 So, paintings of Portland, in which David and Carlittle discuss the city by the sea, as Longfellow famously called it, has been a visual talisman for a host of artists and from early masters to a remarkable roster of contemporary painters. Subjects include many of the city's signature buildings, including the Custom House and Portland headlight, as well as street scenes, the waterfront, harbor, back bay, and surrounding landscapes. Paintings of Portland features a wide range of motifs in all seasons and represented by an array of styles. So, thank you all again for being here, and I'll hand it over to you guys. Thank you very much, Rachel, and thanks to the library, and thanks to everybody for coming out. We're going to have a fun hour looking at a lot of nice art and having some conversations about it. We're going to go through a lot of images that are in the book, and we'll save time for questions later as well. But I wanted to start at the beginning. Welcome both of you. Thanks for making time for your schedule for coming out. Thanks for being here, Bob. My pleasure. Okay, so let's start at the beginning. What is the inspiration? What was the inspiration for the book? Well, I mean, I think I would start with the Portland show, the biennial that the Green Hut Galleries puts together, and it started with Peggy Golden in 2002, I want to say. Peggy is here. That was actually when we got the contract for the book. That was our first stop. We went right over to Green Hut, sat down, and just said, we'll take one of those, one of those, one of those. So there is quite a big representation from past shows. And then seeing the most recent iteration of that show is like, well, there's volume two on its way. I'm not sure what to add. I would say that the inspiration for me is being a painter that paints in the Portland area and wanting to do a book that really would make Portland shine as a city with a variety of artists that have been affected and have grown to love the city. Yeah. And just to read a quote that we used at the beginning there from Louise Dickinson Rich, who's just a wonderful writer about Maine, she said, Portland, beautiful of situation, the joy of the whole earth surrounded by the islands of Casco Bay, like gems in her crown, is a fitting city to form the front door of Maine. I love that. That's very well put. Absolutely. So as Rachel said in the introduction, this is your third collaboration. How do you divide the work? What roles do each of you play? Well, it's changed from book to book. The art of Katahdin really was David's project, and I came on as editor and did a little bit of writing, but David really did that one. The thing that has happened to me being a painter is that when Carl introduced me to basically publishing and asked me to be a part of these projects, I had already kind of put together an idea for a book on Katahdin. And when that came out, that was a project that resulted from many, many years of gathering stuff, gathering, and so gathering is like the first part of it. And I make lists, so one of the things about the Paintings of Portland book was I made a list. It was two pages long, and it was all the different subjects that I either have painted or that I thought were important to be in the book. So if Carl and I could find images of any of these, we could then check them off, or we could begin to categorize them. And that's why I think there's a great diversity in the book. Also, timelines are really important. And then, of course, Carl knows more of the contemporary artists in Maine than anybody in Maine. Yeah. But I was going to say also it was David's idea to bring in the ringers, so we did solicit ideas from Earl Shettleworth, and he kind of sent us his top 25 from the 19th century. And I'd say what, a dozen of those ended up in the book, maybe a few more. Yeah, and then we also went to the Portland Museum of Art, and we went to the Maine Historical Society as two of the big sources. We also went to the bank collections, because the early bank collections still have some of their paintings in the buildings here in Portland. So that's where we saw the Bernie Langley painting was at the key bank. There's many hundreds of years of paintings of Portland, and it's great to bring the old with the new together. Very interesting to see the similarities over the years. The architecture has changed, but then again it hasn't changed all that much. Right. I mean you have the big fire did a number, and we actually have a painting of the great fire in the book. But yes, it has. Well, let's get to some of the paintings. We should start with the cover, Joel Bab. Yeah, we just thought this was the perfect cover painting. I often think of Monument Square as sort of the heart of Portland. This is where the protests take place. This is where the farmer's market is right now. It is kind of the beating heart, and according to Joel he went up into, I think it was Pierce Atwood's office, and the way he works, he takes photographs, does some sketching, and then produces this wonderful painting. He's also very well known for his paintings of Boston also. I had a chance to spend some time with Joel this summer, late summer I went to his studio to do a profile of him. The MFA in Boston had recently acquired one of his paintings, and I wanted to talk about that. And to look at the science that is involved in making these paintings perfect was astounding to me. He gave me a real education in math as well as art. There is a lot of math in there. Yeah. Incredible. I guess the only thing I would add is that there are several paintings in the book that artists have tried to find high up places in the city from which to work. When you're walking around the city and you're looking, it's a little bit different