I took a trip to the Portland Museum of Art over the weekend to see the Winslow Homer exhibit Weatherbeaten and I cannot recommend it highly enough. His amazing paint handling and the strength of the imagery was timeless (the polar opposite of old-fashioned) and felt peculiarly relevant in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The show presents a view of the Maine coast with no calm ultramarine seas or fairweather clouds sailing along through blue skies, though of course Homer would have seen such scenes time and again. Instead, he gives us the white line of rough surf against cold viridian green breakers, plum and gray skies, ochre and red scrub along the shoreline, sunlight and moonlight coming and going through thick fog and layers of atmosphere, dark rocks full of both intense color and deep shadow. And a few glorious sunsets, rendered with painterly brushstrokes of peach, orange, and vermilion. One of my favorite paintings of all time is in this exhibit, West Point, Prout's Neck. To stand before it and really take it in was a privilege. What an extremely rewarding, rich painting, full of color and movement, with masterful compositional choices throughout.
One of the things that struck me about the show, after seeing it, was Homer's use of narrative and illustration techniques in his earlier paintings - they tell specific stories, events, people, and ships appear in them, and buildings, and other details of human involvement in the natural scene - and how these narrative elements gradually drop away in his later work until we are left with raw nature, and we, the viewers, have ourselves become the observers he used to paint on canvas. There is no story left, other than the same old glorious one, told over and over by the ocean. Homer reminds me of another American Master - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as he grew older, with no need to repeat the epic poems of his past, instead writing some gems of poems that include everything we need, short as they are. Here is one such, that I love, on this same theme, written by Longfellow late in life. I think of this often, when I'm out painting by the ocean myself:
The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
One of the things that struck me about the show, after seeing it, was Homer's use of narrative and illustration techniques in his earlier paintings - they tell specific stories, events, people, and ships appear in them, and buildings, and other details of human involvement in the natural scene - and how these narrative elements gradually drop away in his later work until we are left with raw nature, and we, the viewers, have ourselves become the observers he used to paint on canvas. There is no story left, other than the same old glorious one, told over and over by the ocean. Homer reminds me of another American Master - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as he grew older, with no need to repeat the epic poems of his past, instead writing some gems of poems that include everything we need, short as they are. Here is one such, that I love, on this same theme, written by Longfellow late in life. I think of this often, when I'm out painting by the ocean myself:
The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls
The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.
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