Portland Museum of Art

We went up to Portland to see a minor league baseball game - the Sea Dogs vs. the Fisher Cats - note the nautical theme - but made the mistake of assuming we could buy tickets right before the game. They were sold out. Perhaps if we hadn't spent the whole afternoon at the museum, we could have gotten tickets earlier in the day. Oh well.

In the rotunda connecting the two parts of the museum, they had some nicely detailed marble sculptures in a classical style. I really liked the one of a drowned pearl driver - a young man of delicate feminine beauty - draped backward over a rock and covered with a strategically carved marble net. Here is a close-up of his feet, with a small tangle of seaweed:


I also thought the fabric of President U.S. Grant's marble coat was particularly well done (although the face was not up to the same quality):


A nice contrast to the classical sculptures is this modern work (visible through the window of the rotunda), called "Rising Cairn":

It's a nice play on words; not only does it look like cairn coming to life in human form, rising up out of the stones from which it was made (a new Adam/Eve), but also it echoes the phrase "raising Cain" - appropriate for some monstrous man-made creature (humanoid but not human).

In the main building, they had a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit (with no allusions to Fallingwater, worse luck), but their bread and butter was the collection of paintings by New England artists. This one was called "The Raven" - if you can ignore the glare/reflections, you may be able to see that there is no raven depicted. Just a bleak landscape with symbols of death and feathery branches of a tree. I think this was by one of the Wyeths (maybe Andrew):


By far my favorite painting in the place was another Wyeth (N.C. this time, I think). Although one could object to the picture-postcard perfection and almost hyperrealistic colors, the light in the painting was simply spectacular. I think what really made it work was the very intense spots of light on the top of the rock where the sun practically burned through the trees.

After seeing all the paintings of New England's seacoasts, we wandered over to see the real, live version. This rock is painted to commemorate a shipwreck about 120 years ago; I don't know if that was before or after they built the lighthouse that stands there today.