Ending Neil Diamond

It's almost time to call it a wrap on this painting, "Self portrait being a teenage Neil Diamond"... Suffice it to say t's taken me on a very interesting journey and to some very interesting places inside my soul, which is why I bother to paint any painting I do anyway. If it doesn't send me to do a work of art as I see fit and on my own terms, then it ain't worth it for me. That's all she wrote.
C.W.O.

This is the last photo you'll be seeing of "Self-portrait being a teenage Neil Diamond rockin' the shack and Port Clyde roads" until it's completely done. Then you'll have to either come see the real thing later this summer, or not. I don't even know if it will still be around. But then again, I never know that about any painting I do.

It's in what I call a kind of "leisurely contemplation". There's more to go, but it's all kind of at a "pick-away at it" place now. Some color adjustments here and there and I've got to put the "story" on the RECORD that's in the lower left hand side of the painting. And that is gestating as well. It will come when it's meant to. It's not all just straight forward like painting what's in front of you. A "plein-aire" landscape or a vase with flowers in it or something. It's me painting what's inside of me and it's personal and I want to get it down as close as I can get it.
Hopefully nail it, and nail it hard. That's all I can do, and then I gotta move on to the next painting.

It's not that I'm picky, but I am, so I'm going to take my time before I sign it. In fact I don't sign anything until I am called to sign it. That's artists for you.

I've been keeping a journal entry log of the "Self Portrait being a teenage Neil Diamond rocking the shack and Port Clyde roads" fairly well right along, as I have done over the years for most of my paintings that I've done. Like a lot of artists, I lose some of the notes from time to time in the shuffle or the heat of the moment. I've gotten better at not doing that, especially since I've been putting my journals into a collected form, all in one place that's become a book now of nearly 400 pages. Also as I've worked to keep the clutter in my studio to a minimum. It works better for me that way. Such are the things you learn about yourself over the years.

Basically with my notes and journal entries, I try to not only record my thought process, dreams and idyls, and memories, but also what works for color combinations, how I arrived at certain decisions made along the way that helped make the painting what it is, and sometimes even just something so simple that it's almost dumb, like what makes me happy about something I did successfully in the piece.

I try not to get too in my own way or otherwise too judgmental about my pictures, because most of them "come around" after awhile with a little coaxing. If I'm doing it "right", there is a sense in me of how something belongs to the order of my daily world. The ones I lose absolute faith in are chucked in the woodstove, mainly. That seems to be the best method of getting rid of something once and for all is to reduce it to so much cinders. Then you don't have to ever worry about it again. I guess every artist has his or her own method of body of work disposal. At any rate, I've gotten a little less impetuous with starting off on wild goose chases with some of my paintings.

When I look back I know I've learned something from each and every one, no matter what the outcome, which happily most of 'em have just gone into homes where people love them. That's a good break, and that's the relationship with that particular painting. I've been blessed that I paint pictures about my life, and the things that interest me, or spark my interest in some way and that people want to buy them.

I have a frame in mind for "Self-portrait being a teenage Neil Diamond. . ." Will I execute it? I dunno. The frame I did for the "Ex-wives clambake" came on like gangbusters and I went into it like a mad-man looking for a scrap. I barely got it done in time to exhibit it a few summers ago, but I wasn't going to exhibit the painting without the frame. There was just "no way". It's ancient history now, but I remember taking it into the gallery and it was still oozing glue after a week of dry time.

With this "Neil" painting it may well be that much like "Portrait of my mother dumping our garbage off the wharfs of Port Clyde" where I had planned a really elaborate frame for it, I never did that, either. I have all the components to it out in my shop. I don't worry about the frames so much, not when I'm hot on the trait of some other beautiful vision I got to paint out of me. In other words, "I got other fish to fry", but I'm glad the "ideas" show up for them anyway. I duly note them down, or sketch them. It's part of what I do. Who knows, it may come in handy some other time and it can be said that it somehow completes the vision in a funky "accessory" sort of way, even if they never get done. The only person that's any the wiser is me. And I'm the one that is ultimately putting himself out there on the line -- not you, or anybody else.

It's true for me at least in art, as in life, it's about the journey and not the journey's end. By the time I show a painting in public I'm already light years away from it in my head and onto other things. I don't always get to live very long with many of my paintings but that's in very many ways a good thing, and that's the nature of earning a living as an artist.

Carry on then. I am...

cwo

Uncle Walt's burnt out wharf rat ghost tailed me home

Charles Wilder Oakes
"Uncle Walt's burnt out wharf rat ghost tailed me home" (From the series: My Port Clyde)
Oil on driftwood 2007
11" x 21"

(With 3rd degree copious notes and equations on the reverse side )

"In the springtime when I was a teenager and things were letting go from winter and the whole village was in the absolute dregs of it, I'd walk the streets of Port Clyde at night, breathing in the town, because I knew it wasn't always going to be like this. (I'd read Thoreau's book "On Walden Pond" by then, and made the pilgrimage down in a "field trip". THAT Walden, didn't much resemble Thoreau's take on it, let me tell you -- and if THAT could happen to WALDEN POND, I knew the sad truth it was going to play out in the cards for my Port Clyde, too).

