In summer, in harbors along the Maine coast and on its islands, community sailing schools introduce youngsters and others to the art of tacking and jibing, to bow, aft, starboard, and stern. Sea legs develop and salt air enters the lungs and heart.
The Hancock Point Sailing Program has been offering lessons for 55 years. The current fleet consists of 16-foot Mercury sailboats, 420 racing dinghies, and an instructor’s launch. The program follows a curriculum designed by U.S. Sailing, which also certifies its instructors.
During spring, summer, and fall, painter Philip Frey likes to walk around Hancock Point, not far from his studio in Sullivan, sometimes visiting the pier to sketch or paint. One afternoon he arrived after sailing lessons were done for the day.
“The fading warm summer light, the boats, and the boathouse were inspiring,” he recalls.
Frey painted “Ready for Lessons” from photographs and graphite sketches. He chose to work mostly in an earth-tone and mid-tone palette with some select higher key colors—“so, mostly grays and some blues and greens with accents of orange and red and yellow,” he explains. He sought to capture “the cast of yellow/orange light” happening in the late afternoon, to reflect its effect “over the entire piece.”
The result is a paean to summer, to the quiet that follows a day of waterfront activities. The boats are lined up for the next day, the boathouse with its flag and bulletin board sits in the shadows of nearby trees, and the dock, which has been badly battered in winter storms, reaches out to the horizon.
Frey has painted seaside scenes in many parts of Maine, including Great Cranberry Island, Portland, and along the Downeast coast.
“People have made their livelihood and built their civilizations around water,” he notes, “so it is the boats, structures, piers, and all the things that allow us to go on the water that I find fascinating.” He gravitates to the smaller marinas and coves where pleasure craft share the space with working fishing boats. “All the shapes, the jumble of forms and colors, are inspiring,” he writes.
Born in Portland in 1967, Frey believes his first experience of the Maine coast was on one of many summer trips from New Bedford, Mass., before his family moved back to the state in 1980.
“I remember the water being quite cold compared to Massachusetts,” he writes, “and our focus was mostly on playing in and around the water.”
After graduating from Ellsworth High School, Frey pursued art studies at the Columbus (Ohio) College of Art and Design and then Syracuse University where he earned a BFA in 1990. He recalls working on some landscape pieces, including paintings and photomontages and collages, but it wasn’t until he settled in Maine that he would focus his attention on rendering the world around him.
Part of that focus derives from Frey’s experience as a Buddhist practitioner. He has found that active concentrating on particular forms in nature is enhanced by his mindfulness practice. Slowing down and noticing things enables him “to stay with an objective focus for some time and not be scattered,” which has had a positive effect of calmness and clarity.
Which brings us back to Frey’s painting of Hancock Point. The warm colors, the cast of end-of-day light, the sense of expectation—all is calm and clear.
On a personal note: When my six-year-old grandson James finished a week at the MDI Community Sailing Center in Southwest Harbor last summer, he was hooked. One night, getting ready to go to bed, he pretended he was in a sailboat.
The sheets were the ropes, “because that’s what they call them,” he said, and he used his ear to steer.
No doubt, his dreams that night involved holding a swift course for a distant island, the sails filled with wind.
You can see more of Frey’s work at www.philipfrey.com. He is represented by Courthouse Gallery Fine Art in Ellsworth, Greenhut Galleries in Portland, Carver Hill Gallery in Camden, and Edgewater Gallery in Middlebury, Vt. He will be teaching a plein-air painting workshop at Schoodic Institute in Winter Harbor Sept. 11-15.
Carl Little wrote the introduction to The Prints of Siri Beckman: Engraving a Sense of Place (Down East Books).
