NOTES ON THE LANDSCAPE OF HOME by SUSAN HAND SHETTERLY

Author:SUSAN HAND SHETTERLY
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Down East Books
Published: 2022-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

TIME ALONE

SOMETIMES A PAINTING WILL lodge in your mind. You carry the image around and your days filter their hours through it, as if it were a place you might have lived in a long time ago, and the uncertain memory of it stays for a while, a ghost-like presence, familiar but also at a distance, before it eventually fades.

These last days, the narrative of my life has been touched by Winslow Homer’s The Artist’s Studio in an Afternoon Fog. You can find it on the Web or in a book of his oil paintings, when, in his last years, he set out to paint the sea from his place on Prout’s Neck. Who would ever set out to paint the sea, especially here in Maine? How could anyone get it right? Well, Homer did.

Those of us who live on this coast know something about the magic of water. We’ve seen how it comes in as a building tide, lifting the knotted wrack so that their blades spread out and wave like trees in the wind. We know the withdrawing tide leaves pools in the mud and cobble of dead low, where mummichog schools swim, awaiting the water’s return. We’ve seen our high-tide bays as flat as mirrors, and the terns fishing above them, and we’ve seen them wild in a storm and watched in a snow squall the white flakes vanish into the dark uneasy waves. The colors of our home bays always shift, and some of the blues and greens, the off-whites and the grays we have no names for.

Homer’s canvas that has lived with me these days has none of his famous breaking waves. It is still, except for a small ruffle of water along the far ledge and a glint of water pooling on the rocks up close. An oil painting in browns, dense black, and silvery whites, it was made in 1894, after he had decided to spend most of his time on this stretch of the coast and commissioned a stable by the shore to be rebuilt as a studio where he could keep to himself and work.

The sun burning into the fog in the painting creates a light that seems crepuscular. It looks like evening, but it’s one of those middays when warm air moves across the cold surface of the Gulf and hits a dew point, dropping a gauzy curtain along the shore. You, the viewer, see his studio through this veil of fog, ghost-like, and beyond the studio, the family home.

What I see in the painting now is an echo of the time we’re going through. The artist’s studio is poised at the land’s edge, bearing witness to a vast and complicated and unpredictable sea. To some extent we’re all standing like that studio: far apart, and on the edge, watching a world that is very beautiful and dangerous.

The painter has put himself at a distance, looking back at his studio covered in this protective fog. That is a double vision, the sort that many of us are feeling as we live through this COVID crisis and climate change.

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