But this time we are talkin' now is at the ass-end of junior-year in high-school, lest we forget.

I'd have a swig off the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer out of my blue denim jacket pocket, where I could quickly and easily tuck it back in if need be, and it would be just another teenage bulge no one wants to talk about if some adult happened along. It was night anyway, and my eyes were sharp like a hawk then, and my hearing just as good. The Pabst beer I'd either gotten off Uncle Walt by hook or by crook, or I'd otherwise kif't off someone else's stash.

You're not picky about where the booze ("boos"! -- as Uncle Walt's ghost would croak out ) comes from when you've got that fledgling teenage alkie wantin' wanton HUSSEY BLOOD thing revin' up inside of ya! Damn the torpedoes -- and pass me one! I'm here to tell you, I was plenty resourceful, to get my "boos" and when push came to shove, I might not have been first in line, (I didn't need to be) but I knew all about scuttlin' 'round the places like a wharf rat, where I could get my share! You bet-ya! God be with the days now long gone. Under-age drinkin'? Whass that?? Didn't mean a thing. That it eventually caught up to me as bloodless and bled dry as a cod fish filleted, or Uncle Walt's ghost pawing over-n-across the veil from the realms of the unseen -- "the here-after and evermore" -- well that's simply written in the HUSSEY BLOODLINE. In blood, and bloodlessness alike. I got the genes right in me like the rest of 'em that makes me another chip off the old block...uh. . .head.

Uh. . .block. . .uh. . .head was about the size of it too: I was just another drunk for a long time completely set up, until I got straight.

But back then on that particular Port Clyde night I'm talkin' 'bout right here and right now, and sooooo many others just like it (most vividly) my junior year in high school with my whole life out in front of me, catchin' a buzz didn't matter a lick. It was what we did, and the way it was. I had no idea about twenty, or thirty, much less what it would be like to be forty or fifty years old. My "future self" was as much a ghost to me as were my HUSSEY ancestors. "Pass me ovah a cold-one, bubby" could have been written as the family motto underneath the HUSSEY flag-crest, or what to hell, it would make a grand tattoo for all the rest of us descendants.

So that spring night I trod down "Cony's road". . . the one they call the co-op road now, where Cony's fish-shack still sat derelict by the water and I'd have a swill, listening along to the sounds of the familiar ocean, and the sound that one culvert underneath the road made as it drained the spring run-off into the cove right in front of Cony's fish-shack. Everything was a-stir. And even though Cony was stone cold dead by then out underneath the "Ridge church stars", and Uncle Walt was very much alive those nights, it was Uncle Walt's burnt out wharf rat ghost that tailed me home with every breath I'd take."

c.w. o.

Abbreviated (or otherwise kif't) from my journal as a recovering alcoholic.

The Ballad of Uncle Walt's peepin' tommin' down to Port Clyde

Charles Wilder Oakes
"Got Caught"
(Private Collection).
Acrylic on panel
24 1/2 X 20 1/2 in.



A face through a fogged-up window. . .cleared away with a patched old overcoat cuff, and an old salt sea dog's paw, with the other clutching tight on a half swilled PBR, you want to bet!! My uncle Walt Anderson was notorious for a good many things, down around the back streets and shoreline lanes of "old Port Clyde". Certainly for being Andrew Wyeth's closest Maine friend, confidant, and subject of a good many of Andrew's best known paintings. Walter and his brother Robert Anderson, as do a great many of the former denizens of what I term "Old Port Clyde" seem to me now more and more like some legend followed up on and collected by the brothers Grimm. I recall at the last of it, in uncle Walt's last days, uncle Walt was a kind of good will ambassador for Andrew Wyeth and old Port Clyde -- the Port Clyde of the 1960's and up to the mid 70's, that still had "the old ways". . .I don't know quite how to say it any better than that. A way of life we all knew and loved down there -- rough and tumble, untidily gentrified, scrapin' and scrapping, all kinds of life rigmarole, comin' at ya and going' the other way, all to once.

Time flies, and in those days Port Clyde was populated with the kind of fishermen I remember, (bear with me for just a few names, because I can't name 'em all -- there's just too many of 'em) let's say: "Jack" Cushman, Buster, and Woodrow, the Hupper's, Carlos Davis, Old Cony and Crow Morris, Block, Fawd, Gump, Earl, the Simmons's, and Stanley Stone, and on and on, who are mostly all over to "The Ridge" now; them and their widows gone behind them too, and some of their children, even. A lot of these all in the family. The six Hussey sisters migrated over from Friendship village after all, to Port Clyde, and they married into the Port Clyde families, and they had children, and their children had children -- and time flies.