thing than it is to go up on top of a garage, or go up and get in the offices. One of my favorite views is from the seventh floor of Intermed. It's just extraordinary. I have to go to the doctor, but I don't want to go. I want to look out the window. Joel tells great stories about getting into the buildings of Boston and how he finds the views, and what he has to do in order to get into those offices to take photographs and catch those scenes. He's even hired helicopters to get up over the city. It's interesting how far an artist will go to get the perfect painting. Right. It's a time-honored thing, too, in Maine. I mean, you have Eric Hopkins, you have Evangiket. There's some great aerial artists. Okay, Rachel. Great. All right. This is, let's see, is that Bernard Langley? This is the map, and David is the map guy here. I think in all three of our books, he's wanted us to have some kind of an orientation up front in the book to give people a sense of the lay of the land and take it from there. This happened because in both of the other books, I've gone to the Osher Map Library for help as another place that you check. And I went in and talked to Vince Foster. I think Vince Foster. And he first showed me some old maps, and then he said, you know, I've got this pictorial map that you might like to see. And he brought out two copies of it and spread them out. And it's an enormous map. It's actually not too far off from this in size. It's 55 by 99 inches in size. So it's an enormous fold-out map that was, the originals are hand-colored. And what really struck me about it was that this is a woman cartographer. She has been represented in a big exhibition, Women in Cartography. Catherine Dudley is her name. And it was done in the 20s, which is when the pictorial map movement really became very strong in the United States. And they were going away from the technical maps that showed sort of the importance of being geographically correct and topographically correct, and went to more things that were more fun and that would attract tourists. So this map is partly about tourism. And it was done for the baby, let me see if I get this right. Yes, baby hygiene and child welfare association. And it was to show the cleanliness of Portland. Yeah, it's a very clean city. It is, it is. It also gives you, though, the little insets kind of take you out to the surrounding thing. And that kind of guided us a little bit in the way we envisioned the book. A good scene, Senator, to start the book. Okay, Rachel, thanks. Well, Harrison Bird Brown. So, yeah, 19th century, there are a fair amount of lighthouses in this book. Hopper, Harrison Bird Brown. There's a wonderful one by Andrew Winter, who is better known for his Monhegan paintings. I just have a short thing to read from John Neal. And he wrote this wonderful book in 1874 called Portland Illustrated about Harry Brown. He says about 15 or perhaps 18 years ago, according to my present recollection, and he's a critic, so beware of what he says. I was invited into a painter's workshop on Exchange Street opposite my office to look at a head just turned off by Harry Brown, a young man who at best only claimed to be a painter of signs, banners, et cetera, et cetera, in full practice. The head was a wretched affair, and I lost no time in advising him to give up the idea of portraiture. But while talking with him, my attention happened to be attracted by a rough landscape sketch hung in the shadow. It was really rich, clever, and full of promise. When I found that this was his work, thrown off in the heat and hurry of sudden inspiration, while wandering by himself along the seashore and among the outworks of the wilderness, I urged him with all earnestness to try his hand at landscape, see views, et cetera, to begin at once and to lose no time. The influence of critics, Bob. I believe he was the first critic in Maine. He was, and he's actually considered among the first American art critics. And he's buried in Western Cemetery, if you want to go see his monument. Excellent. Okay, Rachel, the Przomskut River looking toward Blackstrap, Charles Kimball. So again, I have a little short thing to read on Kimball, who's buried in Evergreen Cemetery, one of the people on the art tours that I give there. And this is from John Calvin Stevens from an article he wrote, in which he talks about Kimball as an artist. Of a later period was Charles Frederick Kimball, a local artist who in his day was ranked high as a landscape painter. Actually, this is the introduction. John Calvin Stevens, in his article, An Appreciation of Maine's Greatest Landscape Painter, which appeared in Pine Tree Magazine, April 1906, wrote of Kimball's work, quote, The rugged strength of northern New England scenery, when it is flooded with a splendor of the summer sunshine and glowing with the rich colors characteristic of these latitudes, has rarely found so true an interpreter as was Charles Frederick Kimball, Maine's greatest landscape painter. His pictures were almost entirely of the summertime, and he dearly loved the full rich greens of June. Occasionally, a spring landscape made a subject for his brushes, and whatever he did received the most intelligent and painstaking treatment he was capable of. He aimed to paint the weather and to reproduce the very atmosphere and all the effects of light and shade which seemed to him so beautiful. And then he just says that among Kimball's most noted pictures was the falls at Stroudwater, which is the subject of this painting. And I might just add that he was also apparently a master cabinet maker and also a member of this group called the Brushons. And also along with John Calvin Stevens, critical to the formation of the Portland Society of Art. Which led to the museum, became the