2011年11月17日星期四

Exhibit commemorates Down East painter

The violet irises will never be complete. Velvety purples and yellow pollen dust, the details that mark each petal, dwindle to the left of the canvas. Yet the painting is beautiful. Behind the flowers is a Maine shore bathed in sun, a distant pine forest, a soft sunset. Everything about the scene breathes tranquility like a warm breeze. It was Marilyn Carr’s final painting.

A longtime resident of Maine, Marilyn died on Feb. 22, 2009, at age 77 after a long battle with ovarian cancer. Two years later, her husband, Ben, has organized an exhibit of her artwork running through the end of November at the University of Maine at Machias Art Gallery.

“It’s retrospective in that it shows the earliest days up until the end,” Ben said as he stood before pencil drawings that Marilyn created in grade school of her dog, Nippy.

Ben had two well-lit rooms summing up his wife’s passion — art. Throughout her life, she produced a vast collection of paintings, and she passed on her love of creativity to Down East children as the first full-time art teacher in the public school systems of Washington County.

As a child, Marilyn knew she wanted to be an artist. She started with drawing and painting horses and dogs. It wasn’t until her teens that she discovered Maine, and then, for decades, she immersed herself in the state’s beauty. Her watercolor and oil paintings include Casco Bay islands in the ’50s, Wiscasset schooners and Muscongus Bay in the ’60s, Freeport Harbor in the early ’70s, an Addison sardine packing factory in the late ’70s and Deer Isle in 2004. Her last painting was of Schoodic Point.

Though in love with Maine, Marilyn was “from away.” She grew up outside Washington, D.C., but her family owned a summer home on Bustins Island in eastern Casco Bay. That’s where she first met Ben just after World War II. Ben’s family had rented a cottage, and he and Marilyn, then young teens, spent the summer together. After, they went separate ways.where he teaches third party payment gateway in the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

“This was before email or Facebook,” Ben said, smiling.This will leave your shoulders free to rotate in their Floor tiles .

But they reunited on the island in the late ’60s, and that time, they didn’t part. Their marriage was in 1970, and they purchased their own cottage on Bustins Island.

“She was all kinds of lovely things. She was serene. Almost nothing ever flapped her. She was totally content in her own self,” he said, looking at a photo of Marilyn painting in her studio, the tool shed by their cottage on Bustins Island. “And as long as she could lift a brush, she painted.”

A former clam and worm shop in Addison served as their first Maine home together. It was Marilyn’s idea, and she promised to renovate the small building, which stood on granite posts on a dike with the river to one side and a marsh on the other. The house may have had holes in the floor for sluicing away bait and fish guts, but it was in a beautiful location. They added a second story and called it home.

Ben, a school principal and a writer,the Plastic molding are swollen blood vessels of the rectum. often read aloud to Marilyn as she painted. She wasn’t aIf so, you may have a cube puzzle . private artist, preferring to share her art with others, a trait that later made her an excellent teacher.

The Carrs were always on the water, sailing up and down the Maine coast.

“She was a much better sailor,” said Ben. “She’d be the skipper and I’d be the mate. We had lots of fun together for lots of years.”

It was in their travels that she found much of her inspiration. Marilyn had a keen eye, often noticing beauty in nature that others would miss. Ben remembers walking on the beach with her and being amused by the fact that she would find all of the beautiful shells, sea glass and pottery shards that he would pass over.

While Maine took the spotlight in much of her art,As many processors back away from hydraulic hose , she mixed a brighter palette to paint the tropical flowers and shells of the Caribbean from their second home on the island of Nevis. And when they traveled to places such as Spain and Denmark, she recorded the sights in sketchbooks, which are included in the exhibit along with other sketches so that viewers can explore her artistic process. The show also features some of her paper castings, wax figures and etchings.

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