PROFILE – JULY 2008

By Joshua Bodwell

Photography Darren Setlo

An artist unearthing the story of Maine through its remnants.

The hummingbird flitting around the crabapple tree outside John Whalley’s studio has caught the artist’s attention. It darts about, pausing here and there to drink from the delicate pink blossoms. Beyond the tree, railroad tracks look quiet and heavy with history, and past the tracks the salt bay edging Damariscotta is swollen with high tide.

Whalley returns his attention to the studio.

“Sure, you start out relying on the subject matter,” he says, “but then you see where it takes you.” When the 54-year-old New York native says subject matter, he is referring to the wealth of detritus stacked meticulously on the shelves and tables around his studio. There are piles of clay marbles, little tins, seashells, screwdrivers, worn leather books, hammers, chalk lines and balls of blue chalk rescued from nearby Liberty Tool Company, bits of hundred-year-old newspapers, assorted locks and keys, musical instruments, an oxidized spoon dug from the mudflats in Bristol. These castoff objects are the fodder of Whalley’s painstakingly rendered oil paintings and graphite drawings.

Although Whalley is often classified as a photorealist, it would be an injustice to confine him to the genre. Though he is obviously devoted to the realist tradition, and his pieces have the crisp composition of a photograph, Whalley’s work glows with an ethereal inner luminosity that goes beyond realism—when he draws a delicate strand of frayed twine, you can almost imagine that it once held an entire life together. “I love worn things,” he says, “things that have just been saturated with a story.” Taking full advantage of the illustration skills he honed at the Rhode Island School of Design in the mid-1970s, Whalley can infuse an object as mundane as a hammer with such emotion that it becomes a portrait not of a tool, but of the man who once used it.

John Whalley first moved to Maine in the mid-1980s, having vacationed in the state regularly since childhood. In 1997, he left for eight years to establish a school for orphans on a 150-acre ranch in South America. He came back to Maine in 2003. “Returning from Brazil meant returning to Maine, because this was where I considered home to be,” he says. “Maine offers a quality of life that has meant so much to me over all these years. There is still a glow of magic in the rivers and sea that I knew as a kid.”

Though Whalley had been selling and showing his work extensively since the 1970s—including a major, one-man retrospective at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2001—when he returned from Brazil, he wondered if he would ever paint again professionally. “I honestly thought my life in art was maybe over,” he admits, sneaking a glance at the hummingbird still working the crabapple blossoms.

Yet Whalley was soon lovingly depicting the odds and ends he unearthed at Maine’s many barn sales and flea markets in drawings such as Mason’s Line, which shows a simple stick of wood wound with a tangle of white twine floating above a paint-splattered background. Nothing, it seems, is too distressed or dilapidated, torn or tarnished to escape Whalley’s attention and sympathy. Not unlike in his work with orphaned children—work he began in the 1970s when he was teaching art at a Pennsylvania orphanage and that continues to this day through fundraising efforts—Whalley rescues what others have cast off, snatches them from the darkness and holds them up in a redemptive light. In turn, Maine has offered him no shortage of inspiration: Whalley’s first book, In New Light, contains 30 years’ worth of work, but since returning from Brazil he has been so productive that the past five years of output could easily fill another monograph.

Although Whalley’s art often evokes a somber sensitivity, it can also be quirky and lighthearted. His graphite drawing The Understudy is a perfect example. It depicts a barnacle-covered whelk shell lying atop a small tin box; in front of the box sits a plump pear also covered in barnacles. The piece is a thousand shades of black and white, the product of Whalley rubbing graphite dust into the paper with steel wool and then working meticulously with many pencils of varying degrees of hardness.

On one of their first dates, Whalley’s wife, Ellen Erickson Whalley, leaned in close to one of his graphite drawings and, stunned, asked, “How do you do that?”

“With a pencil,” he replied devilishly and seemingly unaware that he has unlocked secrets of the pencil that the rest of world remains oblivious to.

Whalley’s art is a confrontation with memory—he saves and honors the tiny objects that make up our lives from being lost to the obscurity of our forgetfulness. There is a world of reclaimed lost things inside John Whalley, a little village with rambling stone walls and abandoned outbuildings that brim with worn tools, pencil nubs, balls of twine, baskets and jars, bricks, buttons, and smooth-edged coins. It is a testament to the artist’s exceptional abilities that, even though his paintings and drawings rarely depict the human subject, the human touch nevertheless characterizes nearly every piece. “I guess I prefer to come in through the back door,” he says, in a typically understated style in which big ideas are expressed through small gestures.

“I feel like I am really seeing the story of Maine through its remnants,” says Whalley as he turns toward a gentle tapping at the window beside him. The hummingbird has abandoned the blossoms and is fluttering its tiny wings against the glass. “Look at this,” Whalley says, a smiling spreading across his face. “He wants to get in!”