museum, correct. Okay, next question, please. John Calvin Stevens, two images by someone we know more as an architect. Well, as you know, Stevens was best known as an architect, but anybody who went to see that show that was put up at the University of New England Gallery a couple of years ago was a real eye-opener. I mean, he was a master painter. And again, a member of this group called the Brushons that were kind of a group of plein air painters that set out to join together and paint together in different places. Is it a casual group of friends? Yes, yeah. The Brushons, B-R-U-S-H-U-N-S. Yeah, B-R-U-S-H apostrophe, U-N-S. The Brushons. The Brushons are coming, the Brushons are coming. So I have a small piece to read written by Earl Shettleworth from his beautiful catalogue that he did for the show at the University of New England. At the peak of his architectural career in his early fifties, Stevens was ready to develop his talent as a marine and landscape painter, and he did so with a passion. Leaving his wife and children to attend church, Stevens would set out each Sunday morning with his friends to practice his own religion painting. As a reporter wrote of him in 1917, his favorite pastime is to get into a suit of old clothes, pull a soft hat down over his eyes, and tramp over the cape, stopping wherever he finds one of those rugged bits of scenery which have made our coast famous. Stevens' 1914 tongue-in-cheek poem about the Brushons describes his fellow artist as well as himself. And it's just a short verse. He lugs a canvas, easel, too, some brushes and a box. He puts his easel up and then he tries to paint the rocks. Nice poetic flow there. This is fascinating. There's lots to talk about here. Yes. Well, when we were putting the final design of the book together, we wanted to have these two together, and it didn't work out, but it's still referenced in the text. But on the left is Xanthe Smith paintings of these crazy razzle-dazzle warships during World War I. And on the right, of course, is the Sprague oil tanks designed by the Venezuelan artist Jamie Gilley. And it was just, we just made this visual connection, the abstraction here. The point of these ships was that at a distance, because of the designs on them, it would be hard to tell what they were or what was going on. Am I representing that right? Yes. The idea behind it was to be unable to tell, first of all, which was the front and back of the boat, and which way it was moving, because the lines, not on this particular one, but if you look at some of the diagrams of the boats that were built, the geometric lines did not come together. They actually were offset. So it created a three-dimensional distortion looking from a distance of what you were looking at. So you couldn't really tell what form the boat had. It could be completely, and they said there was mixed success with it, but they did. Many, many boats were painted. It's a great observation to find those similarities in color and shape. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. All right, this is the Bernard Langley. Yeah, well, David found this one. As he mentioned, this is in the key bank here on Monument Square. I think you were just walking in there. And actually, we don't know the backstory on this. We're not really sure. I think we think it was a commission in the 70s, because it's a little bit unusual for Langley to do something like this. But it's just wonderful. It's a double spread, almost like the centerfold of the book. And you'll see a lot of the landmarks, some of which have changed over the years. The thing about looking at it is that it's very hard to tell. It looks like it might be a flat painting, but it's incredibly three-dimensional. So you've got things that have been nailed on, glued on, hammered, just whatever he did. He put stuff in, and there's a lot of art references in it. I think Tom Cruddy's gallery is in it. Yeah, Baradoff is in there. Baradoff is in there. So if you haven't seen it, it's enormous. I think it's five panels. You could just walk over after this talk. Just like a mob scene. Sorry, that's the wrong one to use that term. But it is in the tradition of Langley, and that it is a constructed piece with wood and mixed media. Yeah. You're right in terms of the commission. This is unlike what he would typically do, but it would make sense. Yeah, we did. We got the date because in the background of a photo of Langley in a studio, you can see it. And it was around the early 70s, I think, which is where we estimated it. I see he has the Longfellow statue. Yeah. And a basketball player, I guess. I'm not sure of the significance of that. And a golfer on the Eastern prom. Is that right? Yeah. Yes. It's a golfer. Yeah. It's pretty wild. It is pretty wild. Many people probably haven't seen that. Okay, this is another painting, Alfred Chadborne, a great story behind that as well. This is a landmark for many years. Yeah. And this is one of these things where David the Sleuth comes to the fore there. We really wanted to know where this was. And you went through many different sources. I asked many, many different people about this, particularly people in the car repair business. And nobody knew. So I ended up going to Springer on Forest Avenue, which has the... I think they do things like struts and springs and stuff like that. And I showed the picture of this to the fellow that was there. And I said, I'm not sure this looks like it was in Portland. It says, welcome to Portland is the title. Do you have any memory of where it was? And he looked at it and he said, let me show it to my manager. And then the manager looked at it and he went, you know, I think you need to go talk to Mary. And Mary worked on... I think her name was Mary. She works over on Fox Street. And