By the time I got to know uncle Walt, there was no question he was well on his way to becoming the town derelict, and I don't say that in any "judgmental sense", it was just simply his path to walk, and the way it was. Well we all knew uncle Walt also was well known to go out walkin' (shades of Patsy Cline on the radio from the old days) after hours. He'd be making his rounds and sizing' up who he'd likely be "peepin' Tommin'."

Hard to tell who he spied in on all across the years down to Port. I know more than a few certainly from first hand stories. But it was most likely whomever took his fancy at the time, and was within reasonable walking distance 'round town. A place where the lay of the land provided some brushy shelter. A good "hideout place" -- all the better to stand there and pound back a few frosties, stay out of the window and porch lights, and get entertained for the evening.

Summer wimmin in their rental places, were a good bet for sure, because they were "from away", and just by and large "clueless". Then there was always the current crop of choice local teenage girls, and probably a cadre of the old ladies too, sitting around half naked combing their hair after a good hot bath, on a Sunday night. All of them in their underwear unawares that Uncle Walt was lurking just outside the window having a few cold ones of liquid courage, and "peerin' in".

And we all knew it was uncle Walt, or blamed it on him at any rate. (Sometimes you see, if the wind blew something over outside, or started in a branch to scratching up against the outside of the house, you'd pause and someone would inevitably say: "Uncle Walt! " or "Uncle Walt?! that you?!!" and we'd all laugh and go back to eating supper).

Sometimes it really WAS uncle Walt, though. He'd get caught by someone and there'd be a shriek and a flurry of activity, but by the time you got into your own boots and threw a sweater on, and got the storm door open, all you could hear of Ol' Walt was distant scurrying sounds out there in the dark. Uncle Walt huffing and puffing, headed back to the village as fast as his hip boots could carry him down those snowy roads. And that would be that.

You could probably trail him, but he knew enough to hide his tracks once he got back near to base at Charlie Culver's fish house. He was a pirate, after all. Pirates know a lot of ways to hide things. Still and all come the early morning hours there'd be "evidence" on occasion, that old Walt had drifted 'round a-visitin'. A bottle of Reunité wine, dead soldiered, or some empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cans laying half buried in the snow along with all these boot prints showing where uncle Walt had been milling around underneath the shelter of the spruce and fir trees, and walking back and fourth to the windows.


cwo

"Portrait of my mother dumping our garbage off the wharfs of Port Clyde."

Here's a little before and after, as things were going along at the time. Basically the composition of the painting was pretty well nailed down even before I took the first photo of the painting. You know, before I added the "snow" coming down. The idea being to get all the broad areas and details taken care of first before I put the snow fall in the mix.

So this is my first painting I did about my mother. I painted it while I was in the hard-scrabble of coming off a life-long booze habit. I started it after the d.t.'s and hallucinations left me. I had to wait at least that long, as my painting hand wasn't very steady, and neither was much else about me, to be completely honest about it. Looking back today, I've not a doubt in my mind what-so-ever that her spirit was hooverin' 'round over me last summer, helpin' keep her boy on the straight-n-narrow from here to eternity. Hey, it's a mother's job. There's a blessin an' a curse to everythin' that comes our way. You only got to look at your bible to get my drift, if you don't see it in the daily news or otherwise get enough from experience every day.

I pulled it off, though. I finished "Portrait of my mother. . ." around the mid-summer mark of 2006. And it was sold not too long after mid-winter down in New York city. Beats all !! Now I can in all honesty tell folks that I "sold my mother down the river". Well, at least over to the Jersey side. Ha!

Most of the rest of the time in the five or six paintings I've done where my mother appears, she ranges from about 1/2 to a full 3/4 of and inch high, to a relatively gargantuan 3 full inches tall in one particular painting that I can think of; now long sold. (There's a lot of writing on the back of "Portrait of my mother dumping our garbage off the wharfs of Port Clyde", by the way. Initially I had planned to make a large elaborate frame for it, out of an old time wooden storm door. I still have the storm door and the things I bought to go along with the plan that would fit into the frame. A few people have asked me whether I'm going to paint another one similar to this. Considering it took me THIS FRIGGEN LONG to paint THIS ONE, I'd say the chances aren't very good).

I like the look I captured on "Portrait of my mother dumping our garbage off the wharfs of Port Clyde". My mother has that kind of "deer caught in the headlights look" going on which amuses me, mainly because there wasn't much that I can remember about her that caught her off guard. As I've come full circle in my appreciation of and for my mother, (and glad I lived long enough to see it through) I do appreciate that aspect of her personality. She wasn't one to suffer fools gladly, not by a long shot, and in fact some of 'em she'd take out after with a base ball bat or a stick or whatever was handy when someone got her ire up. It's the stuff of Port Clyde legend.

