Quintessential Maine, Through its Gardens and Landscapes
As the gift-giving holiday season draws nearer, two coffee table books are worth a look. Although both feature the beauty of nature in artistic renditions, they have their differences. One volume offers a visual feast of Maine landscapes seen through the lens of the camera, captured on film by professional photographer Lucian Niemeyer. The other is more homespun, less grand in scope and style. Artist, author and expert gardener Loretta Krupinski paints charming illustrations of the wild and domesticated life found or cultivated where she lives, at the edge of a tidal cove on Midcoast Maine’s St. George River.
Krupinski’s A Maine Artist’s Garden Journal would be ideal to share with children. There’s a palpable sense of her affection for living things as she records in text and pictures her observations of the natural world over a typical year. In describing May, for example, she includes a painting of her two cats admiring a hummingbird. The cats look attentive but ineffective; Krupinski points out that the hummingbirds are much faster than the cats. As if to further taunt those kitties, the adjacent page is covered with more springtime birds visiting her feeder: goldfinches, purple finches and red-breasted grosbeaks. The next page lists the seeds to plant by early May: spinach, lettuce, sugar snap peas. Sharing that page, a rabbit is seen in close-up, painted mid-munch, placidly enjoying her garden’s fresh greens. There’s a recipe too, her favorite for stir-fried sugar snap peas. And so each month and season is similarly represented. We get a sense of Krupinski’s bond with those who share her yard and cove; well, with the exception of what she calls “icky things in the garden,” including slugs, tomato hornworms, tent caterpillars, and Japanese beetles. For these, she recommends an approach she calls, euphemistically,” pest control.” Luckily, no illustrations show an “after.” A lot of helpful gardening advice is proffered, and there’s useful information for identifying local wildlife, including flowers, birds, insects and animals.
Niemeyer’s book, Maine: A Portrait is also a combination of illustrations and text. Essays are included by Rachel Carson and Louise Dickinson Rich. The book’s collection of fine photographs could evoke pride from those who know Maine and provoke interest in getting to know the state from those who haven’t had that pleasure yet. The strength and weakness of this book is the effort to be comprehensive and capture the quintessential Maine. If you know Maine, it may feel formulaic; there might be nothing in this book that will rivet or surprise you, either in content or rendition. But that’s not to say it’s a bad book. In fact, it could be an especially good book as a souvenir. Remember the episodes of “Seinfeld” where Kramer creates a coffee table book that literally acts as a coffee table? This book deserves much better than that. It can serve, not as a coaster or tray, but rather as means to a reverie, a rhapsody of beautiful pictures of a beautiful place.
When she’s in Maine, Tina Cohen writes from Old Harbor, Vinalhaven.