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Nancy Bauer

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While we were vacationing in Maine, we went to a Portland Museum exhibition, Art of the Cranberry Isles, curated by Susan Danly and illuminated by Carl Little's lecture. I was introduced to a whole miniature art world: two island sanctuaries with their landscapes and communities of artists. Little began his lecture with the caveat that he could only mention a few of the artists who have lived there, but even then he cited about 30. Most summered there, art teachers in New York and elsewhere in the winter. He described two groups, one on Great Cranberry Island that thrived in the '60s, '70s and '80s, and one on Little Cranberry Island flourishing now.

Little was asked in a televised interview: What draws artists to the islands? He replied that more than the landscape, the light, the rocky shore, it was the sense of "refuge and retreat."

Rosanna Warren writes about the Great Cranberry group: "The picturesque: that was a threat for painters in Maine. The Cranberry Island painters never fell into that trap. Maybe "never" is too strong, but the exhibition surely didn't have any of the pretty scenes that populate Maine galleries.

Because the artists painted the same landscape, the exhibition showed plainly how various styles and approaches to art produced dramatically different results. Little, however, stressed how much the island artists influenced each other.

I was struck with the difference between the two communities he described and those of our communities of artists. Our communities are inhabited year-round, those in the Hampton, Gagetown and Moncton areas for example. We have just celebrated the Saint John community of artists that welcomed a teenage Fred Ross. It thrived in the '30s, '40s and '50s. The wonder of that community was that all the artists stayed in the city, didn't wander off to the big centres.

Little knew the Great Cranberry artists well. One of them was his uncle, William Kienbusch, from whom he inherited an island house. Kienbusch worked mainly in casein but later in life he worked in Cray-Pas. Pastel seems to be a popular medium in Maine. Watercolour is another popular medium on the Cranberry Isles and in Maine generally. If you live in a place because of the landscape, you paint outside, I suppose. Are pastels and watercolour good mediums for plein air artists? I wonder. Many of the Maine plein air artists whose work I know, Stefan Pastuhov for example, work in oil.

A well-known Cranberry Isle artist was Dorothy Eisner. Little contributed an essay in a new book, Painting My World: The Art of Dorothy Eisner, edited by her daughter Christie McDonald and featuring 78 handsome plates of her work. He begins his essay: "In Maine artists and islands have gone together for nearly two centuries." Eisner was one of a group from the '60s to the late '80s who shared "a new and special comradeship:" Robert LaHotan, Charles Wadsworth, Carl Nelson, John Heliker, and Kienbusch among others. Unexpectedly, she seemed more interested in the interiors, the activities, the architecture of the island than in its landscape. Her two paintings in the exhibition were of her desk and of croquet mallets and sun hats. Her friend, Heliker, also painted interiors which Little described as "tense with activity," including the exhibition's Maine Kitchen. Heliker was influenced by one of my favourite artists, Vuillard.

The Eisner book contains a marvelous essay by her friend Rosanna Warren, daughter of the writers Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark. Here is how she describes Eisner's work: "She made space giddy." Warren asks herself, "Does it matter to her art"¦ that (Eisner) was a woman?" And then in several long paragraphs she poetically contrasts Eisner's "undeclared Taoist" way of being a committed woman artist with her own mother's "fierce and combative" way.

I think Emily Nelligan must be the only one of that group still alive. All her life she has worked entirely in charcoal. I was amazed at what she could achieve with such a limited medium: sun breaking through clouds, raging sea, dusk. It made me want to run out and buy some charcoal. She and her husband, the printmaker Marvin Bileck, came every summer for many years. At 84, she is still making art, I gather. I've put one of her charcoals of ocean and altocumulus clouds on my desktop. Even in this less than satisfactory way to reproduce her work, I can see her hand and imagination at play. I admired her charcoals in the exhibition, but now I wish I'd paid even more attention.

Before their deaths, Heliker and LaHotan established a foundation that sponsors four-week residencies for artists and writers in their island home. The site also has a printmaking studio. You can get there on the mail boat from Northeast Harbor.

Nancy Bauer is an arts columnist who lives in Fredericton. She can be reached at wbauer@nbnet.nb.ca.