“To me, making art is the hardest kind of work,” said Deer Isle artist Larry Moffet, and that’s saying something because the 56-year-old Moffet earns his living as a lobsterman and boatbuilder. He works in oils, watercolors, pastels, woodcuts, cut paper and silver, has taught paper-cutting and has exhibited his work at Deer Isle’s Turtle Gallery, the Penobscot Marine Museum and the White House among other venues. “Very seldom do I make money at making art,” he said. “I have a rule of thumb: the amount of money made from art for a year equals the amount of money made from lobster hauled for one day.”
With both daughters in college, he spent this past winter building boats, something he’s done on and off since moving to Deer Isle from New Jersey at age 22. He had an all-timer of a job: the care of the elderly man who owned the house he and his family now live in. In return for cooking two meals a day and keeping the house clean, the young artist got room and board, a car in his name, and time to paint.
He painted for a couple of weeks and then got sidetracked by meeting the now-legendary boatbuilder Arno Day, who was building a 36-foot lobster boat in a shop right down the road. Moffet is passionate about passing on the art of wooden boatbuilding, a trade he thinks is becoming rapidly lost.
In fact, he’s passionate about just about everything he does, according to friend and artist Holly Mead. “He’s the most passionate person I’ve ever met,” she said. “He’s passionate about his painting, his skiing – cross-country and telemark downhill – his fishing, his family. He just takes it to the height. That’s what is so unique about him.”
Castine artist and ship model maker John Gardner said “He skis for days on end. He rides his bicycle along the shore on ice and takes great pride in doing it. He just digs life.”
Moffet’s paper cuts show that love of life. He has such a sure hand, the lines of his cuts flow. He folds paper several ways, then cuts his pattern through. He made a birthday card for a friend who bicycles up Cadillac Mountain. The card consists of two cutouts of a bicycle on either side of the central mountain and the road winding to the top. Other cutouts feature snowflakes, but not your usual snowflake. “It’s one thing to make a snowflake,” he said, then getting into the geometry and mathematics of art and nature: “but [it’s] another to follow the crystal structure of the water molecule when it freezes. There are six points to a snowflake, and every one has these twelve right triangles that make up the shape and form of the snowflake.” Another captivating cutout illustrates his imagination, moving from the structure of a snowflake to an intricate snowflake-like cutout of fishermen and fish, from king cod to the lowly sculpin.
He likes to make useful items and to use his art for a good cause. For years he’s designed the tee shirts, using paper cuts, for the Island Fishermen’s Wives Association, which they sell on Fishermen’s Day. He said, “Wherever I go now, I can be at a school board meeting and somebody can be really angry at me, and they don’t realize they’re wearing a piece of my artwork.”
But most of all this tall, rangy man who bears a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln minus the bruised, haunted eyes (or perhaps more like Raymond Massey playing Lincoln) loves mountains. He loves to look at mountains, to draw, paint, and carve mountains, and he loves to climb mountains. And of all the mountains he’s climbed and painted, the one he loves best – you might even say the one that fascinates him to the point of obsession – is Katahdin.
Moffet knows the each peak, each facet of the mountain intimately. He can’t get enough of it. His living room is filled with his efforts to capture it, from a three-foot-long relief sculpture carved from a two-inch pine board to a large woodcut to oil paintings and watercolors to silver pins, pendants, and rings depicting the mountain carved of wax then cast into silver. The Katahdin jewelry is not for sale, it’s as if it is part of his heart and is made for his wife, technical writer Lisa Schoonmaker, and their daughters.
Moffet’s friend, Deer Isle artist and furniture maker Bruce Bulger, calls him one of the most dedicated artists he knows and said, “He’s an avid naturalist with a vast understanding of nature and earth. This scholarly approach to understanding, from lobsters to Cezanne, one of his heroes, lands him directly in his paintings through the use of brush and the marks of drawing.”
Gardner, the recipient of the bicycle cut-paper birthday card, said, “His conversations are very revealing – he has profound scientific knowledge – and they betray his intelligence. I see that he has keen observation. He’s really studied light and how it reflects, and distance.” As for fishing, Gardner said, “He takes in every aspect of it; he doesn’t leave much to chance.”
That pretty much suns up Moffet’s life and art: he lives his life with passion, studies intently, and doesn’t leave much to chance.
Moffet’s art can be seen at the Friend’s Memorial Library in Brooklin and at the office of Cindy Avery, MD in Ellsworth.