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Dear Friends,  I write to share an older drawing and a more recent painting.  Enjoy!

It was 1973.  I was newly married and freshly minted with a degree in environmental planning from University of Pennsylvania.  My husband and I moved to Maine for my planning job.  We purchased a little camp on the Penobscot River and settled in.  We were in heaven!  That was soon after the Maine Legislature had enacted a law requiring communities to write comprehensive plans and enact shoreline zoning ordinances.  I, the "Lady Planner from Away", was assigned to visit communities up and down the Penobscot River Watershed and talk with Selectmen and Planning Boards about the dreaded "Zoning" word.  One community visit took me to a meeting of the Selectmen of Prospect, Maine, held in the First Selectman's house.

I fell in love with that Selectman's barn.  Located directly on Route 1A with its three stories, tucked into the hillside and its utilitarian doors purposeful to the raising of sheep, it was conservative in all manner of form and function.  I don't remember much about the meeting I attended, but I do remember the barn.  Over the years I have watched it as I traveled up and down Route 1A, noticing little changes, marveling at its structure, and stopping often to photograph it.  Sheep raising ceased long ago.  Slowly the barbed wire and gates which defined the barn yard deteriorated.  The barn itself remained, and still remains strong and straight, a testimony to building skills of years past and value placed on a good sound barn.

Finally in 2009 I challenged myself to draw it in graphite, taking the time to be present in its form and shape, rendering its shingles, the water stains off the roof, the inviting gateway to the barnyard, the dried grasses and weeds growing around it in the fall.  It felt that a fall season drawing was appropriate to the time in the life cycle of this elegant building.

Again this January I stopped on my way north on Route 1A to look at the barn with its winter adornments surrounded by fields covered with ice, snow drifts and winter vegetation.  This time my eye was drawn to the Selectman's house, located across the road and tucked in with its winter blanket.

I don't know who lives there now, but with the drawing (Ray's Barn) and the painting (Tucked In), I pay homage to small farmers who live and thrive on the land and to the hardscrabble environment where they work which draws out the best and strongest in individuals, communities, and neighbors.  I hope you enjoy these paintings.

Rocks, fog, and still waters define some days on the Maine Coast.  This painting evolved from the experience of hiking with two friends to the end of a point of land in the Petite Manan Federal Wildlife Refuge one foggy day in September.  Arriving at the end of the point we were drawn to sit and breathe in the stillness, watch the water move, and listen to the silence.  Life is well proportioned when fog and rock prevail.