John Marin: An artist, his shack and the sea — Bob Keyes: Storyteller & Writer

Five years before John Marin died in 1953, Look Magazine named him America’s most important artist. His paintings in watercolor and oil were celebrated for blending representational images with abstract ideas and execution. Critics hailed his approach as innovative and sophisticated, and he was seen on both sides of the Atlantic as a key figure in America’s Modernist movement.

None of this would have happened had Marin not taken up an invitation from a friend to come to Phippsburg in Casco Bay in summer and fall 1914.

Marin lived in New Jersey and focused much of his artistic eye on New York and the surrounding mid-Atlantic states. New York was agreeable to Marin, personally and professionally. His time in Europe in the early years of 20th century fueled his creative impulses, and he returned to New York bursting with energy and ideas. He was part of the Armory Show in New York in 1913, and helped lead America’s emergence in modern culture. He was an artist on the edge of greatness, with new ideas, bold vision and the courage of confidence.

In summer 1914, he listened to the advice of an artist friend from New York, Ernest Haskell, who told Marin that Maine was where he would find the subjects for his paintings. Haskell was no stranger to Maine. Connecticut-born, Haskell bought a land and a farm in Phippsburg in 1903 and quickly fell into a pattern of spending summers in Maine and winters in New York. Marin adopted the lifestyle as his own in the decades ahead.

Marin and his wife arrived in Maine the first week of August 1914, and stayed eight weeks in a cabin on the southern tip of Carrying Place Head, a 32-acre private island just off the coast of Phippsburg in the New Meadows River. Presumably, Haskell helped Marin make the arrangements. The cabin was one of two houses on the island. The much larger main house, on a grassy flat on the island’s village-facing east side, was a five-minute walk through the woods.

Built on a pitching ledge, Marin’s cabin had two interior rooms: A small kitchen and a slightly larger living area, with enough space for two beds, a chair and a drying rack. A fireplace made with rocks and decorated with mica from nearby beaches dominated the room. A small screened porch faced the ocean.

Beyond that, rocks and water. High tide was 15 feet from the porch. The entry to the kitchen was two-feet wide. Marin, a slight man, would have turned sideways to slip through. It was rustic by any standard. Water for drinking and cooking was drawn from a well far down a footpath from the cabin. There was no electricity. The fireplace provided heat for cooking and drying.

The east side of the island by the village was accessible by foot for two hours on either side of low tide, but Marin depended on a row boat to get to and from the mainland. Marin had access to a skiff, and quickly learned his way with the boat. He told his dealer in New York, Alfred Stieglitz, “To go anywheres I have to row, row, row.”

Depending on the wind, it was a challenging row. Marin had to cross a bay and round a point into open water. He navigated winds, tides and rocks to find safety in a sandy beach. After unloading his provisions on the rocks, he secured his boat and hoisted himself up a wet and slippery ledge. Nothing came easy.

By his own account, it was not the lifestyle to which he was accustomed. He worried about the well going dry, and complained endlessly about the mosquitoes — “the Hell pest of this country, morning, noon and night.” We might assume he worried about the well going dry because of his kitchen needs. But Marin mostly feared the well going dry because he would have to row to the mainland to fetch water to mix paints.

“To hell with water for cooking, washing and drinking,” he wrote. “Don’t cook — eat berries. Don’t wash — you are wet all the time so what’s the use. Don’t drink, for surely some of this wetness must sink in.”

He also worried about his little row boat, which he moored in a rocky cove just below the cabin. Seas tossed it day and night, and Marin feared its demise if it came loose from its mooring or otherwise thrashed against the rocks. “You can never know what a boat means unless you are stranded on an island,” he told Stieglitz.

Given his disposition, it’s a wonder Marin stayed as long as he did, let alone return. But he did. Until his death in 1953, Marin spent all but one summer in Maine beginning in 1914. He came back to Phippsburg in 1915 and again in 1917, before focusing his artistic energy elsewhere in Maine.

He mastered seamanship skills and learned to tolerate mosquitoes and the discomfort of always feeling damp. In time, he worked his way up the coast, settling first in Stonington and later in the Down East community of Addison. He bought a house there, and began spending more than summers in Maine. His daughter-in-law, Norma, lives part of the year in the Marin home in Addison yet today.

Everything changed about Marin — his art, his disposition, his outlook — when he came to Maine. Maine changed the man. He had a good and promising career before he came to Phippsburg, but the coast and the imagery of trees, rocks and water offered much more than New York for interesting subjects. He was captivated by the ever-moving water, entranced by the sharp shapes of the trees and transfixed by the ruggedness of the rocks.

The expressive nature of his painting style was a good match for Maine’s volatile environment. He learned to capture the majesty of Maine, and became one of the best-known interpreters of the state to the outside world.