it's a company that leases buses. It's as you turn the first left-hand turn. It's right there on the left. So I went in with this picture and I had to wait because she was busy with someone. Then I got in to see her and I showed her this and she went, oh my God. She said, I worked there as a young girl. Sure, I know exactly where that is. And she went and she said, come on, I'll show you. And we walked out because this was a trailer and you couldn't see out. We went around the building and she pointed to the next building over and said, that's where it was right there. And she said, my dad owned the business and I've got black and white photographs so I can show you what it looked like. And so I got the whole story there and then she said, I've got a surprise for you. I want you to come around the corner and I'll show you the tow truck, which has been totally restored. And it was all protected with a tarp and everything over it. And she showed it to me. It was just beautiful to see it from the time period. So this is the Exit 7 truck stop, as it says there. And I did want to mention it. Chad Bourne is just a wonderful painter. We have a couple of other paintings of his in the book. He lived eventually in Yarmouth. He's sort of one of their wonderful local painters, but just had a wonderful way of capturing these different scenes. And one last thing. If you haven't been to see the show that's in Yarmouth at the Frame Shopping Gallery on Route 1, it's a show to do with this book, Paintings of Portland. And there are two magnificent chip Chad Bournes that were borrowed for the show. So if you have a chance, take a peek at them. They're really lovely. Yes, and Chad Bourne has had a recent show in Yarmouth, I believe last year or the year before? Yeah, and then had a show at the Gunquit Museum, too, a couple of years ago. Next one, Rachel, thanks. Paul Black, the late great Paul Black. Yeah, he has the most paintings in the book of any single artist. He's one of these artists of many in the book who are really committed to painting the city, who are clearly in love with the city in all seasons. And each one of these has a little story. Tommy's Park with the hot dog stand. David actually figured out what kind of boats those were and the fleet there, the wonderful winter thing. And I have a story. I was judging a poetry out loud contest with Monica Wood, the novelist. And I was telling her about this book. And she said, are you going to have Paul Black? And I said, yeah. And she just made a motion like tapping her heart. This was someone very special to her. Paul showed, and I believe his art is still shown annually, especially some of these winter scenes at galleries in Portland. A very enduring artist. Obviously widely loved for a very long time. There are, I think there are eight paintings in the Yarmouth Show by Paul Black that were picked out by Beth Newman, the owner. My feeling about Paul was that being, myself being a landscape painter in my background, was that he is, he's one of the artists who was able to create the mood in his paintings of Portland that we think of at different seasons of the year. And his atmospheric effects of bringing in his kind of, I think it's impressionist skies, impressionist atmosphere over the city in different ways. It's truly a unique, there's nobody that really paints like that. I paint landscape in the city and around the city, but I always admired Paul's work and was very happy that I met him before he passed away and then got a chance to go in later and visit in his studio and see all the beautiful works that he's made. He's also in the Art of Acadia book. He would come up every summer and paint, particularly he loved the Astakoo Gardens right across the street from the Astakoo Inn. And Rita Redfield, who's a dealer and was a dealer in Northeast Harbor, represented his MDI work. And she said she could tell the date of the pieces because there was one Alberta spruce that he painted every year and it just got larger and larger and larger. And it's like, you know, real commitment to, you know. Here we have Robert Solitaire, Gray Street View, Portland, Maine. Beautiful painting. Yeah, this one had such a wonderful, I was thinking it was wonderful that the artist who painted this, his name was Solitaire. There's something sort of quiet and sort of a side street, you know, this wonderful woman on her bicycle. He was, like Paul Black, devoted to the city. He painted all, there's another painting in the book of the Franklin Arterial. He really painted all around. He loves city views. Did you ever meet him? I have met him, yep, I did. And just very short conversations, he almost always came to the previews of Baradoff to check out La Caixion and see who's doing what. But I really liked his work. It's slightly academic and yet it's beautifully done as if there's a great deal of love in the work, I think. And I think it shows in the various, even in his industrial scenes, there's a tenderness, believe it or not. So Alice and Rector, yeah. She's a wonderful artist. She lives in Monroe, Maine and I want to say five or six years ago, maybe even longer now, she embarked on a whole series of paintings of libraries in Maine, outside and inside. These are two of them. Of course, the Glickman looking out at the back bay and then the original Portland Public Library on the right, the Baxter Library, now is where Via is, the ad agency. Yeah. But just for me, it's just a wonderful sense of light here. Particularly in this one, you can't really see it that well, but there's this wonderful shadow late afternoon, I suppose, kind of coming across the facade of the library. The only thing I was going to say was that the Glickman library became my refuge from home in terms of writing. I couldn't seem to