Whether summer or winter, East Coast or West Coast, Colin Page captures the visual world
By Bonnie Gangelhoff
This story was featured in the November 2018 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art November 2018 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
The leaves are turning and there’s a slight chill in the air as Colin Page says goodbye to summer along Maine’s rocky coast. Page is wrapping up a season spent painting on location in the seaside towns of Camden and Rockport as well as on Spruce Head Island. His summer bounty has yielded works depicting—among other things—working harbors and the supply houses that sell bait to, and buy lobsters from, local fishermen. “I was looking for places or structures that are crowded or funky,” he says. “I tried to exaggerate the colors and start each painting with a color idea to set the mood.”
Indeed, color is paramount in all of Page’s work. “Colin is an expert at balancing warm and cool colors to capture the atmospheric quality of the scene,” says John Danos, co-owner of Greenhut Gallery in Portland, ME, which represents Page. “Given his attraction to color, light, and coastlines, Maine—which has more [miles of] coastline than California—is a natural home for him.”
This year marks Page’s 16th summer in the Pine Tree State. He arrived in 2002, thinking it would be a temporary retreat from Brooklyn, where he was living at the time. A friend had offered him a place to stay where rent was minimal and alluring scenery was abundant. He planned to return to his apartment in Brooklyn in the fall, but he ended up never leaving Maine. “It’s one of my random decisions that worked out. I love it here,” he says.
Today he makes his home in Camden, a small coastal community that, ironically, swells with New Yorkers and other big-city folks in the summer. For Page, the warm air and sunshine mean not only outdoor painting but also spending time with his wife and young daughters before school routines begin again. As the cooler days of autumn arrive, his schedule fills with workshops, shows, painting demonstrations, and travel.
In September his lush painting titled CANDY STRIPES was on view in The Guild of Boston Artists Regional Show. At the end of the month he was off to Rockland, ME, where he taught a painting workshop that was so popular, prospective students entered a lottery to secure one of the 12 places. In October Page flew to Southern California, where his paintings were on display at the Newport Beach Yacht Club.
In fact, Page typically travels to Southern California several times a year. Last year he was juried into the Laguna Beach Plein Air Painting Invitational and won a top award. Indeed, if you ask him about his favorite places to paint, he has a ready answer—Spruce Head Island and Catalina Island, which are a full 3,000 miles apart from one another on opposite coasts.
Each region of the country sparks his imagination in different ways. Maine appeals to him because of its historic towns and small commercial harbors where people make their living from the ocean. The harbors are picturesque yet functional. In his painting titled SUPPLY HOUSE, for example, Page relishes the fact that the red cottage is a little bit beat-up and the oil tankers in the foreground are part of how the space works. “Instead of trying to pretty it up, I am charmed by the honesty of how the space was created by the people who use it,” he says. “Even the unmowed grass full of Queen Anne’s Lace and the satellite dish on the roof tell the story of the place.”
What strikes him most about California, on the other hand, is the vastness of the landscape. “The mountains out west are so big and far away that atmospheric perspective plays a bigger role in landscape painting,” he says. “The land has a structural quality, without so much foliage to soften the edges of land masses. On the East Coast, we have so many trees and foliage that it’s rare to see so much distant landscape.”
Page was born in Kalamazoo, MI, but his family moved to Baltimore, MD, when he was just 2 years old. Art was an early interest, and his parents fully supported his budding talents. Page’s mother enrolled him in art classes as a youngster, and by the time he entered high school, he was already on a serious path to a fine-art career: He was accepted to the Baltimore School for the Arts, where half of the day was devoted to academics and the other half to art classes. “It was a fabulous foundation and gave me a head start in my art training,” Page says. “It started me oil painting when I was 15 years old.”
He finished high school, he says, with a disciplined and dedicated focus on how to pursue art in the future. He enrolled briefly at the Rhode Island School of Design but transferred to Cooper Union in New York, graduating in 2000 with a degree in fine art. He stayed on in New York and worked an array of odd jobs to pay the bills, including pizza maker, photographer’s assistant, and security guard at the Noguchi Museum in Queens.
In his free hours, Page painted and sold his paintings at outdoor art shows up and down the East Coast. When he left for Maine in 2002 on his supposed summer sabbatical, he was selling enough work to transition into the life of a full-time fine artist. Eventually the galleries came calling, too, and today the majority of his income is from gallery sales.
Winter arrives early in Maine. In November, when the trees are bare and the landscape becomes a grayish-brown monochrome, Page retreats to his studio. He’s not one to set up his easel on a frozen lake, but he is a man with a plan: From winter through spring, he creates still lifes and large-scale landscapes in the warmth of his studio. It’s nestled in a converted two-car garage at his home; sliding-glass windows face west and illuminate the space. On occasion his daughters, Audrey and Hazel, pop in for a visit, as do Kona the dog and the cats, Etosha and Lollipop. “The four chickens are not allowed,” Page jokes.
Recently the artist has taken on some self-imposed challenges when it comes to still-life works. Earlier this year he created CANDY STRIPES, a complex tableaux which was eventually juried into the California Art Club’s prestigious Gold Medal Exhibition in Los Angeles. In this piece, a red-and-white-striped tablecloth forms the background for bowls and plates brimming with lobsters and clams. Lemons, a glass of beer, and a martini also set the scene for a delicious taste of Maine. “I should have known better than to choose a striped tablecloth, but the pattern and color looked great, so I did it anyway,” he says. “It took a lot of careful drawing and paint handling to get the stripes to all line up in a natural way that shows the folds of the cloth without distorting the perspective. It was a lot of work, but this still life has always been the one I am most proud of.”
The frigid winter is also when Page chooses to work on large-scale landscapes that he creates from sketches and photographs. “Larger paintings give me the freedom to let the brush play a little more,” he says. “I switch to bigger brushes and look for opportunities to abstract parts of the scene. I can dig into a painting over a longer period. Most of my bigger paintings take several months of intermittent work to finish. I build up the painting slowly and have more time to consider each decision.”
He experiences a similar sense of freedom with the brush when he is painting out West because of its vast perspectives. In TWO HARBORS, MORNING LIGHT, for example, if the viewer stands close to the piece, it appears to rely on simple brush strokes to suggest buildings and trees. The painting is sprinkled with broken shapes and color patches. But when the viewer steps back, the puzzle pieces come together to reveal a complex scene. “It’s the kind of scene that grabs me,” Page says. “I love looking through all that activity and then off into calming waters and a large land mass across the harbor.”
Spring comes late in Maine and doesn’t linger. Page sometimes packs up his gear to paint on location in May. But it’s more likely to be early June before the landscape turns from gray to green and the gardens start blooming. By the official start of summer on June 21, Page is fully ensconced in plein-air painting once again—for everything there is a season.
The artist is fond of saying that his paintings, whether they are created in Maine or California or elsewhere, are about poetry. “For me, painting is about documenting what is exciting about the visual world,” he says. “The paintings are not about copying a scene but capturing light and mood. I am always looking for a more poetic understanding. Painting is how I share the poetry of an experience.”
representation
Greenhut Gallery, Portland, ME; Anglin Smith Fine Art, Charleston, SC; Debra Huse Gallery, Balboa Island, CA; Courthouse Gallery, Ellsworth, ME; Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME.
This story was featured in the November 2018 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art November 2018 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.
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