Form Light and Spirit
Recent Paintings of Mount Desert Island by Ernest McMullen
Essay by John Wilmerding

Ernest McMullen may rightfully deserve the designation of Painter Laureate of Mount Desert. He is of course one of a number of accomplished and distinguished contemporary artists painting the island and its environs, perhaps most notably Joellyn Duesberry and Richard Estes, though they have been mainly periodic or seasonal residents. For more than three decades McMullen has lived and worked here full-time, and his views have been distinctive in capturing the familiar geology and panoramas of the area, not just in changing conditions of light or weather but in all the different seasons of the year. His paintings embrace strong visual combinations of striated granite ledges, popplestone beaches, or light dappled water surfaces with varied skies of fair weather clouds, coming or departing showers, or the pale milky light of an early morning.  He has been sensitive to the changing angles of sunlight we experience at this latitude, from the cooler palette of spring and broad glare of summer to the sharper reflections of autumn and cold intensity of midday light in winter.

McMullen's compositions tend to make use of strong foregrounds, often of massive rocky passages, themselves punctuated with pools of tidal water, pockets of snow, shallow water or exposed pebbles from the receding tide. Alternatively, he establishes our vantage point in a dense forest, sunny meadow, or curving mountain summit. These landscape platforms then unusually move our eyes to a contrasting zone of water, whether glassy and reflective, opaque, or rippled by air or washing ashore. The horizon in turn is filled with the sloping contours of familiar mountain profiles, offshore islands, or distant harbor shorelines. Following in the long tradition of artists painting the Mount Desert region before him, McMullen has taken advantage of a geography which varies extensively from the sublime to the beautiful, that is, from the dramatic shoreline juxtapositions of rock and water and the spectacular panoramas from elevated heights to the softer and more intimate scale of inland meadows and protected coves. As residents well know and visitors soon experience, Mount Desert is a place of both charm and awe, and this artist has produced a body of work which explores the full range of that emotional spectrum.

As is now well known, American artists have flourished on Mount Desert Island for more than a century and a half. The island today and its surrounding communities support countless numbers of painters, sculptors, draftsmen, photographers, and crafts artisans, many of whom draw direct inspiration from elements of the environment. Because of the special features of the local geology, its  history and preservation, and because of the changeable character of the climate throughout the seasons, Mount Desert has offered artists of almost every stylistic interest rich visual resources to depict. This in part explains why the region has served the successive needs of painters from the early nineteenth century to modern times, from the romantic exaggerations of the first visitors, through the contemplative clarities of the luminists and the celebratory colors of impressionists to the abstracted fragmentations of many modernists. McMullen firmly takes his place within this tradition, well aware himself of the area's art history and of examples by admired predecessors working at specific sites.

Among the significant realists active here just before McMullen were Ogden Pleissner and Allen Blagden, and before them in the first half of the twentieth cen-tury were Marsden Hartley and John Marin. At the  end of the nineteenth century most prominent were such figures as John La Farge and Childe Hassam. But it is the crowd of Hudson River School artists and their solid realism recording the wonders of American wilderness landscape through the middle decades of  the nineteenth century to whom McMullen's art most particularly looks. Among the first generation in the 1840s were Alvan Fisher, Thomas Doughty, and Thomas Cole, who together painted intimate shoreline views, broader coastal panoramas, and prospects from various mountain summits. Next came Fitz H. Lane during the early 1850s, who favored sketching the shore from the water and discovered the spacious expanses of the Maine skies during summer months. He would give us some of the first pure luminist scenes, of the coast at dawn or dusk and harbors bathed in the blue glare of midday sunlight or the pink gradations of descending twilight. Throughout the same decade Frederic Church returned repeatedly to the area—perhaps the finest artist technically of his generation—and in hundreds of drawings, oil sketches and finished oils recorded the island's prominent headlands as well as increasingly intense sunset dramas. Finally, in 1859 William Stanley Haseltine arrived and executed a suite of powerful ink wash drawings concentrating on some of the major rock outcroppings around the island, such as Eagle Cliff on Somes Sound, Otter Cliffs, Thunder Hole, and Great Head. We can see echoes of all these artists reinterpreted in McMullen's canvases: the poetic illuminations of Lane, Church's vistas, and Haseltine's bold geology.

Indeed, McMullen has painted views from Somes Landing, where Thomas Cole and Fitz H. Lane made sketches for paintings in the mid-nineteenth century. His view  of the Porcupine Islands from Cadillac Mountain is a slightly more elevated version of ones drawn by Cole and William Stanley Haseltine. Other summit vistas have clear echoes of Frederic Church's panoramas. McMullen has likewise been drawn to the Otter Cliffs area of the Ocean Drive coastline, again following in the footsteps of his many predecessors. Yet, as might be expected with any good realist then or now, nature  is not just for slavish recording. If we were to compare either the best work of nineteenth century visitors or McMullen's canvases today with the actual sites, we would immediately see the artist's manipulations and creative modifications. The view would be clearly recognizable, but space might be telescoped or expanded, forms moved slightly or contours adjusted, all towards pictorial organization, visual balance or dynamism. These are the transformative powers of art, and McMullen's realism knows how to tease out such expressive subtleties.

To this end it is worth noting some of his working procedures and techniques. Like his friend and colleague Richard Estes, McMullen makes use of photographs as preparatory sketches and impressions of a site's primary features. He will photograph with a digital camera different parts and angles of a view as well as many of its components, and then collage the prints into a tentative whole. This in turn becomes the basis for a drawing on a board or canvas. Having been trained in  a classical academic manner, and admiring many of the old masters of the Renaissance and Baroque periods as he does, McMullen next blocks in a relatively dark monochromatic background. This serves as a base for subsequent, successively lighter layers of paint, first for the major forms and then for increasingly precise details. Gradually he moves from more opaque passages to transparent glazes, finishing with the lightest and sharpest passages.

McMullen likes to think of his finished work as having partial analogies to classical music, as he strives for similar effects of visual harmonies, rhythms, balances, and unities. Through recording the grandeur of nature in Maine, he also hopes to suggest an emotional contact, whether of awe in the presence of meteorological forces or of spiritual contemplativeness suggested by the delicacies of tinted light and radiant spaces. Well aware of the environmental erosions encroaching on this landscape, and the vulgarities of civilization challenging this once pure wilderness, McMullen at once records this favored scenery and tries to convey on a deeper expressive level its enduring and uplifting aesthetic values. In doing so, he honors past artistic tradition while making it new, personal, and contemporary.

John Wilmerding
Sarofim Professor of American Art, Princeton University and Visiting Curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Trustee, College of the Atlantic.

Captions:
Bracy Cove, October, 2004, oilonpanel, 25" by 18"
Eagle Lake, 2005, oil on panel, 34" by 36"
Southeast View from Wonderland, 2004, oil on panel, 15" by 21"
View from Flying Mountain, 2004, oil on canvas, 30" by 44"
Base of Otter Cliffs, 2004,oil on panel, 22" by 30"