write and get into my head and spread out the way I could in the seventh floor, a great reading room at the Glickman. And I would get there when they opened, first thing in the morning, something like 745, to be no one there. And I would pick a desk that I could basically spread out and take two or three chairs. And so a lot of the chapters in the, all of the chapters in the Katahdin book were written there. And right now, if I could put a pitch in for this, there are at least three great shows up there. There's a show about immigrants from, going to an island in Greece called Iksnos. I think it is photographs and other works on paper. And then there's the Margo Halverson photo, which is part of the main museum of photographic arts. That's on the sixth floor, I think. And then there's the book arts group that Rebecca Goodale runs. And so it's become really a central art place in the city. No question about it. There's a lot going into the library all the time. I was just at the Margo Halverson show last week, and I'm going to be writing about that. And it is an interesting space. It's not the best gallery space, but there's a room for a lot in that building. And it is surprising how much happens there that may not be on your top of mind. It's a great venue to keep in mind, almost always an art show of quite good quality. Bob, correct me if I'm wrong. If anyone in the audience knows. I think the Baxter Library was designed by John Calvin Stevens. Am I right? Any nods? Anybody know? Anyway, I think it is. I don't know that. That wouldn't surprise me. The Baxter building is important to me personally. My mom was a librarian at Portland School of Art, before it became Main College of Art. And her office was in that building. And when I lived in the Midwest, whenever I'd come back to Portland, that was the first place I would go. Get off the plane and go see my mom. That is so cool. Great building. Also, Carl, coincidentally, the Baxter building was built on the site that was occupied by the Russians. The Russians had a little bungalow. And then it was moved to Harrison Brown's studio when it had to be taken down because the library took it over. And then eventually they convinced Margaret Musty Sweatt to give her house and leave her house as the new building. So their first show was in 1911 there. And David and I break into, build me a bungalow? No, sorry. You only get these chances. You don't get these chances that often. So Tina Ingraham, painter from Bath, and what I love about her, she's been obsessing with this particular view. She's done it, I want to say, more than 40 times of the Custom House wharf in all seasons, all weather. She has said that she loves just the endurance of it. And I think actually when we were talking, when we talked, Bob, when the book first came out, we talked about this idea of preserving the city and how the painters had a role in that. And so by painting it over and over again, it's almost like Tina's making an argument for, let's keep part of this thing. With the cruise ships looming and stuff like that, let's have this place, special place to go to and look at. One of the things this book does exceptionally well is preserve that sense of time. And as we said at the beginning, it also shows a little bit how Portland has evolved and what we're hanging onto and why that's important. There are a lot of connections among these paintings and among these artists over hundreds of years. And that continuum is a big part of the main art story. And I love that it's so present in this book. The continuing narrative. Like you have Mildred Burridge doing a painting down on the docks. Marsha Donahue doing a painting looking down toward the wharf. And actually she has one that's on the docks. But there's kind of that line at Commercial Street where most people stay on there. They don't kind of go and drift. But if you start to drift down onto the different wharves, there's just amazing things you can see in terms of people at work and what they're doing to make a living. Very different. Alice Spencer. Yeah, so we really like to push the envelope with imagery. And this one is probably the most abstract piece. But the story behind this is that Alice was on the Portland Public Art Committee and they would hold their meetings in the planning office at City Hall. And there would be all of these zoning maps on the wall around her. And right about that same time, she was also starting to get very interested in textiles, textile designs. And those two things kind of came together. She did a whole series of these. And this is one that came from one of the Portland shows at Greenhut. It's just wonderfully inventive. It represents Portland, but in a way that's very tangential. And it says something about where artists go for inspiration, that she could find something in a zoning map that would make her look deeper. And you know that Alice has gone on. She helped launch Tempo Art, which does these pop-up shows around the city. And she's really committed to public art and making it happen. He also was in the Katahdin book and did a whole series of watercolor studies of Mount Katahdin. Are there artists who are in all three of your books? I'm sure there are, but... It's Guy. I'd have to check that out, I think. Perhaps. John Swan, Summertime Scarborough Beach. Can you tell me about that? I went to visit with John at his house and got some of the history of the house. As I said before, I do the art tours in Evergreen Cemetery. And on our second tour, we visit the grave of Walter Griffin and his father, Edward Souther Griffin, who did down here the fireman in front of the fire station and also did the statue of Jacob Winslow in the cemetery. And there are two parts to this. Just briefly, I got a chance to go and see