Terry Tempest Williams - Island: Paintings by Tom Curry

M ore people than I can name have inspired and encouraged me to do the work I love. Thanks to my parents, Bob and Carol Curry; Nancy and Bucky Kales for inspiration; Terry Tempest Williams for her eloquent questions; Jan Cigliano Hartman for being a catalyst; William Braden for introducing me to landscape painting; a wide community of friends and brilliant painters here in Maine; extraordinary teachers at RISD, including Lorraine Shemesh, Panos Ghikas, and the late George Pappas and Francis Harpin. Finally, to my wife Kimberly for believing in me.

overleaf: Tempest, oil on panel, 36" x 43", collection of Nancy and Bucky Kales.

Terry Tempest Williams

E very summer and fall I migrate to Maine, where the daily breathing of tides becomes the mantra of the seas edge. It is here I return like the least sandpiper to probe the wrack line for sustenance. It is here I have come to rely on the abundance of salt marshes and the braiding of eelgrass to untangle my mind. And it is here I have learned that when the crows gather in the arms of balsam firs and birches, crying incessantly, a bald eagle is near.

It is also here where I met Tom Curry, a landscape painter who lives on the Blue Hill Peninsula. How do you paint Spirit? I once asked him. He didnt answer. It is not a question I have asked myself as a writer.

A few years later, I found myself inside Toms studio looking at new paintings. I witnessed light dancing on water. Paint on canvas awakened the ineffable, and my longing, whose source eludes me, returned.

Agitation is not often paired with contemplation, but I believe these words are siblings. A restlessness precedes or prompts the cry for reflection. The mental tossing we experience as crashing waves within the walls of our mind begs for the pause of tranquility. How else will we find our way in a world as discursive and distractive as ours?

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire, wrote T. S. Eliot, is the wisdom of humility. I think of Maines rocky coast. Acadia. Monhegan. Surf crashing, plumes of sea smoke rising, the sloshing of water back and forth in the confines of a granite trough. It is the oscillations between thrust and pause, emptiness and explosion that keep us in the dynamic stance of watchfulness as we contemplate the nature of relentless power.

One night, I floated on my back in Morgan Bay, the ocean waters of Surry, Maine, with my arms outstretched like a cross. I was cradled in water, rocked back and forth by the sea, as the Milky Way bathed me in starlight. In that moment, I felt blessed, and dissolved.

Currys Chatto Island paintings are a meditation. His close perusal of water, the undulating ripples between shadow and light that occur in moments of calm and disturbance, brings us into the emotional relief of memory. We know that island.

We have witnessed that moment. On one day, Currys brushstrokes create a skiff of ice and a reflection melting from the last rays of daylight. On another day, he paints the dazzling dance of water as the island sleeps.

We do not look at these paintings so much as feel them like a heat wave in August. They are the visceral expressions of all the various moods we experience living on the edge of water.

In my favorite island meditation, it is snowing. An immense whispering is heard. Each flake is painted as a world falling. The foreground is transparent, blue green, sheets of ice are exposed beneath the opaque water. Ice slabs crack and break the chilled serenity. The island rests like a great stillness upon the sea, housing secrets that will be kept until summer.

What is an island but a body? The human body awakens. We emerge from the seas upright, cellular bodies with legs and arms and eyes that blink to register the clarity of forms known and unknown, the result of joyous struggle and experimentation.

I dont know what keeps the artist returning to his easel day after day, or the writer to her desk, when despair creeps in and threatens to quell the imagination, the source of our deepest hope as human beings. To evoke what we can never say, to honor what we can never know, and to illuminate what we can only feel, is the truest rendering of our souls work.

Tom Curry follows the animation of spirit. What is invisible becomes the secret muscle that calls forth tides and keeps them rushing forward, fingers of foam on the reach. But it is in the retreat that treasures are found: a shell, a stone, a buoy unmoored from a fishermans boat, now an artifact. This is the wisdom of return that the ocean knows and we seek each time we walk to the waters edge and follow the wrack line.

The return. Currys gift to us is always the return, the return to the island. The return of light on the water. The return of the seasonal palette before him. His courage as an artist is his belief in the holy act of repetition and return. The island he paints over and over again is a shimmering liturgy of light, transcendent.

The face of the sea is always changing, crossed by colors, lights and moving shadows, sparkling in the sun, mysterious in the twilight, its aspects and its moods vary hour by hour.

Rachel Carson, from The Sea Around Us

Sea Smoke, oil on panel, 36" x 43", collection of Nancy and Bucky Kales.

Carl Little

T he history of American art offers a variety of islands, from Childe Hassams Appledore in the Isles of Shoals to Walter Andersons Horn Island off the coast of Mississippi. In these and other cases, the artist brought a level of obsession to the subject, which led to paintings that have the authenticity of a place experienced.

With its impressive archipelago, Maine is well represented in this rich thematic line. Monhegan Island alone has inspired a distinguished roster of some of Americas finest landscape painters, from George Bellows and Edward Hopper to Reuben Tam and Jamie Wyeth.

Artists often become intimately associated with a particular Maine islandFairfield Porter and Great Spruce Head, William Kienbusch and Hurricane Island, Carolyn Brady and Vinalhaven, or Bo Bartlett and Matinicus. The island becomes a nurturing place, a retreat and refuge, a source of art and energy.

The spruce-clad isles along the coast have beckoned Tom Curry since he and his wife, writer Kimberly Ridley, moved to the state in 1995. One island in particular has held him captive: humble and handsome Chatto.

Currys first representation of Chatto Island, which sits just off Center Harbor in the village of Brooklin, on the Blue Hill Peninsula, was a pastel drawn in 1996. That striking depiction of a dark island under a sun-pierced evening sky was the touchstone. In the years that followed, Curry found himself attached to Chatto.