ART IN-BETWEEN

By Laurie Meunier Graves

Not long ago, I was in Portland, the Babylon of Maine, and it was an in-between sort of time. It wasn’t exactly winter, but it wasn’t exactly spring, either. For the most part, the snow was gone, but the trees around Back Cove stood dark and bare with just a hint of swelling at the end of their slender branches. The air was still decidedly brisk but not so brisk that a walk around Back Cove was out of the question. However, there were no tulips, no daffodils, no green, and while Portland had the gritty, gray look of winter fatigue, there was also a sense of an imminent gathering, the deep breath before the leap. The birds, especially, seemed to sense this, and the air was full of their sound.

It was also an in-between time for art. The galleries that I went to had not yet changed their exhibits, and the Portland Museum of Art was in the process of doing so. In the Portland Museum, it was hustle and ladders and commotion as new pieces—quilts—were being hung in the lobby. They were too high for comfortable viewing but were placed that way, I suppose, to be out of reach.

Because there was nothing new at the Portland Museum, I decided to take a closer look at their permanent collection to see what might catch my attention. This turned out to be a rewarding experience in which I do not often indulge. I live far enough away from Portland so that casual, repeated viewing is not something I can easily do. Normally I come, with notebook and pencil, when there are new exhibits to see and consider and ponder. While I certainly enjoy doing this, there is something undeniably special about having the time to wander through the museum and observe paintings that have become old friends and therefore are almost taken for granted. I must admit that it’s also fun to observe the patrons.

While I was at the museum, a little girl, six years old or so, was looking at art with her grandmother. The child wore a green coat and red shoes. Clicking her tongue, she skipped around the room, stopping when her grandmother would point out a painting and an artist—Pissarro, Cassatt, Hassam. The child would dutifully stop and peer, her tiny face close to the painting. But she didn’t touch. As the child skipped out of sight, I wondered how much she took in of the paintings she saw. I caught a glimpse of her one last time, staring out the windows overlooking the city streets.

When the child and grandmother were gone, I turned my attention to two paintings, Dune Pool and Isle of Shoals, both by Frederick Childe Hassam, an American Impressionist painter who was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and lived from 1859 to 1935. In the past, I had more or less skipped over Hassam, who seemed to be overshadowed by the more famous European Impressionists—Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir. It’s not that I disliked Hassam’s work, but somehow I always breezed by him on the way to other paintings.

On that day, I stopped for a closer look. In Dune Pool, an aquamarine pond glimmers in the middle of a scrubby landscape that could only be coastal. The vegetation is aglow with yellow, green, and orange, and I can almost smell the plants as they grow hot under the sun. To one side, between two sliver-thin trees, stands a nude woman. Her flesh is pink and solid, and she looks as though she could snap those fragile trees with one hand. The whole painting gives the impression of heat, summer, and salt. There is also the illusion of casualness. Did nude women really bathe in that pool in the middle of the day?

Isle of Shoals also has that same luminous, clipped vegetation. Everything is low to the ground. There is nothing except the sky to draw the eye upwards, and the sky melds with the sea in a pearly white haze. Like Dune Pool, Isle of Shoals has a quiet intensity that draws the viewer into its small but complete world. Both paintings make me think that in the future, I shouldn’t be so quick to pass by Hassam’s work.

As I left the room with Hassam’s paintings, I came across a group of high school students striding behind their teacher, who seemed engaged but relaxed. They were not clicking their tongues. Instead, they had notebooks in one hand and in the other, pencils poised for action. I would have liked to listen to their conversation, but I didn’t dare stand that close to them.

Instead, I turned to The Coopers, a mixed-media work by Charles DuBack. Fourteen or so grim-faced men stare out from this large picture. In the front row, the men are seated; in the back row, they are standing. It’s as though they posed for the picture. Some of the faces are painted directly on the canvas; some are wood cutouts, and the mixture gives the piece literal depth. However, painted flat or raised, all of the men are somber. The wall text states that “their faces are based on daguerreotype portraits that the artist found in the 19th-centruy building he used as studio, a former cooperage in Waldoboro.” Perhaps the spirits of the workers haunted DuBack. In this picture, the men do indeed have the vague, ghostly look that daguerreotypes inevitably give people.

To add to the eerie effect, DuBack has clothed these men with bits of stained fabric as well as paint. One man wears soiled, striped baggy coveralls over a red painted shirt. Another has a blue denim shirt, with a pencil tucked into the pocket. The paint and the cloth and the cutouts and the flatness come together to give the work a solid yet out-of-focus look. The men are there, but in a way, they are not. DuBack really makes the viewers feel as though they are gazing into a scene from the past.

Leaving the room, I came upon one student, a young man, who had strayed from his group. He was lying on a bench and not looking at anything. He was just staring at the ceiling.

Down the stairs I went. Through the curved floor-to-ceiling window, I glimpsed Celeste Roberge’s Rising Cairn, a huge man made from a metal frame and stuffed with granite rocks. Crouching outdoors among the trees and bushes, he looked as though he could leap to life at any moment and strike, lobbing stones and bringing terror to the city. I pictured the giant rock man crashing into the museum. In my imagination, the young man leaps from the bench, the little girl in the green coat screams, and the teacher does not look calm. But the rock man does not harm them. Instead, he smashes through the other side of the museum and tears down Congress Street, throwing rocks through windows.

As I left the museum, I shook my head, dispelling the notion of the rampaging rock man, who, truth be told, has always given me the shivers. In this case, perhaps it’s best not to look too closely at art in-between. 

 

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