SOLD - Thoughts of Winter Down East

The coast of Maine is beautiful year 'round, but it's always amazing to me how fast a vibrant summer community can pack itself up in a suitcase and ship out with the rest of the summer gear. It's a bit unsettling when the only signs of humanoid life are an occasional local handyman, the ghost-like tinkling of wind chimes on a shuttered cottage, or the slow whiney creak of rusty rooftop sculptures and weather vanes. 

I have often thought it would be fun to live in one of those coastal houses during the winter when the rent drops. But the reality lurks in thoughts of long and lonely, black, cold and stormy winter nights, when the wind howls like a banshee, clamoring and clawing at the door to take you away in its hearse to hell. And then there's the relentless pounding of the ocean's fists on the breakwater, the only baracade between you and your most terrifying fear - the abyss that is the bottom of the ocean. Even lobster boats that over-winter in the harbor, so quintessentially Maine in the summer, become vessels for ghosts of fishermen-lost, who take the helms and head out for open ocean - now their eternal limbo.

I realize there are folks who live in these places year 'round and would call my imaginings absurd. But they are not cursed with a undisciplined imagination where a proposition like this for someone like me is most certainly, a road to insanity.

Thoughts of Winter Down East  • 8"x8" watercolor and gouache framed to 12" x 12" • $200