Final! "Noonday sun, Fish Beach Road-Monhegan Island", 20x16, oil on canvas by Maryanne Jacobsen

"Noonday sun, Fish Beach Road-Monhegan Island", 20x16, oil on canvas by Maryanne Jacobsen

It's funny. Whenever I work hard on a painting, it gets more and more difficult as I get into the final stages. I think that is because I know when a painting is coming together in a positive direction, and there's always the fear that I'll screw it up in the end!

That's exactly what happened with the painting that I did of Fish Beach Road. The very last thing that I did was the building in the foreground on the right, and as soon as I looked at the finished painting, I knew that building was detracting from what would have otherwise been a very good painting.

Nonetheless, I was afraid to touch it. So I stewed on it for two days before I finally woke up this morning and decided I had to try to fix it. In this case, I was fortunate. I knew exactly what was wrong with the painting. Here's the painting before I corrected it:


I had worked pretty hard to stay true to the photograph, but I knew that the long vertical line created by the doorway in the foreground building was an eyesore. Your eye kept being drawn to it, yet it added nothing positive to the overall painting.


I also knew that the temperature of the building in the foreground needed to be warmer, in order to bring the building forward and create more illusion of depth. So I mixed up my batches of paint and experimented a bit with grays. I finally came up with what you see above. I think I probably could also have gone more into a brown direction, but in the end, I decided to stick with weathered blues in a warmer note than what I had had before.

I feel relieved. It sucks when you work long and hard on a painting and know you haven't done the best you can. Now, I feel that I have done the best I could do, and that's a good feeling.

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"Noonday Sun, Fish Beach Road-Monhegan Island", 20x16, oil on canvas by Maryanne Jacobsen

"Noonday sun, Fish Beach Road-Monhegan Island", 20x16, oil on canvas by Maryanne Jacobsen

Last week I enjoyed painting the quick study that I did of Fish Beach on Monhegan Island. So I decided to do another one, bigger and a lot more refined than the last. This is the result. I must say that I struggled with this painting because there was just so much going on in the scene.

If you are unfamiliar with Monhegan Island, it's a dramatic little working island about 10 miles off the coast of Maine. Some of that wonderful lobster that we so enjoy eating all year long, may well have been an end result of the stalwart efforts of the lobsterman who live on Monhegan Island, who brave the coldest temps and elements imaginable in order to lower their nets into the ice, snow and otherwise frost-bitten waters of the northern Atlantic and bring to the surface those cold water lobstahs that we all so love to eat!

So I debated about just how much detail to put into this painting. In the end, I knew that I had to include the convoluted buoys, the haphazzard yarn, the weeds, the traps, the weather-smitten cedar shingles, and the view of tiny Manana just a stones throw away, in order to convey the character of the island. Here's the photo I took that I used for my reference:

I was fortunate to visit Monhegan in the heat of summer. I tried to portray just how hot it was on the August day that I snapped this photo. Monhegan is an island of drama- hills and vales and cliffs and fog. Some people visit there and hate it. Others get a taste of it and can't wait to return!

Even though I am a former dancer, in pretty good shape, I had trouble navigating the hills and dales on this hot summer day. I also had trouble trying to portray the character of this island in all its truth and simplicity.

I hope that you enjoy my efforts. I'll probably work on this a tiny bit more and take a picture of it in daylight so there's no glare. But for the most part it's done. It is available for purchase for $1400. Just send me an email at maryanne jacobsen@aol.com, if you are interested in purchasing this painting.

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