THE CANVAS – APRIL 2008

By Carl Little

Dodd, Frederick, Knock, Baker & Palmer

In the best of painters there is a balance between content and technique—the subject and the chosen means to present it are in sync. Each canvas is the culmination of a life spent responding to the world, yet each is also a step toward a new fulfillment of both the artist’s vision and the viewer’s perpetual wonder at what is being expressed on the picture plane.

The five artists showcased here, all of whom are at different places in their lives and careers, have developed signature styles to accompany the subject matter they have made their own. A nude with wheelbarrow, motel units in deep twilight, a dock with purling water, a domestic odalisque, an imaginary vista—the subjects are as wide-ranging as the styles these painters have developed to render them.

Lois Dodd: Reinventing the Real

In 1998, during a summer that proved too hot to work outdoors for any extended length of time, Lois Dodd found herself driven into the shade of her barn studio in Cushing. She had been drawing nudes al fresco with a group of painters for several years and had accumulated a stack of studies.

That summer, Dodd began to develop some of these studies into small paintings, each featuring a nude female figure, or several, engaged in outdoor activities: hanging laundry on the line, sawing wood, turning the soil, or simply sleeping in the sun-dappled grass beneath a tree. All were painted on panels in dimensions often associated with the oil sketch.

Nude with Wheelbarrow, 2000, exemplifies that special bravado Dodd brings to the subject. The figure casually stands behind a wheelbarrow, her left leg cocked; she rests a moment before moving the sack of mulch, or whatever the barrow holds, to its destination. Beyond and around her gray-blue body with its multiple shadows lies a yellow world broken up by clumps of greenery accented with blue. The viewer can almost feel the heat of the day, which justifies, if you will, the figure’s state of undress.

The Intrigue of Linden Frederick

Belfast-based Linden Frederick is one of the foremost painters of America’s byways, highways, and backyards. He can make the humblest objects or places—propane tanks, beehives, a stretch of Route One, self-storage units, a U-Haul truck, the leftover string of Christmas lights on a run-down home—resonate with mystery. Frederick is a poet of the overlooked, and by focusing his significant prowess as a painter on these everyday subjects, he draws the viewer’s attention to their inherent beauty.

The painter also has a passion for dusk—“the hour between dog and wolf,” as French poet Jean Follain once described it. His ability to capture the most subtle gradations of twilight using oil paints is remarkable. This is a world that few of us ever really see, distracted as we are by the incessant demands of modern life. It is at once ominous and sublime. It is romantic without being faux-luminist.

Frederick brings focus and drive to everything he does. A semiprofessional bicyclist, he recently pedaled across the country. The trip was physical, to be sure, but it also broadened his vision of the American scene, that sad but beautiful heartland with its signage and railyards.

Where Knock is Open Wide

Over the past several centuries, the Maine coast has inspired countless marine artists. From Fitz Henry Lane, Thomas Cole, and Frederic Church in the mid-1800s to the bounty of 20th-century painters transfixed by the sea, the state can lay claim to stimulating the most sustained body of marine art of just about any place in the world. So far, the new millennium has witnessed no slackening of the tide.

Sarah Knock entered the field in 1989 while an artist-in-residence on Monhegan—there is nothing like Rockwell Kent’s “seagirt” island to instill an infatuation with the open ocean. Since that time, this resident of Freeport has explored the coast in all seasons, rendering a range of waterfronts and islands, from the Custom House Wharf in Portland to the Sisters in Penobscot Bay.

Knock’s seascapes are often about the sea itself, about ripple effect and reflection, wakes and floes. Like fellow Maine water-worshippers Susan Shatter, Brita Holmquist, and Nancy Wissemann-Widrig, she is mesmerized by that scintillating medium, that wine-dark element about which Homer, the Greek bard of antiquity, once rhapsodized.

David Graeme Baker’s Beautiful Dreamer

Born in Capetown, South Africa, and trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, painter David Graeme Baker moved from the city of Philadelphia to the hamlet of Hancock about eight years ago when his wife became dean of admission at the College of the Atlantic. While he has since produced his share of landscapes, rarely do they fit the typical mold. A statue of St. Joseph located off a corner in downtown Ellsworth, for example, is not what most of us think of when conjuring Downeast Maine, yet Baker’s image of reverence says as much about this neck of the woods as any panorama.

Even rarer in these parts are painters who specialize in interiors. Over the past several years, Baker has turned his sights inside, capturing a domestic milieu with stunning verisimilitude. Working with the figures around him—his young children, his wife, a babysitter—he creates familial tableaux reminiscent of John Singer Sargent’s.

In her formal green dress, the recumbent woman in Baker’s painting, R.T.’s Paper Crown, 2007, is more than a nanny catching a few winks while her two charges, one of them in diapers, occupy themselves with toys nearby. She is also a beautiful dreamer.

Michael Palmer’s Landscape Inventions

In his introduction to the traveling exhibition “Expressions from Maine 1976,” the novelist, art writer, and historian Martin Dibner stated, “There is no simple answer to the question, ‘What is a Maine artist?’” Michael Palmer, one of the painters and sculptors featured in that long-ago show, is a case in point. While his landscapes might evoke a particular setting, they are largely works of imagination and more fanciful in nature.

A son of the South (Kentucky, then Georgia), Palmer moved to Durham, New Hampshire, in the 1960s to study with John Hatch at the University of New Hampshire. After completing his BA, he stayed on to fill in for the arts faculty, teaching the occasional drawing or painting class. He had studio space and the opportunity to roam, which is how he discovered the south coast of Maine and became part of the Ogunquit art scene. The combination of bare-bones landscape and architecture, a special quality of light, and a vital artistic community led to a residency that has lasted more than 40 years.

Today, Palmer divides his time among Maine, Key West, and other places in between. He continues to favor landscapes that are composites. In Puddles, 2007, an even strip of Monopoly-like houses and barns divides sky and land. Painterly clouds roll across the pale-blue heavens while basins of standing water accent the foreground’s green-brown sward. There is a touch of the surreal in the simplicity of this designed vista.

In a recent interview, Palmer expressed a view that is likely shared by the other painters featured here. “I feel an artist’s work must continue to evolve,” he wrote. “One doesn’t always know to what or where….” He concluded: “I’ve been fortunate enough to survive doing what I love.” We, in turn, have been fortunate to have Palmer and his peers provide new ways of regarding the world.