John Marin (1870-1953)

Schooner and Sea, Maine is featured on catalog cover for John Marin: The Edge of Abstraction, held at the Meredith Ward Fine Art Gallery in New York in 2006. Having been attracted to Marin’s vibrant art for decades, John Sacret Young wrote in his essay about Marin’s “passion for place,” the influence of music, and “his crusty, plentiful, Whitman-like writings” that express the essence of his observations and intentions. He agreed with others that characterized Marin “as a rugged individualist.” Marin merged the visible world with internalized experiences in paintings which Young described as “still fresh with his love of paint, still fresh with discovery and vibrant life—the smell of the sea, the stench of exhaust and cacophonous excitement of Manhattan, the arid hues of New Mexico, the scrubbed washes yet jagged punch of the White Mountains at Dixville Notch, the rhythm of rain and wind and weather around these places, and the lives they know and hold—apprehended in the instant and touched with a measure of infinity.”