His transformation began on a tiny cabin on Carrying Place Head. He didn’t paint right away when he arrived that first week of August. World War I had just begun, and Marin’s letters home suggest the conflict in Europe was very much on his mind. Marin had to row to the mainland for a newspaper or, more likely, relied on the local fishermen for news.

He settled in and learned to gauge the nuances of the winds and tides. He spoke often about the surprises of Maine, particularly the ocean, which inspired fear and awe. High tide was 15 feet from his cabin door. One senses from reading his letters that Marin slept with one eye open. “They tell me that when the storms come the water will splash over the house. But these fishermen are always trying to scare you,” he wrote.

Marin kept time by the sound of waves crashing.

He ended his first letter home on a foreboding, if joking, note: “There be and have been mighty men, I suppose, but who has gotten to the bottom of the mighty ocean unless as a Corpse. Ha Ha.”

Whatever fears or trepidation he had about Maine were overcome by the inspiration he found when he put brush to paper. Marin made many paintings from his perch by the sea, some good, some indifferent and some “mighty rotten,” as he said.

Those early Maine paintings set the course for the next four decades of his life.

Carrying Place Head hasn’t changed much. The cabin where Marin stayed is still standing, but isn’t habitable. The cabin was knocked from its foundation during the blizzard of February 1978, and fell into disrepair. The windows are broken, the floor has caved in spots and the chimney has fallen into the roof.

But the ghost of Marin is present. People who visit the island today can see where Marin made these paintings: From a ledge on the West Side looking toward Wood Island; from a precipice facing the mainland, with fishing boats on their moorings; from an outcropping above his cabin, with trees in the foreground.

The forest has grown up and around Marin’s cabin, but the paths he explored still traverse the mossy forest bed. And the seas that lapped at Marin’s cabin still crawl up the ledge and touch the broken structure during storms.

Carrying Place Head was and remains a rugged and difficult place. Marin complained about the challenges endlessly, but as August stretched into September, he found its beauty. We see that in the work that he produced there, and we read about in his letters. Tellingly, in one letter home to Stieglitz he seemed to embrace the freedom of painting in nature. “Oh, it is dangerous ever, ever to work in a studio; this is of course only an opinion, take it for what it’s worth and I’ll do the same.

“Oh Hell. Nature’s arrangements are much finer, more, infinitely finer than your studio arrangements, my fine studio arrangements.”

Marin acclimated well. He learned to the love the place. He noticed the birds and commented on the trees and abundance of fish. In letters sent the following summer, when he stayed nearby in Small Point, he began observing the swallows. “The place continues to grow on me,” he said. “And who misses me in New York and elsewhere: nobody, not very much.”

He learned to fish, and learned to pay attention to the weather and the elements. He knew the tides, and quickly understood that high tide and low tide dictate the rhythm of the day.

We see him becoming a Mainer, and we imagine him rounding into physical shape.

“The rain and the fog, the fog and the rain, torrents, bad roads, mud puddles, high tides and low tides, the bailing out of the boats, cold water, you are nearly up to your hips, the dread of the plunge, the shiver of it, oh, but after — oh now I feel bully.

“Rowing, rowing, rowing, pull, pull, pull — you devil you — pull and row, row and pull.”

In another letter, he spoke of a “Sou Wester,” a hard-blowing storm that required “a good stout rope” to secure a boat. “Otherwise, you won’t have any boat. … The wind moans, howls, and whistles.”

He lamented leaving Phippsburg after only a month in summer 1915. He could not secure the housing he wanted, and relocated to Massachusetts until he found a place in Maine he desired.

And it was Maine — Carrying Place Head, Small Point and later Stonington and Addison — where Marin found his artistic voice. He overcame his initial skepticism of the remoteness and ruggedness of place, and fell into the rhythm of his environment. Over the next four decades, his paintings reflected this new-found and long-held love of place.

More than 60 years after his death, Marin remains one of Maine’s best-known painters. He’s mentioned with Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley and Andrew Wyeth as the painters who have defined this place — their place — to the larger world.

Marin ingrained himself in his new environment. Instead of resisting the elements that challenged him, he embraced them. Instead of running for cover, he exposed his vulnerabilities. When the shipyard in Bath hired all the local men to build ships for the war, Marin repaired his own boat. It was work he preferred hiring out. Instead of waiting for an available laborer, he did the sanding and painting himself.

Marin fell in love with Maine. He allowed Maine to become the focus of his life and his work. When he wasn’t in Maine, he wished he was. When he was in Maine, he was happy and inspired.

“It’s great to sit on a gigantic rock and look at the waters,” he wrote to Stieglitz.

Story originally appeared on Medium @bobkeyes on January 2, 2017.

The Marin cabin at low tide. Photo by Bob Keyes

John Marin photographed by Alfred Stieglitz in 1922.

Poison ivy and decades of neglect have taken their toll on the Marin cabin in Phippsburg, ME.