A few years ago - before the town became fashionable - a world-famous artist wandered into Rockland, Maine with a picture to be framed. The odor of fish reeked from the SeaPro plant by the harbor and the empty brick store fronts along Main Street gave the town a desolate air. Strolling into the Huston-Tuttle Gallery, he laid his art on the counter where the young clerk gave it a cursory glance. According to rumor, she did not recognize the name or the work of Andrew Wyeth. It's unlikely that she suspected the power of a painter to transform her world. 

Few people did.

In the rugged midcoast region of Maine, artists are a part of the scenery. Ever since Winslow Homer found his muse in Prout's Neck, painters have journeyed north, seeking a wilderness and isolation not found in Cape Cod and other New England seashores.

At the turn of the century, some of America's most prominent landscape artists made their way to Monhegan Island, eleven miles offshore. In the early 1930's, painter and illustrator N.C. Wyeth bought a summer home in Port Clyde. Son Andrew summers in Cushing, and grandson Jamie (a favorite of John F. Kennedy) paints in a lighthouse and owns two homes in the area.

Today it's difficult to view the sheer cliffs of Monhegan Island or the rolling farmlands between Portland and Camden without recalling the dramatic brush strokes and brooding colors of the artists who came to work here. Indeed, some tourists come just to see the scenes that inspired painters like Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth.

WYETH'S WORLD
One stormy afternoon, I joined the throng of tourists on a standing-room-only ferry for the hour-long ride out to Monhegan Island. Gulls shrieked overhead. Seals piled on slick black shoals yelped and slithered into the bay. Suddenly in the distance, the island emerged from the mist, a high green knoll topped by the pointed tower of The Island Inn.

Peering through the telephoto lens of my camera, I saw that a dozen or so artists had propped their easels on the ragged banks. Poised like sandpipers, they gazed past their canvases at our approaching ferry. Perhaps they would place us in some grand landscape - a bright white dot tossing on dark waters. We would become immortal. Then, to add to the illusion, who should putter by but Jamie Wyeth himself?

Leaning over the rail, the ferry passengers shouted greetings into the wind. With a smile and a wave, he piloted his navy blue boat toward the horizon. The boundary between art and life seemed as hazy as the line between sea and sky ...

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