Borrowed View Press, Rockland, ME
2004
A Room of Her Own
Connie Hayes paints scenes from the coast of Maine familiar to many of us; quilted-together backyards of fishing villages, working waterfronts with their spill of gear, weathered houses, islands positioned like sentinels in coves. A native of Maine, she has been painting here for several decades. Hayes had a well-received show of her paintings last summer at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland. Painting Maine, the book accompanying that exhibit, is richly illustrated in color, including essays by Carl Little and Chris Crosman as well as commentary by Hayes. Its cover art — some of the Carver’s Harbor waterfront in Vinalhaven — is a perfect example of the focus and affection brings to her subject. The landscape is a slice of island life, with its buildings in vernacular Victorian, piled lobster traps, and a utility pole and outsized satellite dish featured, as if icons. If this were religious imagery, those would be the two symbols with greatest significance, conferring meaning to the subject, the way arrows denote the piety associated with St. Sebastian, for example, or animals with St. Francis of Assisi. Hayes seems to highlight them; the pole and satellite dish virtually glow in a bright hue of brownish orange known as titian or burnt sienna. In a place with extraordinary natural beauty, she enjoys this incongruity; the mundane and manmade have an aesthetic as well. Hayes sees that as what adds substance, and refers to it, appreciatively, as “functional beauty.”
In 1990, in an effort to experience these landscapes first-hand by living in the spaces she felt drawn to paint, Hayes conceived the idea of borrowing houses and views from willing participants. She became a modern-day itinerant painter of sorts, and has regularly traveled ever since, visiting locations along Midcoast to southern coastal Maine predominantly, such as Vinalhaven, Islesboro, Stonington, Cape Elizabeth, Monhegan and Christmas Cove, literally transfiguring these in her renderings. “Transfiguring” means, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, “to transform the appearance of; alter radically; or exalt, glorify.” And that is exactly what Connie Hayes does. With her bright, exotic colors and semiabstract approach, Hayes has often been stylistically linked to the Impressionist and Fauve artists such as Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse, and Cassatt. But her roots seem to actually go farther back than the 19th century. Perhaps it is no accident that Hayes highlights in titian that satellite dish and utility pole. As objects, they both serve to provide a connection with invisible energies — from the heavens, as it were — giving us earthbound sounds and images to work with, as ordinary as shows on TV, Internet links by computer, music on the radio, or conversations by phone.
For Hayes, color is not only a physical property but also a psychological and emotional one. It becomes both X-ray and Rorschach, documenting a place’s heart and soul. “She seeks, in her words, to move from the `merely seen’ to the `really felt.’ Her response is visceral,” critic Carl Little explains. The interiors she paints — often living rooms, sometimes bedrooms or porches — are suffused with molten, golden, liquid light. “Pull Up a Chair, Cape Elizabeth,” “Inner and Outer Glow,” “Time Cure,” and “A World of Reading,” portray places of respite. The intense colors and fluid shapes could have just as easily conveyed disequilibrium, but Hayes offers them as invitingly restful and reassuring. They provide a sense that “all’s right in the world,” at least somewhere.
The visual experience merges with the emotional, both for Hayes and her viewers. Turning through the pages of her book or visiting a show of her work produces a kind of reverie, even euphoria. We can experience anew, with fresh insights, familiar places — even, for the lucky hosts, very familiar places. Hayes’s website (www.conniehayes.com) includes examples of her work and more descriptive information about her, along with an update of her “borrowed views” project. Hayes continues to consider invitations for possible residencies when a home will be otherwise unoccupied; her stay may last several days or several weeks. She offers her hosts first choice from the paintings she creates. Hayes’ book is available at area museums and bookstores, L.L. Bean, or by contacting Borrowed Views Press through her website or (207) 594-1633. A high quality, signed print of her painting illustrated here, “Compression,” can be purchased at the Freeport showroom of Thomas Moser Cabinetmakers. On Vinalhaven, Hayes’ paintings and book can be found at Elaine Crossman’s New Era Gallery on Main Street, (207) 863-9351.
Tina Cohen writes from Old Harbor, Vinalhaven.