I kind-a miss that rough and tumble private "set-to" attitude of settling things that was quite common on the streets of old Port Clyde. I won't name names here of the various denizens who brawled their way into local lore. I don't have to. That my mother was a culprit amongst 'em is enough to say. She'd confront you and take you on whether you was a man or a woman, it didn't really matter much. You do that now a-days and it's cop-city. Everyone gets into the act, and it's assault and battery, and a li'l bit o' jail time for your jollies, but back then it was just par for the course. You got your face rubbed in it, or your ol' bald head pissed on, maybe a little do-see-doe (dose-e-doe?) of road rash, swinging your pard-nah round-n-round, ( a punch in the ear and another in the nose, a few to the old beer gut ) and you got on with things in the after-thrash. Sure, guns came out now and again, don't get me wrong. It's a small town and there's booze and lobstermen, and that's a tale as old as time. But guns for mowing down human beings is for cretins and is always a certinous act in any personal set of domestic problems. Since the whole town back then was mostly related to one another anyway, it's often a case of blood being thicker-n-water. If you drew it, you'd pay the price. Still and all, we all got along as best we knew how. What more can you ask?

But that aside, let's get back on course here. Dumping the garbage off the wharfs was a ritual that went on for a long time with us Port Clyde natives, and just about every other town on the coastline, stretching back to time immemorial. Sure, no one these days wants to cop to it, but it WENT ON just the same. All that feedin' on all that community garbage made for some honkin' size ("sizah's" we'd call 'em) wharf rats, I can tell you!!

Holy-moly, I'll tell you what -- I remember seeing 'em scurrying across the flats on the cove at low tide, day in and day out like family pets gone feral, or sometimes I'd hear 'em out there wrangling tin cans by moonlight (sometimes with the tin cans "on" -- actually over their heads), scavenging down the last succulent morsel out of some washed up Chef Boyardee Beef-a-Roni can, down amongst the rock-weed. I'd look out the childhood window I always looked out of at Cony's shack some of those nights when the natives were restless. Down in the cove by the foot of the docks some of them wharf rats to my wondering eyes did appear to be more or less the size of a freakin' Jack Russell Terrier, and every bit as frisky.

I doubt my mother was the last of a kind doing dumping garbage off the docks, but I would be willing to bet, pretty near so. This was back in the days (lest we forget) when those that were too poor to own a car or a truck to go to the town dump just chucked bags of garbage off the wharfs end to go out with the tide. This was before plastic garbage bags were all the rage, mind you. These were paper grocery bags from Ralph Simmons's "Port Clyde General", and later when it became Nealy Morse's, and still later on through all them that owned it and my mother's days in Port Clyde she'd go down the trodden path to past Cony's shack -- although he was dead by then, old Cony, the shack was still standing, such as it was, so derelict it may as well have been make believe. Some kind of set decoration in a documentary about worn down gone to hell lobsterman's shacks and welfare mothers out on their "night errands" dumping their sacks of garbage off the ends of the wharfs of Port Clyde.

cwo

Port Clyde boy, born and raised, on the trail of Neil Diamond, (New York City born and raised)

It's been an interesting journey for me, painting the "self-portrait" as a teen age Neil Diamond painting. I've learned a lot about myself, which I had a "kind-a feeling" I was going to when I took it on. It's like saying to the universe "bring it on!" It's a challenge, in every sense of the word.

I didn't want to paint this painting. My first attitude toward the notion of such an undertaking was: "oh, come on, let's give this a big skip -- you've got to be kidding me!" I mean I get a lot of ideas for paintings, it doesn't mean I do them all. As if I could, or would want to.

It's that business my father used to say: "I'm gonna tow that around awhile before I haul it aboard". But this painting wanted to be done, I could tell, because I've been around myself long enough to separate the wheat from the chaff. Still, I don't cotton much to the notion of "idol worship" like as in making somebody in the entertainment or sports industry some kind of god, and my Neil Diamond memories are intertwined with a lot of really great things as well as a lot of anxt -- some of it very existential that I felt as a teenager.

I mean. . .did I want to "go there". Well, painting for me has always been about exploration of my life and my actions and reactions to it. So yeah, in a very real sense when this image kept coming up for me to deal with it and get it out on canvas, it just got more and more in my way until I had to do something about it. Like put it out there.

Oh, crap! You know? But I'm glad I listened to that voice. It's always been for the best that I do.

I've met my fair share of celebrities over the years in different walks of the general entertainment world. When I worked on the "In the Bedroom" movie that was shot around here a few years ago for instance. I could have gone on and worked on other movies, and I was invited to do so. Basically I wanted to paint pictures. The movie industry is a kind of patron for a lot of writers and artists. Just not this one. I'm past it where I want to live in a hotel room in New York or Boston or god only knows where for months at a time. It's just another job, and a 12 to 16 hour a day one at that. I got a credit for "In the Bedroom." I've seen it twice. Too much of that stuff goes on around here as it is, I don't need to see it on the screen.

Andy Warhol's pithy statement about "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes," which since the era of the internet I've heard adapted to: "In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people" is 'bout the size of it, in my estimation.

