THE CANVAS – NOV/DEC 2008

by Carl Little

Alison Rector, Jill Hoy, & DeWitt Hardy

When describing an artist’s connection to the landscape, the term “a sense of place” is often used to convey that ineffable personal resonance that elevates a work of art above the merely descriptive or picturesque.

On numerous occasions, Alison Rector has walked through the Casco Bay Lines ferry terminal in Portland as she embarked on painting expeditions to the islands. She has come to know this space, and it haunts her. Likewise, a stretch of York beachfront with a trio of summer houses compelled DeWitt Hardy to take up his watercolors. He added his wife and an umbrella to the scene and made up a name for the place—making a claim to it, as it were. And Stonington’s Main Street, all decked out for the annual Fourth of July parade, spoke to Jill Hoy’s deep ties to this beloved community where fishermen and painters, townspeople and children celebrate both their national and individual independence.

Each painting has layers of meaning; each place is rendered in a remarkable way; each image transcends the everyday.

Alison Rector: The Eye of a Poet

When Alison Rector surveys her surroundings for motifs, she is bound to focus on something that is at once ordinary and out of the ordinary—a row of washing machines in a laundromat, say, or a bed in a room of a rustic Maine cottage. The machines and the bed are common and familiar, yet as the subjects of fully realized paintings they become unusual, extraordinary—especially when exquisitely rendered and instilled with the quality of found poetry.

Rector, who once studied with Linden Frederick [MH+D, April 2008], specializes in interiors. In many of her canvases, we are invited to look from room to room, down corridors and stairs, across entryways, through pantries and living rooms—which makes her painting of the Casco Bay Lines terminal stand out from most of her work.

Every time Rector travels to the islands off Portland—she has lugged her painting materials onto the ferries many times—the terminal space, she says, makes her stop and look. There is a certain quality of light, the way the platform becomes suffused with filtered sun. A battery of newspaper dispensers, mailbox, and trashcan is rendered with precision.

The terminal recedes, its columns in a perfect row, its overhanging roof a series of dynamic cantilevers. Though empty, the space is nevertheless charged with anticipation. We will be embarking shortly.

 

 

Jill Hoy’s Life Cycle

In the summer and fall, Jill Hoy is a plein air painter, creating dazzling views in and around her home and studio in Stonington. As the season grows colder, she turns to figurative narrative paintings that demand “a more interior process.” These images are based on memory, drawings, and an occasional photograph. They begin, Hoy notes, “from a kernel of inspiration and ramble through the psyche, changing radically…as I grope for the essence of the painting.”

These paintings are much longer in gestation than her downeast vistas. Indeed, Hoy started Island Parade two years ago, inspired by Stonington’s annual Fourth of July celebration. She first constructed the architectural elements, including the towered parish hall, and then added the sailboat, a seagull winging down the center, and the bird’s mirroring image: the child with arms held wide open below it.

Enjoying its airy structure, the artist let it sit for a year. Then fellow Stonington painter Howard Fussiner died. Fussiner had depicted the parade nearly every year, often including portraits of area artists among the onlookers. Hoy decided to create a tribute to her friend, but in her own distinctive style, which carries the imprint of past masters such as the eroticist Balthus and the social realist Reginald Marsh.

At lower left, Pam Pace, wife of painter Stephen Pace, says good-bye to Butch Ciemei, a friend, neighbor, and local fisherman (the Paces spent their last summer in Stonington in 2007). Other featured figures are painter Leon Goldin and his wife, Meta; medical-research scientist Bernie Weinstein, whose health was failing; the artist’s son Gabriel (on the sailboat with sketchpad open); and various island youngsters. The nude waving her lobster claws is the artist’s alter ego.

This painting celebrates the cycle of life, Hoy attests, but it also represents an island teeming with energy, art, and community

 

A Visit to Kangaroo Beach with DeWitt Hardy

Since taking up residency at Perkins Cove in Ogunquit nearly a half-century ago, DeWitt Hardy has established himself as one of the country’s most respected watercolor painters. His paintings bring out all the beauty of the medium, from luminous transparency to the radiance of subtle coloration.

Hardy is drawn to a range of subjects, from street scenes and still lifes to his true specialty: the female nude. “There is nothing Hardy paints with more authority than tones and texture of human flesh,” wrote Edgar Allen Beem in a 1989 Maine Times feature—an appraisal that has stood the test of time.

Kangaroo Beach depicts a stretch of sand in York; Hardy’s wife Deirdre posed for the figure “to knock off any edge of sentimentality,” the artist explains. Each element in the painting is handled with marvelous control. The eye lands on the beach umbrella and bikinied figure, then moves to the imposing homes—each lit like a Hopper house—before coming to rest on the support wall and random gray rocks in the sand.

You won’t find Kangaroo Beach on a map. Not knowing its name, Hardy made up one, inspired by an apocryphal story about these hopping creatures from Australia. When explorers asked the Aborigines what the animal was called, the legend goes, they replied, “kanguru,” which in their language meant “I don’t know.”

What we do know is that Hardy has provoked our curiosity with this quiet seaside drama lit by the diminishing light of a late afternoon in Maine.