These plein air paintings were all done while sitting on the same sheltered rock along the coastline of Maine in Acadia National Park near Otter Point. I painted there almost every morning throughout the summer and fall of 2022. Jennifer Bartlett provided a role model for creating a daily habit with predetermined boundaries within which I could explore how to paint three essential elements: rock, water, and sky and their dynamic interchange. Variously blue, pink, orange and purple rocks, while seemingly stable amidst shifting waters and skies, revealed their slow geological changes over many centuries of time in their teetering shapes and crumbling surfaces. Water countered with predictable, regular tides and unpredictable surges of surf created by storms that gave the illusion that the rocks were variously sinking, rising, or drowning. Skies seemingly changed each second with moving clouds, mists, or sun sparkles that shifted the colors of water and rock continuously. Each morning I was in an impossible but invigorating chase to capture the sublimity of this site that, from just a single rock, seemed an endlessly vast but profound testimony to time and change. The art of Winslow Homer, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Utagawa Hiroshige, Milton Avery, Mary Armstrong, Deborah Ellis, and Gretna Campbell, among others, gently prodded me forward on this transformative path.