Still with all due mercy shined on my adolescent psyche I didn't have much to hang onto as a kid, other than doing my art and writing, and at the time I'd taught myself how to play guitar. So there was music. I actually got to be a pretty good player and singer. I even wrote some songs. I still have them in a box of things from my high school days, that some how my mother managed not to throw out when she moved out of Port Clyde in the mid-1970's.

So in that sense, I learned to play the songs I liked, and wrote a few that also filled the bill. It's been tentative, because the room mates are still with me for a few more weeks, but I've picked up my guitar on again / off again, in the last few months and started strumming. Since it's an electric one, I'll wait just a bit longer 'til they're gone and then I'm going to cut loose.

I think Neil Diamond -- well, his songs I mean, helped me stay focused when I was that age. . . you know, a teenager. Basically I was a talented kid in a dead end town was how I looked at it. You never really appreciate "home" until you've been out in the world and learned a few lessons that it can kick your ass, no matter how talented you are. When you've got to pay the rent, and you've got to get a job to do that, you get to see just how dedicated you are. . .as opposed to how dedicated you "think" you are.

I've been painting a long time now. Closer to 40 years than 30, so I know when I'm onto something in the way I ought to be. And this "Neil-n-me" painting has hit that point "like a guitar hummin'" in the way he sang about in a song he put out during the summer of 1972 , (a fabled summer for me in the pantheon of my heart-most Port Clyde days for a fact ). The song was "Cracklin' Rosie". This was Neil Diamond's first American #1 hit by the way, something which I guess may or may not have registered at the time on my radar screen. I just liked the tune. I still associate it very much with that summer and fall, which marked my passage and that of all the rest of my classmates from grade-school down here in T-Harbor up to Georges Valley high school. 1972 was freshman year.


I've turned the corner and I'm on the home stretch with "Self portrait being a teenage Neil Diamond
rockin' the shack and Port Clyde Roads." The last update I did on it was February 26th, roughly a
month ago, in other words. I put it away for awhile (over three weeks now) while I got going painting on other things, tinkering with some other ones in various states of completion and also starting a bunch of new paintings. Sometimes you just need to see things with different eyes, that's all. It's kind of like any relationship. . .things need time to gestate.

It's reached the point where I"m going to put it in a temporary frame and hang it on the wall. That's always a good sign. It means it's time now for contemplation at a more leisurely pace. The composition is well established and won't change a whole lot from here on in. Not the "major" things in it anyway.
I pretty much know what's what, and what I want to put in and leave out now that I'm onto the final stretch.

It feels good to be onto the final stretch with the painting. I'll probably be tinkering with it for awhile, but basically it is just about finished. There's still some adjustments I've got to make, but they are pretty minor. At any rate, it's fitting the painting is almost done. It's coming into spring. I started it on Hallowe'en night, which I think is also fitting, since Hallowe'en is where we dress up to be some other character, other than ourselves.


cwo

Heart's Island

My father, "Old Cony" named his lobster boat the "Gale Storm". I never understood why. Maybe I still don't. But I have a few more clues, the older I get, and having put 2 + 2 together, about Gale Storm the actress and singer who's name was originally Josephine Owaissa Cottle (born April 5, 1922 in Bloomington, Texas), and the boat my father kept, the "Gale Storm". He had her built up in Stonington, before I was even a gleam in his eye. And when his days were done searching for and hauling in lobsters around the rocky shores of Port Clyde, he and some companions towed the hulk of the "Gale Storm" out to Hart's Island on the tide, beaching her and burning her. (Have I told you I always understood in the way little kids understand things that to my way of thinking it was "Heart's Island", instead of H-a-r-t-'s Island? No? Well, consider yourself told as of today. I still to this day think it's its "real name", regardless of what the charts or anyone else says: "Long live Heart's Island!" Yeaaah! Right up there with friggen "Treasure Island," and never so far away, ye boogers!! Love that, "ye boogers" part).


"Old Cony" doused his boat with gasoline and set her afire and looked on as she burned down to the ground out there on the ledges of Harts Island. I still have a piece of her (Cony's boat, the "Gale Storm") that I found on a trip out there a few years later. Some of his lobsterman friends and relatives had to help, because by then "Old Cony" had to watch his ticker and the amount of exertion he put on it. It wasn't like now where you can go in and do all the stuff modern medicine does with coronary by-pass surgery in order to prolong your life. "Those were the days my friend", as that song went during the late summer of 1968. Just not the days for those kind of miracles. Though god knows I prayed for one in the way kids do for their parents when you want a miracle and you know they are awful sick. When you love someone you want 'em to stick around as long as they can. You want your dad, 'cos you got stuff you wanna talk over from time to time when you're just ateen-ager. Yeah, you do.

I can't even imagine what kind of thoughts run through a mans mind watching his boat burn like that. Up go the memories; up in smoke. Still and all, burning the boat in a bonfire is a tradition amongst mariners that goes back a long ways. Readily apparent as well as symbolically, its a signal to our maker we've reached our physical limits and the worldly labors are just about done. It's time to hang up the lobster gauge for this life. As far as burning your boat these days -- Ha!! -- irrespective of any such sea-farin' tradition you can bet the DEP would have the last friggen laugh, 'til they go to meet the maker themselves.

