Artistic Heritage

I made a pilgrimage to the Maine coast to visit the places where David Lund, my painting teacher extraordinaire from 1967, and Marvin Bileck, my mentor from Queens College in 1968, spent summers for over 40 years. David still goes there; Marvin died several years ago. Marvin's partner Emily Nelligan still goes there to draw, and is the local heroine.
We flew to Portland and drove up to Stonington on Deer Isle. The light is so brilliant and the air so clear. Stimulating. You want to breathe in all you can store up. Great lobster too. Photos....

The next morning we went by David Lund's house in Stonington and I saw the view which inspired him so long ago. Still there, the water, the rocks, the craggy look, the trees.

Onward to our longer stay on Great Cranberry Island. The ferry rides were my favorite part - the mountains of Mount Desert Island, the sky, the fog that surrounds everything, the water, the waves, the sunlight, the pointy trees that must be balsam firs. Ahhh. Maybe we'll return next summer and I will have a residency at LaHotan and Carl will rent the same lovely house with the out of tune piano and porch swing and feeling of warmth everywhere.

Home in Takoma Park now, trying to adjust, having missed the earthquake here by one day, and avoided the electrical outage. We review the photos in slide show format, trying to get more of that air, that light, that space.

Wait, there is more to this post. All those painters - Marin, Hartley, Lund ..... even Hopper and tons more you've seen - they all soaked up and worked from that Maine landscape. No wonder I needed to go there, and no wonder I loved it too.

David Lund

Miraculously I found my art teacher mentor from the 60's - I had found an article about him on the web and traced him to his new address in NYC. On Sunday Carl and I spent 3 hours with him and his wife. David Lund is about 85 or 86 now, didn't quite remember me - he has taught hundreds of students at Columbia and Cooper Union, and our meeting was at Washington University in 1967.
We looked at painting after painting after painting. It was really something, as he is steeped in tradition, and you can see Giotto, Cezanne, Chagall, Italian painting, Rembrandt - and Lund. Steeped in tradition yet totally contemporary and coming out of his own mind. He says "I am so out of the box that there IS no box!"
I loved hearing him talk about his work, and I loved seeing all that I'd been taught so long ago, there in front of me, looking fresh, deep, radiant, and substantive. No flat cartoons! Yay!

Eventually I showed David and his wife some of my postcards - images from Scenes of Childhood, Still With Us, Soul Ladders, Presence of Spirit, and others. Very different from what I'd studied with him, and yet so "art" that they were both genuinely impressed. It was very moving and gratifying to me. I can't quite describe this, think I'll post an image or two of his work.

and ps what made him the best painting teacher I'd ever encountered had little to do with technique. It had everything to do with his encouraging us to go into and to then express the depth and breadth of our human experience. Hmm. Same with Lowry Burgess years later.