JOHN MARIN 1870-1953
Schooner Yachts, Deer Isle, Maine, 1928
Watercolor on paper, 16 x 22" (40.64 X 55.88 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Museum purchase, 967-W-119

John Marin believed he had to know a place intimately before he could paint it. When he executed Schooner Yachts, Deer Isle, Maine, he had been painting on the coast of Maine for fifteen summers. A particularly vocal opponent of what he considered the "self-indulgence' of pure abstraction, Marin tried to imbue each painting with his love of the visible world. A critics observation that Marin painted from an inner vision offended the artist deeply, and was summarily dismissed by him as rubbish. Marin could not conceive of an art of consequence that was not grounded in the act of seeing. To Marin, "seeing" was a "repetition of glimpses" and each painting an opportunity to capture in a single, striking image the "eye of many lookings." Instilled with a modernist's distrust of illusionism, however, he drew on the resources of his own form of Cubism to explore his response to what he saw and experienced. Marin always insisted that his paintings be both celebrations of the visible world and flat, two-dimensional objects: "I demand of [my paintings] that they are related to experiences ... that they have the music of themselves-so that they do stand of themselves as beautiful-forms-linesand paint on beautiful paper or canvas." This painting epitomizes Marin's work of the 1920s, during which he truly made watercolor his own. Marin longed to imbue his watercolors with the
breadth and power which are traditionally associated with oil painting; in fact, Schooner Yachts, Deer Isle, Maine dates from the year Marin began to complement his work in watercolor with his first serious experiments in oil. Frustrated with the limits imposed by traditional watercolor technique, Marin increasingly chose to ignore the medium's luminous properties. Schooner Yachts, Deer Isle, Maine is dominated by opaque strokes of saturated color which Marin then mixed with charcoal and graphite. The rugged vigor that characterizes the work, achieved at times by scrubbing and reworking the surface, belies the delicate beauty still associated with the artist's watercolors of the previous decade.
Maine symbolized for Marin the power and dynamism of nature. In Schooner Yachts, Deer Isle, Maine Marin energizes the surface of the paper with an expressive power that evokes the essence of a place and moment he had experienced. As is true of so many of Marin's paintings, the work embodies the artist's search for the equilibrium he believed could be achieved between the forces of dynamism and those of stability and order. The painting, particularly its seemingly empty center, is filled with a taut energy created by the pull of the two schooners against the demands of the balanced composition. Marin conveys and controls the scene's explosive vitality through a rich concert of brushwork: bold strokes, dense patches of color, fluid washes, and deft lines. There is a breathless swiftness about the work as a whole, which will always make it seem as if the paint has just dried.

NANNETTE V. MACIEJUNES