PROFILE Thomas O’Donovan – AUGUST 2007

By Joshua Bodwell

Photography Darren Setlow

An artist’s journey for beauty’s sake

“Surely
that the world was ever made
is miracle enough.
That it be made so well
suffused with unnecessary beauty
is gift beyond compare.
It is said love is blind.
Not so I say,
Love sees. “

Thomas O’Donovan

The ever-widening spiral of a nautilus shell is one of nature’s greatest works of art. The delicate stripes of the little sea creature’s chambers show the history of its slow, incremental growth. That well-marked expansion makes the nautilus an eminently suitable emblem for artist Thomas O’Donovan’s Harbor Square Gallery. Opened 26 years ago as a modest 300-square-foot gallery in Camden, today Harbor Square commands all three floors and the rooftop of a lovingly maintained circa 1912 building at the heart of Rockland’s artistic renaissance. In many ways, the gallery’s growth has mirrored its founder’s own artistic arch, right down to his decision to move to Maine and open a gallery in the first place.
By the late 1970s, O’Donovan had retreated to the Pennsylvania woods after completing studies at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and graduate work at Penn State University. He lived in a small cabin beside a trout brook and sharpened his skills in metalsmithing and design—that is, until one day Maine came and found him. When O’Donovan’s neighbors ran out of space for guests during their wedding, O’Donovan took in a couple from Camden for the weekend. They raved to him about Maine. “In no uncertain terms,” he remembers with a glint in his eye, “they told me I was in the wrong place. They told me that whether or not I knew it, I was a refugee of Maine and I needed to go home.”
By 1980, O’Donovan had completed his move to Camden, and a year later he opened the first incarnation of Harbor Square Gallery in a small woodstove-heated space on the town’s public landing. For the next few years, O’Donovan pieced together a quiet existence, refining his craft and building a reputation as a creator of exceptional jewelry. When a series of unfortunate events forced O’Donovan to find another space for his studio and showroom, he recalls that the idea of moving to a much larger and more expensive storefront on the edge of Camden’s downtown was “absolutely terrifying.” But after some hemming and hawing, he made the leap into the unknown in 1983. “The hard things in life,” O’Donovan says now, “often turn out to be a blessing.”
The “cavernous space,” as O’Donovan saw it, quickly filled up with not only his art, but also the work of others. “I had all these white walls to fill. So we did and it ended up working,” he says matter-of-factly. O’Donovan likens the experience of starting and nurturing his gallery to a lesson his grandfather once taught him. “He used to say that certain things in life are like pushing a Buick: they’re hard at first, but once you get them rolling, they get easier.”
Harbor Square Gallery got rolling so smoothly, in fact, that over the next five years, O’Donovan expanded his gallery to encompass the entirety of the two-story, 4,500-square-foot building that he’d once been intimidated to rent a single suite in. “When other tenants would move out, the landlord would offer me their units,” O’Donovan says. “So I’d go into the empty spaces at night, maybe with a glass of wine, and I’d dream of how the walls could come down and how I could use the new room.” Those dreams grew to include a café, which soon became an evening destination for jazz enthusiasts on the Midcoast.
By 1995, climbing Camden rental rates had pushed O’Donovan’s monthly overhead to heights he wasn’t comfortable with. Unable to find a building for sale in Camden that suited his needs, O’Donovan began exploring Rockland. “It was still sort of rough and tumble in Rockland in 1995,” he remembers, “and there were certainly a lot of empty storefronts.” In fact, the former bank building O’Donovan ended up purchasing at 374 Main Street, in a prime location next door to the Farnsworth Art Museum, was actually being used as a storage space for Weatherend, an outdoor furnishings company.
While some naysayers told O’Donovan that the move to Rockland was a bad idea, he persisted. “I was just totally in love with this building,” he says, “and I used to joke that I moved to Rockland because I couldn’t figure out how to move that building to Camden!” Even though he was convinced that owning, not renting, was the only way to forge ahead with his business, O’Donovan says it was the Farnsworth that sealed the deal in his mind. “The presence of that institution made the move feel feasible,” he says.
For the past 11 years, O’Donovan has happily watched as new shops have opened and flourished around his gallery, and as established Maine businesses, such as Planet Toys and the Grasshopper Shop, have moved in to become a part of Rockland’s rebirth. “It used to feel like we were the Alamo holding out at all costs,” O’Donovan says of the early days of his move. “But it doesn’t feel like that anymore. Piece by piece, a pretty remarkable little street has formed here.” And in the middle of all that creative hustle and bustle stands O’Donovan’s own Harbor Square Gallery.
Even amidst a stretch of buildings noted on the National Register of Historic Places, Harbor Square Gallery shines like a piece of polished gold. O’Donovan has created a stunning gallery space, but he has also taken pains to preserve the charm of the building’s banking past—even the old vault remains, its antiquated door swung wide to showcase the art within. Above the old marble floors of the gallery’s ground level, a mezzanine beckons visitors up the sturdy iron stairs. Today, there are not only three floors of art to explore, but O’Donovan has recently put the final jewel in the building’s crown: on Memorial Day weekend, he opened the Muir Garden for Contemporary Sculpture on the building’s rooftop. Named in honor of the recently deceased Maine artist Bryce Muir, the rooftop terrace offers commanding views of Rockland. And not only is it covered in flowers, plants, and small trees, it is teaming with the sculpture of artists such as Cabot Lyford, Roy Patterson, Jenilyn Johnson, and Claire McArdle.
“There’s a lot of labor in this labor of love, but there’s more love,” O’Donovan says of his gallery, “because making money is never enough reason to keep doing what you’re doing. I’ve always been more interested in making beauty.” And so, the sculptor, designer, and self-described “maker-of-things” has come to see the evolution of Harbor Square Gallery as one of his greatest artistic accomplishments. “Too much of what is expanding in the world right now is not beautiful,” says O’Donovan. “I have this innate faith in the universe that there is some kind of support for the expansion of beauty…and this small space is a gesture to the fact that there is so much beauty. That’s important to me.”
And so O’Donovan has pushed slowly forward, adding to and experiencing the beauty of the world around him. Like the tiny nautilus, whose spiraling shell grows along with its owner, O’Donovan has built upon the spaces he has outgrown and now lives in the last and greatest chamber, which is wide open to the world.