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 Local news and information from Castine and Penobscot, Maine. |
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News Feature
Painter Carvel Glidden  Painter Carvel Glidden, who was “compelled by the coast, the harbors and the waters” of coastal Maine, opened a new Castine gallery to showcase her work. The right-hand painting is of Wadsworth Cove, the left a scene from Sorrento.  Painter Carvel Glidden, who was “compelled by the coast, the harbors and the waters” of coastal Maine, opened a new Castine gallery to showcase her work. The right-hand painting is of Wadsworth Cove, the left a scene from Sorrento. by Anne Berleant Painter Carvel Glidden opened her self-named gallery on the corner of Maine and Stevens Streets to showcase her portraits and scenic coastal landscapes. “I’ve been painting for 60 years,” Glidden said in a recent interview. “My first lesson with my uncle was at [age] six.” Glidden’s uncle was portrait artist Germain G. Glidden, who founded the National Art Museum of Sport at Purdue University in Indianapolis in 1959. Her portrait work—which hangs from all corners in her studio, sometimes dwarfing the more ethereal Maine coastal landscapes—are large paintings created in bold colors of Maori tribesmen from New Zealand, Australian aborigines and Native Americans. “I wanted to paint pictures of vanishing ethnic people,” Glidden said. “I was going to end up in Africa,” but a little over four years ago she moved instead, with her husband Paul Herrmann, from Hawaii to Castine. “The harbors, the coves and the coast is why I came,” Glidden said. The path that led Glidden to Maine meandered through New York City, Michigan and Boston, and the southwest and Hawaii. After initially studying at the Art Student’s League in New York City, Glidden held a two-year stint drawing fashion for The New Yorker, but as a figurative artist, Glidden said she was “ill suited for New York at that time because it was all abstract [art].” She moved westward at the age of 24 and taught Latin, French and art, holding what she referred to as her first “big show” at Michigan’s Saginaw Art Gallery while in her thirties. But she returned east in the 1980s, opening her own gallery in Boston on Beacon Hill, to show her own work and that of other artists. “After a while, your art pushes you out the door,” she said. “My paintings started piling up.” In Boston, Glidden said she was able to sell many of her paintings and portrait commissions. “Boston was much more happy with my work,” she said, than New York. After the death of her second husband (“he died playing tennis, a wonderful exit for him”), Glidden began painting portrait subjects of her own choosing, with a Santa Fe gallery handling her work. And, after a time living in Hawaii, she settled in Castine. “I was compelled by the coast, the harbors and the waters,” Glidden said. “There are not the kind of sailing harbors [in Hawaii] you find in Maine.” Glidden draws a connection between “the colors in the flesh” and those found in the water and coastlines. And her finished oil paintings of Goose Cove in Deer Isle, Fly Point in Brooklin, Sorrento, which lies near the Schoodic Peninsula, and the Castine harbor hold a strong presence alongside the larger portraits. “I like to pick out colors,” said Glidden. “That’s why I paint.” The Carvel Glidden Gallery, on Main Street in Castine, is open Wednesday through Saturday. |
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