this house belonged to Walter Griffin. And so I found out by looking in the house and talking with John and then seeing the barn where his studio was that there was a really interesting article that Colin Sargent had written years ago back when he was able to... Back in the 70s, it might have been in Down East Magazine. And it was about the sale of all the effects that Walter Griffin left behind, his steamer trunks because he traveled to Europe and lived over there for over 10 years. There were paintings for sale, his studio equipment, his props. It ended up being a sale with, I think it was like $175,000 was raised, I guess, for the family. And it's a wonderful article about the discovery of this artist that Colin Sargent made. He became very excited. And you can tell in the article, it's beautifully written. The other side of this is that one of my favorite things to do in Maine is to body surf at Scarborough Beach. So when I had a choice, I could have done one of the paintings that John Swan did of Stroudwater and instead I chose the Walter Griffin painting of Stroudwater for the book. But I wanted to show that there are beaches and it's part of our life in Portland. It's part of what attracts us to living here. Okay. And here we got some baseball. Go Red Sox. Yeah, so this is obviously our home team, the Seedogs, Portland Seedogs. This is an artist, Nancy Morgan Barnes, who lives in Searsport. And again, we wanted to represent the city and all its vibrancy and all the things that are going on. And it was kind of wonderful because I ended up sending a copy of the book to a person at the Seedogs organization and pointed out that we had a painting in the book. And he invited David and I to throw out the first pitch. And the night that we threw out the first pitch, E-Rod pitched to Christian Vasquez. And of course, they learned something from our pitching and it clearly passed on. And today there's a duck parade. Why weren't we invited? I don't know. Well, we were doing this. We had a prior commitment. Yeah, exactly. Friar commitment. How did you do in the first pitch? Well, when Carl got up to pitch, he was just starting to go into his motion when this picture came on the screen. I said, Carl, Carl, wait, wait, you've got to see this because he wanted to see what they were going to do. So he turned around and there was the picture. Then he went in through his pitch. I think it was a little high and outside. It was high and outside, yeah. And my pitch was low and in the dirt in front of the pitch. So you make a good team. You balance each other out. Exactly, exactly. I would be very nervous doing that. Right. Yeah. All right. Okay. Jessica Gandolf, Evergreen Cemetery. One of the things, here I'm slightly biased, I wear a hat because I've been on the board of the Friends of Evergreen Cemetery for so many years and have tried to help them and eventually became a history docent. And I love the organization. I love the cemetery. I live right next door on Brentwood Street and I've painted the cemetery. And so I thought that if we could find any images of Evergreen, it would be quite wonderful. Trying to remember what you wanted me to mention about Evergreen. Do you remember? Didn't she say there's something coming up there that people should know about? Yes. I was going to mention just that one of the things that the Friends does every year now is we do a day of remembrance. And it's going to happen this Sunday at five o'clock in the chapel. If any of you would like to come and remember someone you've lost this year or someone you've lost in the past, it's a very solemn occasion. It's candlelight. It's lovely. It's about 40 minutes. Five o'clock at the chapel, the Wild Memorial Chapel in Evergreen. Welcome to come. And I might mention that, you know, when we did this book and with our previous projects too, we often asked the artist to give us a little bit of background when they're sending in their image. And Jessica said she walks in Evergreen quite a bit. It's one of her places to go to. And she said her all-time favorite epitaph is she hath done what she could. It's like that, yeah. Very well said. Okay. All right. Karen, Marie, Michelle, who I believe is in the audience. There she is all the way to the back. Hey. Two paintings. The Down Easter and Got Paint. Yeah. Great stories of both. When I solicited Karen for images, she sent me quite a few. They're just, they're full of color. And going through it, David and I settled on these two as wonderfully representative of two different subjects. One being the Amtrak Down Easter coming in from the bottom there. And then this, the Arts and Supply, Arts and Supply. Arts and Crafts. Yeah. One of the things that I had thought about was the contrast and having the Down Easter coming in. One of the things that, and I'll try to remember this, but first thing is that when you take the Down Easter South, you go right by those ghillie tanks, those ghillie painted tanks. So you get a chance to see the designs from like 30 feet away. It's like right in your face. It's really quite extraordinary. But I also was thinking about Stephen Netnier's painting of Union Station and how this is the new transportation coming back. So you have, in a way in the book, you have a little bit of the artist's interpretation of the rise and fall of the train system in Maine, and particularly in Portland where it got to a height and then it kind of went away. And we have the freight trains, but now we have the Down Easter that's come back that can take us down to Boston and beyond. The store, the store has been my source for canvases and paints for ever since I moved to Portland. Larry Adlerstein became a very close friend, and I would go in and look at the latest colors that he had in and get drawing