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50 PLUS ONE, ALLAGASH WILDERNESS WATERWAY INAUGURAL VISITING ARTIST 2020 BOOK.
DISCRIPTION
50 PLUS One is a wilderness journal of Michael E. Vermette that chronicles his two-week visiting artist program on the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in 2020. The Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry selected Indian Island artist Michael E. Vermette, on the year of their 50th anniversary, to be their inaugural visiting artist and capture the beauty of the waterway from Lock Dam cabin on Chamberlain Lake. As a result of his two-week residency, you can view 53 color plates of his oil and watercolor plein air paintings and explore this extraordinary 92-mile wild river system through his writings as he plans, teaches, engages, and visually captures imagery that imprints itself on the modern Maine consciousness.
FORWARD
By Carl Little
Michael Vermette: An Allagash Exaltation
Paul Cézanne once famously noted that art is “a harmony running parallel to nature.” The French painter did not wish to replicate the landscape around him; rather he sought to reveal its underlying structure and composition.
Michael Vermette is on a similar mission: to reveal the currents and energy of his surroundings, be it on Monhegan Island, in Baxter State Park or, most recently, along the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. With a lively brush and an acute sense of motion and light, Vermette creates that harmony that runs adjacent to the natural world while rejoicing in its sheer magnificence.
A committed plein air painter, ready to fend off black flies and deal with rapid changes in the weather, Vermette immerses himself in the landscape as an act of communion. To be one with lakes and rivers, swaying trees, sunrises and sunsets, is as important as painting itself. Indeed, they are inseparable.
In both oil and watercolor Vermette is an action painter, capturing the scene with an immediacy that brings the painting—and landscape—to life. At the same time, he displays a discipline borne of years spent studying and rendering Maine’s lakes and rivers, islands and mountains.
While Monhegan and Mount Katahdin are oft-rendered by painters, the Allagash is less so. Vermette approached this new territory like an eager explorer, keen to know its elements and contours—and how it moves. With limited time, he made the most of his sojourn, painting dawn to dusk and sometimes into the night, drawing on all his powers to create a record of his river time.
And what a record it is: In oil and watercolor Vermette brings us into this wilderness world with gusto. Each painting is tied to place: Chamberlain and Eagle lakes, Martin Cove, Telos and Lock dams, Indian Pond, Chase Rapids, Nugent’s Camps. The paintings offer a kind of Allagash diary: One day he is atop Allagash Mountain painting the woodlands spread before him; the next, he’s set up by Little Allagash Falls, his watercolors aligned to the course of white water over rocks.
Vermette also pays homage to the rustic aspect of the Allagash through paintings of the humble cabins built near the river. Like Frederic Church and other painters of the north woods he finds poetry in the simple lines of the lodgings.
There are echoes of artistic ancestors here. The sun blazing through an apple tree at Lock Dam cabin brings to mind some of Arthur Dove’s radiant paintings. A tangled beaver lodge and a gray stump recall some of Neil Welliver’s Allagash subjects, albeit painted with a freedom bordering on frenzy. And some of the watercolor subjects, like the ancient trains, would have been in Edward Hopper’s wheelhouse.
In two paintings Vermette presents the view of Bear Mountain from Pillsbury Island where Henry David Thoreau camped during his 1857 trip from Moosehead Lake to the Allagash accompanied by Joe Polis, a Penobscot guide. “I began to be exhilarated by the sight of the wild fir and spruce tops,” Thoreau wrote in his journal: “It was like the sight and odor of cake to a schoolboy.”
To Vermette the natural world is cake—and celebration. He provides us with an exaltation of paint and place. We partake of his art—and his Allagash—with pleasure.
Carl Little edited his brother David’s book Art of Katahdin, which features several Vermette paintings. He wrote an article in the May –June 2021 issue of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors, Maine Art Feature, called A Passion for Plein Air, featuring Vermette’s paintings in the Allagash. He lives and writes on Mount Desert Island.
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50 PLUS ONE BOOK
INVOICE
Name: _____________________________________________
Date: ______________________________________________
Street Address: ______________________________________
City/Town: __________________________________________
State: _____________Zip Code: _________________________
Quantity of Books_______ Signed by the artist? Yes____No_____ Number of Books______
Special Holiday Cost: $35. (If book was hand delivered by artist there is no charge for shipping, otherwise $5.00). .Total $40.00 cash or $41.93 for PayPal or Square.
Please fill out form and make out a check to:
Michael E. Vermette,
send to:
14 Rolling Thunder Drive, Indian Island, Maine 04468
Phone: 207-827-7573 Cell: 745-0071
Email: [email protected]
Website: https//www.michaelevermette.com