Like I said in yesterday's post, I like the internet for re-searching stories or articles I'm writing -- particularly my new high speed "jobby", beats the jalopy dial-up hands-down I had all those years that's for sure -- and now as I get to the meat and potatoes of today's blog, it's gonna be coming in handy again. With the internet, I can get information at my fingertips that would flummox the living daylights out of me if I had to go out-sourcing, library to library or otherwise having to look it up elsewhere. Some of it is minutia, and generally pesky details but there is THAT SIDE OF ME that is a "researcher" of things, that really likes getting to the nitty-gritty details. Mostly what I need it for today is for "fact checkin'". Well, you'll see, but as with any story teller, I don't want you to see too much. I'm not interested in some kind of biography or biographical sketch about Gale Storm, the famous actress and singer, or even a "just the facts, mam", piece. That has all the folksiness of an instruction manual.

What I'm getting at here is when I'm writing a story for instance about Rum Runners in Port Clyde, it helps with the authenticity of things to know (just as a random thought here) if saaaaay: Pepsi Cola was around during prohibition (-- and yes the answer is, it WAS, so happens)! And did you know that during the Great Depression, Pepsi gained considerable popularity following the introduction in 1934 of a 12-ounce bottle? Coca-Cola only had six ounces. The jingle of the times on the radio went: "Pepsi cola hits the spot, twelve full ounces, that's a lot -- Twice as much for a nickel, too -- Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you!"


I'll never use that information in a story other than this one, but there you go. Plus I learned something. That's not such a bad thing.


With all that information so readily available on the internet, I have to say sure as heck the Encyclopedia Britannica set I unearthed the other day from the attic where they've been stored some 8 years now ain't gonna hack it. I mean, what am I going to do with 'em? They are worse than relics, and make no mistake about it, with all the activity going on here at the house, with roommates getting ready to move out, I've got spring cleaning fever. I'm in the mood to get rid of anything and everything that doesn't serve the spartan lifestyle around here. A few paintings and some pictures on the walls, some antiques, a few plants, and a few chairs, and a kitchen table, and it's lookin' like home to me! Simplify, simplify, simplify, and as Thoreau says: "As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler". I'll be the first lead off to give an ol' fashioned tent revival hoot-n-a-holla "Amen Brother!" on that account!


So here's a "for instance" on the internet researching gig. This dip net I've put in the internet water concerns dredging up info about one Gale Storm. Gale Storm was a popular movie actress/singer, whom I never heard of until I was somewhere along in 7th or 8th grade down to T-Harbor, in the building they demolished to make way for the new town office & fire station facilities. Even then, having heard about Gale Storm, she was a blip on my radar screen. Back then I had more important things to do, like making sure I had the entire Detroit Tigers baseball team in my base ball card collection, then the Boston Red Sox, and after that the NY Yankees. Making enough money to get Alice Cushman to pick me up a Neil Diamond album at W.T. Grant's where she worked as a clerk. That was what concerned me.

I wasn't even born when "My Little Margie", premiered as a summer replacement for the "I Love Lucy" show in June of 1952. And when the series was cancelled in 1955, I still wasn't born yet, for that matter. I was however born by the time The Gale Storm Show , a tv sitcom came along; but of course I don't remember THAT, either. Still and all The Gale Storm show ran between 1956 and 1960 (initially on CBS and during it's last year it was on ABC) -- and in it's later syndication by the way -- (so says the dip-net into the internet quick research I can do with all this high speed at my command), it was retitled Oh, Susanna! According to the internet, Gale Storm is still alive and kicking. Not so, Lucille Ball, or my father, or my mother, or Alice Cushman for that matter.

What you can't find out on the internet, is that Gale Storm was the name of my father's "Old Cony's" fishing boat. When I was a kid I went along not knowing a thing about the movie actress/singer Gale Storm. I simply had no consciousness of any such person. Now Patsy Cline I knew, because when I was a kid you'd hear her voice in every fish shack on the cove. There weren't all that many stations on the radio to choose from back then, lets not forget, so as a kid you could actually go from one fish shack to the next, to the next, to the next until you made your circuit around the entire cove, and hear an entire Patsy Cline or Hank Williams or Ernest Tubb honky-tonk song, except for the time you spent running along the path to get there. It's likely Gale Storm was singing her heart out in old Port Clyde back in those little kid days walking shack to shack as I listened to the fishermen tell their gossip and stories. I'm sure Gale Storm was in the background providing the vocals. I didn't even have a television until the summer of 1968. Then of course like how it was with the radios scattered in the fisherman's shacks along the cove, there were but a few scant channels available on tv down to Port Clyde. For tv, we all had rabbit ears to get the thing to come in. Basically all we had was channel 5, 6, 8, 13, and sometimes 2, and occasionally channel 10 which in those days most successfully was known for it's steady test-pattern.