materials. You can get anything you want there. And I think that in some ways this is one of the anchors of the art scene in Portland. So putting it in the book is extraordinary, I think. And I think that her painting is beautiful. It's the back of it, but it's where everyone parks to go in. It's really the entrance. And Karen titled it Got Paint. Yes, right. A little bit of humor. Certainly one of the most recognizable images in the book. David, have you ever painted that building as a subject? Yeah. All right. So this is the final pairing. And we picked these two out just to show the evolution of landscape painting in the city. And on the left is Mary Longfellow's view. And on the right is Catherine Bradford, a contemporary painter. And I just think it does a lovely job of covering that. And you can't see it here, but this is actually partially a collage. Catherine Bradford took a cut something out of an image of Portland and sort of embedded it in the painting. And then she put in all these wonderful flying women, flying naked women over the city. Which is just, you know... So Catherine. Yeah, so Catherine. Yeah. Yep. Do you know the years of these paintings? Not too much. I want to say the Longfellow is maybe 19... She lived to 45, so maybe 1920 or something. And Catherine's just maybe 2000. A little earlier in 1940. Yeah. She was Longfellow's niece. His niece. His niece. Yeah. A large body of her work is in the Craigie House in Massachusetts, near Cambridge. And I think that was Longfellow's home there. And it was also... It had something to do, I think, also with the Revolutionary War. But I think Longfellow, even though there are... I think there are markers. There are mausoleums that are up in Western Cemetery for the Longfellow family. I think his particular grave, I may be wrong, is in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Correct. She is... She's on our third tour in Evergreen Cemetery. She's down in Evergreen Cemetery as you go down toward the ponds. Her grave site is there. And it was wonderful to discover her and then to find out that there were many, many examples of her paintings available to show people on the tour. I just love the romanticism of that. I mean, it looks like Venice or something. Absolutely right. That's our Portland. And that's our Portland too. That absolutely evokes Venice for me. No question about it. Those are our slides, but we do have one quote unquote live painting here on the easel. Dave, do you want to talk about that? Sure. That's what's in store for us in the next couple of months. It's in the book. And I wanted to... There aren't many snow scenes in the book, so I wanted to put in two snow scenes. And this one was painted in my studio in 2001. So that's 17 years ago. And it was called... It's called March Blizzard. And it was snowing. It was a day we had over two feet of snow. And I was up in the studio working. And I was just mesmerized by the snow coming down so hard. I decided to lower my easel down and pull a chair over and look out the window at my neighbor's garage and the house behind and see if I could paint it. So it's a painting I've held on to because it's very special to me. I won't sell it. But I wanted to put it in the book. So I thought today with a little show and tell I might have the opportunity to share it with you all. And I think one of the things about the book is that we... There are neighborhoods represented. The woman on the bicycle on Gray Street and Romosco Street. And so we tried to get... There's a lot of neighborhoods in Portland, but we tried to have those kind of scenes, the local scenes, the churches, the corner lot, the view outside your studio in March Blizzard. The book feels very alive because it's very relevant and tangible. These are scenes we know we can go to. It's one of the great things about art in Maine. The sites where people have painted for hundreds of years don't go away and we can go and experience them. This book really brings it home at the city level. Many of these scenes are part of our lives every day. So you've done a few books together now. What are you going to do next? Well, we've got to go back to the therapist first. We've got to straighten things out between us. Yeah. That would be Mickey and Peggy. No, we don't have a current... We don't have a next project planned yet, but things are percolating. I know you've got some projects that you're involved in. I'm working on one project for the city that's to create a Baxter family trail that starts at the parking lot at Haniford and goes around Back Cove and up to the Baxter Memorial, which most people that I know of have never even been there to look at it, to really look at it and enjoy it. And then it goes up Woodford Street and crosses Forest Avenue and then works its way over to Baxter Woods. And then it goes up through Baxter Woods and crosses Stevens Avenue and goes to the monument in Evergreen Cemetery. And then it continues on to the Brentwood Gate, the back end of the cemetery. And there'll be a sign there that tells you if you'd like to continue on to Baxter Pines. There's going to be seven signs and I've written the signage for three of them. And the one that was actually, all three of them were very exciting to find out about the history of the memorial. So the sign that I've written in rough draft form so far is about the memorial and the history of it. The second one is about the naming of the streets after his children, after James Finney Baxter's children and how that came about in terms of the subdivisions in the area that were related to land that Baxter owned in the late 1890s, 1895 is when it started. So I got diagrams from the city that helped me write that text. And then the third one is about the history of the actual monument in