When I was in college I read stories written by two different authors who made me want to visit the state of Maine. Due to the way they described the landscape and the small towns along the water I became curious and wanderlust.  I don’t remember the name of the author who wrote the first one I read.  It was a short story that described the rocky shores of the Atlantic ocean.  Steep, old, rock staircases leading up to the businesses and the hotels of Maine that overlooked the shoreline.  She made it sound like the landscapes, the seascapes and the buildings were shades of gray. Not gray in a bad or depressing way that winters in some places can become, but the shades of gray that make up the life of an old town and illustrate its history.

The second writer to make me wonder about the state, was May Sarton. She wrote a book of a year she spent alone, in order to gather herself together and to work on her craft of writing, to work in the garden, to shovel the snow.  This book was titled “A Year of Solitude”.  This is what I wanted.  A year away from everything that threatened my painting.  Day jobs, ex-boyfriends, family and friends.  I wasn’t leaving them forever…I just needed to spend time away to discover what the different shades of gray meant.  And I needed to find out whether I could capture that in the paintings–the shades of subtle color necessary in order to create the images I wanted to capture on the canvas. I didn’t spend a whole year in Maine, just one winter.

It was cold.  Makes sense.  It was Maine in the winter and it was cold.  I had rented a small cottage which was old and not well insulated. But a fire each night, and to be honest a fire throughout the day cast a warmer kind of glow on the grays that were just outside my windows.  Occasionally a small deer would walk across the yard, and her smooth brown coat seemed cadmium red in comparison to this black and white winter world.  I learned a lot about color during the months I spent in Maine.   I found that it is the subtleties of life, the grays of life that made the browns so vibrant.  My paintings changed a lot that winter.  I changed a lot that winter, that winter in spent in a state of grays–in the state of Maine.

A Winter of Solitude in Maine is a post from: Mountain Monkeys

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