw from the mainland, has drawn legions of artists. All these locations are beautiful, but what sets them apart is their rich mood and eye-catching composition.
These spots, however, have not drawn the wide breadth of artists the Monhegan headlands have.
The island of Monhegan has been a magnet for painters for almost 150 years. Manana Island, that crescent of rock and lime-green grass, has been depicted over and over, as have Lobster Cove, Gull Rock and the village. On Monhegan, there's a lot of landscape in a small space. The headlands, though, have proved the most irresistible to painters, for both their out-of-the-wayness and their changeable beauty.
There is an irony here. Since the dawn of 19th-century Romanticism, artists have been viewed as genius loners who heed only their own creative voice. So what were - are - all these heroic individualists doing following the paths of their artistic forbears and setting up easels on the same spots?
"The first thing I would say is it's the same thing for painting the human figure," says Mike Culver, a painter who is the curator at the Ogunquit Museum of Art. "It's a fundamental subject. No matter how many times you paint it, you can put your own spin on it. .Ý.Ý. It would be like going to Louisville and not going to the Kentucky Derby, or like you really ought to visit the Eifel Tower if you are in Paris."
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| Painter William Burpee potrayed the headlands on a sunny, clear day long before the current spruce trees cropped up atop their bluffs. |
"Don't you think they are beautiful, beautiful?" asks Jacqueline Hudson, who has painted on the island most of her 80 years.
According to one estimate, White Head and Black Head each rise 160 feet from the open Atlantic. Millions of years in the making, the headlands are made up of gabbro, a dark rock similar to granite that is commonly found deep in the earth rather than on the surface. These headlands are testament to the scraping glaciers and lashing ocean that molded Monhegan Island, lopping off the top and beating down its sides.
The best view of both headlands is from the water. The two headlands, in their proud bearing and gray, rumbled rock, resemble gargantuan Indian elephants standing sentry against the sea. On land, it's harder to take in their grand size. Since the islanders gave up on sheep grazing in the 19th century, fir trees have steadily sprung up along the crest of each head. Many of the trees are dead, gray trunks tumbling helter-skelter along the heights. The bluffs look rust-stained as orange lichen clings to their lengths.
Standing on top of either, you feel as if you are on the bow of a magnificent ship. Down near the base, a battle is on to the cry of gulls. The water slaps the rock over and over, an unending fight between the immovable and the dynamic.
"It's drama," says Ed Deci, director of the Monhegan Museum. "It's power. It's strength. It's the forces of nature against it. It's raw, very raw. The relationship of rock and sea is very powerful."
Artists may have different reasons for painting the headlands, but it boils down to their beauty. Sylvia Murdock, who lives on Monhegan year round and paints primarily in watercolor, finds the light by the headlands is truer. Don Stone, a traditional landscape painter who has a house on Monhegan, is captivated by the war of sea against rock.
"Every time I paint on Monhegan, I can go anywhere in the world and not find anything as beautiful as this," Stone says. "It's the same with the headlands. If you come around Pulpit Rock, all of a sudden .Ý.Ý. these headlands come out. No matter how many times I see it, I never get used to it."
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| Portland artist David Little painted the sea crashing into Monhegan's Black Head this June during a five-week artist residency on the island. |
"I think basically it's a large subject," Little says. "Depending on where you are standing, it can be scenic or it can be dynamic. Most of the scenic views are from the trails, where the headlands look small and the sky looks huge. If you go down on to the rocks — very few adults do that — you see how spectacular these subjects are. I didn't even touch the surface. I might have done five paintings of Black Head, but I'd like to do 50."
Little spent five weeks painting on Monhegan Island as part of a summer residency program run by the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. A number of his Monhegan paintings are on exhibit at the Between the Muse Gallery in Rockland. While on the island, Little donned heavy boots and rain gear one afternoon and scaled White Head in stormy weather.
"It took 40 minutes," Little says. "At one point, I couldn't go up without hauling myself into a spruce tree. .Ý.Ý. I think it gives you a sense of the structure and solidity of what you are painting. That experience of being out there helped me a lot when I was in the studio working in my head."
Little is far from the only artist to brave the elements at Monhegan. Henri, Bellows and Kent all worked there in inclement weather, as proven by their paintings. Kent's "Toilers of the Sea" pictures fishermen in dories braving the thrashing waters at the base of a headland on a winter day. Bellows' "Beating Out to Sea" shows a schooner dangerously close to brooding Black Head in a frothy sea.
More recently, Stone sketches the headlands while cradled in his rocking boat. He's also hiked there in midwinter, when snow fills the rock crevasses, making it treacherous terrain. Little slipped and slid on the rocks at the base, which are draped with wet strands of seaweed.
The headlands, because of their rocky bulk, also are hard to capture in paint. Little says you need to abbreviate them, because it's impossible to render every nook and cranny. Stone has raced what he calls the "raking light" of late afternoon, when the sun moves quickly over the bluffs. An artist has about half an hour to capture the last streaks of sunlight scraping across the rock.
There is also the knowledge that so many artists have been there before. Because of that, Marguerite Robichaux avoided the headlands at first during her stay on the island in 1990.
"I was quite intimidated by the history of the great painters who had done it before," Robichaux says. "I found myself not venturing to the headlands until later in my stay because it had been done so well by such great artists. I thought, 'What could I add to this?' Eventually, I painted to satisfy my need to paint. I wasn't trying to paint something that hadn't been done before."
Little acknowledges that an artist can be overly influenced by other artists' painting of the headlands. Still, he had the opposite reaction from Robichaux. He tracked down the spots were Kent, Bellows and contemporary Chris Huntington had painted. "Chris went out and tackled those because of Kent and Bellows," Little says. "He attempted to do a similar kind of action painting that Bellows did. I followed in that same vein."
Carl Little, director of the College of the Atlantic's gallery and a prolific writer on art, finds that artists make the headlands their own. The paintings vary, if only for the changing historical styles.
Harrison Bird Brown, under the sway of the Hudson River School's romanticism, painted the headlands as ragged brown cliffs cloaked in mist and rising from a raging sea. In 1909, Charles Ebert used impressionistic dabs of yellow and lavender to transform Black Head to a pretty, breezy bluff. Fairfield Porter painted Black Head in the 1950s with slabs of thick greens, golds and tans against the flat blue of the sea, a painting that is more about color than the actual place.
"You show 10 different views of the headlands and they are all different," says Carl Little, who is David's brother. "They vary from foreground of the headlands, such as Kent's famous 'Toilers of the Sea,' where the headlands is right up against you. You get this real sense of a small boat and a huge place. In others, they are in the distance. Sometimes, they are very Hudson-River-School looking, kind of misty.
"It's nice to be able to show the course of American art in a single place."