However, now I can see why and understand and certainly appreciate WHY "Old Cony" named his boat the Gale Storm. (Now-a-days I even know a few women that have become friends of mine that were named "Gale" after the actress -- same spelling and all, not the more "traditional" if you will, "Gail"). But as far as "Old Cony" naming his boat the Gale Storm, I get the picture. I don't need rabbit ears to scope it in. "Old Cony" was "crazy like a fox" on that one. He got to go out with her every day -- Gale Storm -- the boat that is. But in a 2 + 2 way symbolically I'm quietly pleased to think he went out with Gale Storm the spirit woman too, since as we all know, boats are "notorious she's". Well however you slice it, here's a tip and a nod to you, Cony, Gale Storm's got my vote too. Very lovely lady. If before my time. I still can appreciate it, and now I understand a little bit more.

your son,

cwo

Daring all the rainchecks and warrantees of the heart

This time of year with spring so close at hand, I seem to run into thoughts along the path to Old Port Clyde that are like ghost notes left in trees and bushes for me to forage out and fathom through. I'll read them like the signs they are as I come across them; put them in my pocket and take 'em home to kindle a fire later that evening as I sit and go over them again at the end of the day. Notes, & signs, mostly notes from the muse to say I'm on the right track. It's when I don't get those little notes I know I have to re-trace my steps 'til I do get back on again. In essence these little notes are my little reminders for me to keep in the attitude of gratitude. Keep an open mind and heart.

And follow.

Yesterday as I sat by the sea at Marshall Point Light while the sun set on the day, I got into a deeply grateful place inside of myself that I can only externally express ever so slightly through any amount of writing or painting pictures about it. I'm just another human being going about my business who sometimes has a low threshold for beauty, that's all. It's quite beautiful here along this part and parcel of the coastline and it doesn't matter how cold it is, or how it seems the weight of the world gets a little too heavy to shoulder sometimes, and you want it all to slip away for a little while. Take a walk, look around, be thankful to live in such a beautiful place with all it's changing light in the mornings, during the day, or in the evening. I know I never tire of it. I can look back over the day and say I had a great day painting. I got lost in it from time to time, which is the absolute best I can ask for. That and I learned a lot about how I'm going to proceed from here with the picture I'm working on, and in the next few I want to get started on here shortly. I am grateful I am supported to be able to do this; a lot of artists aren't in their lifetimes, most, really, that's just a fact.

So what's below is a poem I wrote to go with a picture I painted in a not-so-long-ago-once-upon-a-time that had my mother in it scuttling along in a winter flurry of snow and beating feet for home from the "Port Clyde General". It all came from a wisp of a memory fetched out of the slipstream. Not too long after I painted it, it got sold, and in a one-of-a-kind way that paintings "are", can never be re-captured again. Of course like a grocer, an artist needs to sell his artwork to put bread on the table and keep the home fires burning. Still, selling your paintings is an odd business sometimes, and no matter how many years I've been doing this it seems sometimes between painting them and exhibiting them I never get to quite live with some of them "long enough". I don't have time to go into it here, but there have been many times where I've lived with them "raising them" them like a child and watching them develop and progress, and then I SELL THEM! Mein Gott! I've SOLD MY Fricken' CHILD! Now THERE'S a feelin' for ya!

At any rate in the painting, my mother's back is to the viewer as she's headed in between the white Baptist church and the Balano tenement where we used to live in Port Clyde. She's only a few steps from pulling open that storm door and putting the groceries down on the counter in the kitchen as she comes in, and closes the cold out. I think of the "doors" of things often, the way they open to things, or close out other things. I've done a lot of paintings of doors and windows, and being on the "outside looking in".

A Port Clyde Memoir

A penny for your thoughts:

Daylight savings time comes around
Dark as a pocket before 4 o'clock by Christmas.
Snow and sleet mix --- stings the face
driven by the wind.

A plow truck goes rattling by
keeping the way clear for what little traffic comes through.

Port Clyde, main st.

My mother comes home from the store. . .
Balano tenement years ---
grocery bags sopping wet.
("Nealy's," we called it then, after Nealy Morse who owned it).

My mother would walk down through the village main st.,
puffing on her Camel cigarette. . .
she'd stand in the lee of the Advent Church
half way to and from "Nealy's".
Just another shadow now amongst many,
mixed with sleet and snow and the smell of salt sea air
on a winter's night.

Update on "Self portrait being a teen-age Neil Diamond, rockin' the shack & Port Clyde roads"

Of the two photographs here, the composition above was taken on the 25th of January, before I left for the Outsider Art Fair in NYC. The one below I took yesterday, so a month has elapsed. In the meantime I've started and completed other paintings of course, while this one gets worked on, evolves, dries, and otherwise gets worked on.
Some things you can readily see are different.

