Decade: Autoportraits, The Vinalhaven Suite

A decade ago, in the early ‘70s I began a series of paintings, autobiographical in intent, which, because they spanned the ten years of my life in the ‘60s, I called Decade: Autoportraits. These grew to be three sets, or, 30 paintings in all, of differing sizes, which touched upon some of the important occasions, places and people who figured conspicuously in my life during that very tumultuous decade for an artist in America—truly a golden decade.

Upon coming to Maine to live permanently in the late ‘70s I decided to record the more recent decade and the ten years which included part of each on the island of Vinalhaven in the Penobscot Bay. I first came to Maine in 1953 when I received a scholarship for the summer to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture from the Art Institute of Chicago from which I had just graduated. Skowhegan came to be the most beautiful summer of my life up to that point, but it was also for me a very meaningful way station on the way to Europe, for I had also won a travelling fellowship from the Art Institute which provided me with a year of study at the University of Edinburgh, the Edinburgh College of Art, and the University of London and travel to France and Italy.

Many years later I returned to Skowhegan for a brief visit as a member of its Board of Governors and, by chance, happened to meet Eliot Elisofon, a noted American photographer, who invited me to visit his summer home on Vinalhaven. On the second day there on my way to the ferry to return to the mainland I saw a marvelous old building in great disrepair and all the more enchanting for it. It was Adams and Hopper and my American dream and within two weeks Mr. Elisofon, whom I had just met two days before, had purchased it so that it might become just that—a dream realized. The year was 1969 and the Star of Hope, as the Odd Fellows had called it, was soon to be 100 years old, having been built in the 1870s when granite, not lobsters, was the big industry on the island.