Elaine Crossman

“I spent my early years in rural Vermont, living as much of my life as possible out of doors. There were few other children nearby, and so I learned early about solitude, and the pleasures to be found in exploring the natural world. I seem to have always known that I would be an artist, and to have always been aware of color and light and form.

In pursuit of an education, I spent many years in cities. I learned to make paintings of the things that one finds indoors and worked to refine skills that have to do with vision and its expression. When I returned to northern New England, settling in Vinalhaven, ME in 1976, I found myself visually overwhelmed by nature. After some trying attempts at painting out of doors, I moved back into my studio and began painting nature as it was framed by windows. This device served me until I could get reoriented to the visual richness of my natural surroundings.

My island home provides me with endless subject matter, both visually and metaphorically. It is a place of extreme contrasts; the dense texture of spruce woods, the spare openness of the sky and sea and seasons all inform and give definition to every aspect of my life. My studio sits feet from the edge of Sand’s Cove where I am surrounded by the good natured industriousness of the lobstering community, and by Nature herself in the forms of sea and sky creatures and light endlessly reflecting on water.

In my recent work, I am refocusing on my intimate connection with the natural world. As I move more deeply into landscape painting I am finding layer after layer of subtlety, new relationships of color and texture with infinite variety. I am a meditative painter, I like spending long periods of time simply absorbing a place, experiencing it in different seasons and at different times of day before I begin painting. I often paint the same place many time=, exploring its diversity under separate conditions of light and weather. In the end my goal is to create painting that are both a visual feast and an invitation to the viewer to remember and rejoice in their own connection with nature.”