Evergreen, which James Finney Baxter commissioned to be built based on a very similar monument that's in Edinburgh, in the cemetery in Edinburgh, way up on the hill on the city, on the outskirts of the city. And it's the tomb of Stugold Stewart, a Scottish philanthropist, a Scottish historian. Doesn't that sound like Baxter? Anyway, he was very, very, he saw this and he went, God, this is a beautiful monument. So it's not an exact reproduction, but it's very close in style. And I found out a lot about this from one of our docents about the westerly granite that came that has kind of a blue mica in it. It has a sparkle to it and how it was brought into the cemetery from the train tracks, the different pieces. It's an extraordinarily big, heavy monument in many pieces. And the year it was ordered and all different kinds of things. And you can see in there the three little sarcophagus that are the three girls that died in the Baxter family that died very young. I think it's very fitting that on Halloween we've got a lot of cemetery stuff going on here. I mean, I just have to throw that in, you know. So I agree. Yeah. I have one thing I want to read. Go for it. This is toward the end of our, I'm not sure how much longer we're going to go, but this is a quote from the preface of an exhibition catalogue of a show at the Portland Museum of Art in 1970. The title of the show was A Century of Portland Painters, 1820 to 1920. This is the quote. And it was written by, I can't remember that one lady is Catherine Woodman and I can't remember the other lady's name, but they worked together to curate the show. Quote, certain cities are beloved by painters there is in them a spirit of place that provides ardor for life, a deep nourishment of the heart and painter's studios everywhere. To borrow the curator's conclusion, our new book, Paintings of Portland, quote, presents the accomplishments of Portland painters and provides an opportunity to reflect upon what lasting meaning the Portland painters may have as a group of painters joined by geographical circumstance or possibly as individual painters in the mainstream of American art. I'll send. And on that note, we definitely have time for some questions, so we would love to hear from you folks. Yes, I'll go back here. The Baxter building was in fact designed by Francis Fassett. Thank you. Not by John Cowell Stevens, but just continuing on the ghoulish theme of cemeteries. While not a painter, one of Portland's most prolific artists, Benjamin Paul Acres, is also buried in every green cemetery. It was his object, Crow Lyra, which was the first acquisition of the Portland Society of Art, just as a little facade. Right. And it would be a book on sculptures of Portland. That's our next quote. Score. Yeah. Okay. Other questions. Certainly there must be some. Well, since there aren't any, I wanted to do a shout out for an event happening this Saturday, the TEDxDirigo taking place. One of our colleagues, Lillia DeAndrade, is doing a presentation. It's at Innovation Hall at UNA starting at noon. And also, if you haven't done it already, obviously, vote. That's right. That's right. Oh, and by the book. Yeah. By the book. Yes. Here we go. Sorry. This isn't so much a question as a pitch for the book. My middle son was getting married this fall. And I went to the bookstore to find a book to give my soon-to-be in-laws from Texas that would give them a feel for what they were now connected to. And here was this marvelous book that just shines with the heart of Portland. It also happens to include our dear friend David Campbell's paintings. And my son, who's getting married, happened to be a model in one of her paintings. So I thought, you know, if I had walked into the bookstore and said, I like a painting of Portland done by a friend with my son. Wow. It just kicked me out. But it turned out to be one of the truths. So it's just a... It's a real treasure. And I'm glad you guys went through all the work of putting it together. Thank you very much. And thank you for sharing that story. That illustrates the connectedness of the arts in Maine. Really, everybody somehow is related. That is so cool. Any other questions? I just want to... Yes, here we go. Just a comment. I'm thinking of the painting of the war. And you were saying that artists are helping us preserve them. Is there any movement among artists here to try to do something to stop the public of things going on? That's a really good question. I mean, I think that they certainly... I don't know if there's a movement, but certainly they have spoken. Yeah, I don't know either. What did you say? We have started now. I will say that a lot of artists have had conversations about what's going on with the city in terms of development and architecture, but specifically also about the working waterfront. And there is a large group of photographers actively working on the waterfront every day to make sure that what we have now is at least preserved through their work, but they're also doing a lot of advocacy work to ensure that further development is done with aesthetic values in mind. So it may not be happening in a formal way, but it certainly is happening informal. And artists are leading that conversation about what our city is going to look like in the future. No question about it. All right. Thank you for that question. Anybody else? Well, I want to thank everybody for coming out. It's great to have a space like this. This is a great opportunity also to recognize the library. Recently won a Portland Buy Local Award for its work in the community. Congratulations to the library for the good work. Thanks to Carl and David for sharing your stories. Thanks, Bob. And your work. And thanks to everybody for coming out. Thank you to the rest of Halloween.