Colin Page:
Down to the Seas Again
Down to the Seas Again is an exhibition of new oil paintings by one of Maine's masters of plein air painting, Colin Page.
Artist Talk and Reception: Thursday, July 1, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
My curiosity as an artist and as a sailor inspired this series of paintings. As a painter, I am drawn to interesting light or exciting color relationships. As a person, I am drawn to the adventure of being on the water. I want to be near it, surrounded by deep blues, bouncing light, and reflective waves. I want to know more about the tides, marine life, currents and wind, studying how color and light act in the ocean air. I want to recreate the energy and drama of sunlight and shifting conditions in nature.
I am raising my kids in and among the islands and harbors of Penobscot Bay. Much of our time is spent exploring the coast, where every beach is a chance to find new treasures. The water is a draw whether I am behind the tiller or looking out at the sea from a neighborhood yard. The islands seem endless and the summer bay calls out. This series is about the joy of our Maine coast.
Photo by Polly Saltonstall
The title for the show came from the following poem:
“I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.”
― John Masefield, Sea Fever: Selected Poems
~ Colin Page
Colin Page was raised in Baltimore, MD and attended the Rhode Island School of Design. He graduated from Cooper Union, New York with a concentration on painting. Upon graduation he lived in New York City for three years where he was an active member in a large and thriving art community. In search of a more diverse landscape, Page moved to Maine. In Maine, Colin paints the coast en plein air and focuses on capturing the atmosphere and light of a scene.
(Click on image to enlarge, hover over enlarged image to see details)
In our side gallery this month, we have Maret Hensick’s Flowers Past and Present a poignant and poetic series of mixed media on paper floral paintings in tribute to her late mother’s love of flowers and travel
I can only speak for myself when I say an artist starts working in any given direction based on an enthusiastic, albeit delusional, concept of where she’s going. You have an idea. You think you know where you’re headed. But hours -- or maybe days -- later, the painting looks absolutely nothing like you originally conceived it. Whatever concept you began with has disappeared, though you are not sure exactly how or why. This is where art gets interesting, inventive, exploratory and, for the artist, thrilling.
The first piece I created in the Flowers Past and Present series was The Past Will Always Be There. The initial painting was a white phlox in the center of the paper, begun in July of 2019, four months after my mother’s passing. I was finally back in my Maine studio, which has always been a place of refuge and solace. White phlox had bloomed in my garden, and the idea hanging in front of me was a big, white-on-white flower of impressive delicacy to express all the love and grief I was harboring. What came out was a tight, narrow, shrunken phlox floating all alone on a piece of paper. It both puzzled and irritated me to have so obviously failed.
Slowly, I kept adding flowers to the composition, picking what grew in the garden and painting them around the original phlox. I wanted to capture both their beauty and their imperfect character. For a few days, the flowers just floated on the paper until I added first one vase and then another. I wanted the vases to share the delicate character of the flowers without using the same approach, so I began to construct them from matte varnish and tissue paper. Rooting around in my studio looking for something else to use, I came across a box of things my mother had kept: old letters, stamps, wine bottle labels, Chinese cutouts, cards from the twenties and thirties, postcards from all her travels, maps. We lived in Europe through the sixties and seventies, and in that small box, I found a little treasure trove of my mother’s mementos to use in this painting and the ones to follow. My mother loved to travel and she loved flowers. From then on, through all 9 of the paintings I made for this series, I had an accurate concept of where to go and how to get there.
This body of work honors my mother, our lives as expatriates, and the fragile connections we all have to our worlds and to each other, past and present. My mother was a traveler. And as I painted, she was with me all along.
~ Maret Hensick
Maret Hensick graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, and from 1980-1986, she studied printmaking in the Hamline University studios with Leonardo Lasansky. She moved to Maine with her husband in 1986, and in 2020 after retiring a long and successful career in surface design, turned her redirected her talent and her full attention toward her fine art practice.
