A new wave of young craftspeople and farmers are setting down roots, starting up businesses, and promoting sustainability on Blue Hill Peninsula and in other Maine communities.
Artist Ed Nadeau taps into his Franco-American heritage and a sense of Maine to create stories of life lived near the edge. In the spectrum of Maine artists, Nadeau is something of a rarity: a narrative painter who mixes fact and fiction. Many of his canvases conjure stories, some drawn from family and personal experiences, others “ripped from the headlines.”
While some beachcombers turn up their nose at a slimy piece of seaweed on the beach, they should not. What keeps that seaweed flexible and slippery is also what keeps our ice cream smooth in our mouths, our lipstick smooth on our lips, and our shaving cream smooth across our cheeks.
Charles Eliot was a noted landscape architect who helped create the land trust model that led to the formation of Acadia National Park. Sailing vacations to Maine with his family when he was young helped inspire his later work.
Painter Joel Babb is a consummate realist. His landscapes of Boston, sometimes based on photographs and sketches made from the air or tall buildings, are considered among the finest achievements of their kind. In recent years, he has turned this same attention to detail onto natural settings in Maine.
Moss Tents was formed by Bill Moss to manufacture and market his designs for the high-end camping and residential canopy markets. But there is much more to the story. He was an artist whose creations revolutionized fabric architecture.
The 2014-2015 Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland’s exhibit “The Shakers: From Mount Lebanon to the World,” featured works from the Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon, the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, and several major museums. Some 200 objects were on display, including the minimalist furniture, boxes, and other household items for which the Shakers are renowned.
Wendy Rackliff plays a role in the preservation of rare heritage breeds of poultry with her island-based business, Coastal Creek Enterprises. She ships quail eggs to breeders all over the country.
With blooms on stalks that can grow up to six feet tall, mullein can be an attractive plant for a cultivated garden. It also has a number of medicinal uses. For example, its broad, fuzzy leaves can be dried and used in teas to relieve congestion.
Who doesn’t want an exact model of their boat? A besotted Concordia owner describes how he was able to track down a miniature replica of his yawl, built by one of the country’s finest model makers, Rob Eddy.
In addition to building fine boats, three Maine boatbuilders have separately branched out into home construction—waterborne homes, that is. Foy Brown on North Haven, Steve White of Brooklin Boat Yard, and Robinhood Marine’s Andy Vavolotis all built themselves houseboats.
Maine, with its vast fields of subterranean rubble left by retreating glaciers, has some of the most wonderful rock gardens to be found anywhere, and some of the most creative gardeners. Rock gardeners utilize every crack, fissure, crevice, and pothole to their advantage.
As letter carvers, the bulk of the work of the father-daughter team of Douglas M. Coffin Lettercutter is creating headstones—beautiful, hand-carved life markers with letters that flow into each other, creating words that call out to be read. They consider their work to be among the most caring of human endeavors.