The sky over the "co-op road" has cleared up, a lot of the purple has gone and although you can't see it in this picture the lightning striking the tree on "Raspberry Island" is still a strong story telling element of the painting. Cony's shack seems to be the dividing place between the "dark brooding side" and the "bright side" of the road. Just an observation. Don't know if it's true or will even stay true. Not worried about it at any rate. The "story" just unfolds.

The bald eagle has a lot more definition as it comes flying up the road. There's a Great Blue Heron on the cabin of my father's boat that's starting to come into the picture that you can see in the bottom photograph, that wasn't there in the top one.

I added some sand to the white paint that's constituting the whites of "Cony's shack." There's a rose bush to the left of Cony's shack now, and there's a bottle of Cracklin' Rose wine beginning to appear in front of that rose bush in the grass. I was surprised to see that, but it makes sense, even though I was thinking to put a few "cold ones", you know a few PBR's there. Well, next time. "Cracklin' Rose" was a number one hit for Neil Diamond in August of 1970, but Crackling Rose the wine, was a kind of bogus basically "bum wine" not too far removed from Annie Green Springs, Reunite, Ripple, Cold Duck, Thunderbird, Boone's Farm or MD 20/20. Any of the afore mentioned strictly suitable for winos and teen age under age consumption, where beggars can't be choosers.

The two pot buoys are my father's buoy colors. If you think about it, there's a lot of "twos" in the painting. Two cats, two birds. The "duality" if you will of the self portrait also being a teen age Neil Diamond. Two in one. Well, the radio on the front step in front of the door of the shack used to be in the window up above, but I didn't like it there, so I moved it down. I'm tinkering with the idea of turning it into a phonograph. But it's just a notion, right now.

In "todays version" of the painting you can also see that I've worked on the island "Raspberry Island " at the end of the "co-op road". Also Hupper's Island is more in focus. At the end of the road I've re-placed the building that WAS there, with a "bait truck", hence giving an "unobstructed view" to Raspberry Island. The two old cats (and they are "old" scruffy mangy ones, kind-a wharf-cats) are getting ready to fall on their "manna from heaven" or in this case a few fish that fell off a bait truck from heaven, on the way down to Giant Davis' bait house that used to be at the end of the road. "There's plenty for all".
It occurs to me as well, just incidentally that my father, "Old Cony" taught me a game of "Old Cat" which was an evidentally popular sort of scrub town ball kind of game amongst the kids growing up in Friendship at the turn of the 1900's. Old Cony told me they often didn't have a baseball like how we know a baseball today; it was often a few "old socks" wrapped tightly together. The number of players in the game determined the number of bases. Hence "1-old cat", "2-old cat", etc.

Well at any rate, the LP (also known as an "album"), in the lower left hand corner is evolving as well. The LP is what is going to "contain" the written material that I'm going to put on the front of the painting, since this is an oil painting on canvas, and I don't care so much to put any writing on the back of a canvas. Not that I won't , because I have and do, it's just the way this painting is going to work out.

Other than that you can now see the Port Clyde America Flag on the side of the building there, which you can't see in the photo that's up above, because it was badly cropped, (and well, it was just barely in there in the one up above anyway). The old wooden lobster traps have gone from a more "newish" look they used to have when they were wooden to a more settled and weathered grey look.

I've also been tinkering with the window in the shack, & extended it. I'm truly not satisfied with it. That's my mother and my father in the window. Something is going to change in the window pretty soon.

cwo

Down through the hands of our gospel elders, I have come to realize. . .or, it's not the size o' the cup, but how hot the coffee stays. . .

Seen through the eyes of innocence. . . .



"When I was young. . .when I was just "this tall" knee high to a grass hopper, with no extra to spare, but just a little shaver going about things with little shaver ways . . who would know. . .who would ever suspect, I would close my eyes and dream of all of these things".





My Father and my mother. . .and if you look close enough. . .

". . . when I was young sitting in the top of the world at Cony's shack and the rain was pattering on the roof like the footsteps of thousands of angels, how could I know anything else other than all was well with the world. . .in innocence, all innocence, through the eyes of a child . . . . .how it is sometimes I think of how easily I could go back to that old fish shack door: "Cony's. . ."
I'd lift that rusty old latch and open it and step into that other world again. Hear again the soft hiss of the rain on the roof and the water. . .the cove. . .the sea. . .
Listen for those voices I grew up hearing, knowing and loving. . .being all the while every blessed moment thankful to hear them again.

"Compass me back. . ."

If you live long enough, you get to see how everything is a curse and a blessing. The trick is to keep rising above -- that's all there is to it, and that's all there ever is to it, in my never to be so humble opion. To keep yourself open to the blessing, because when you don't, you become a victim. And as much as I love Port Clyde, don't think I haven't thought of walking away from it. I think the best of us have, who have walked those Port Clyde roads; that were born and bred down there, and some do, and some don't. It's the love/hate thing maybe. But try and put me on the spot about it, and I get contrary about it. I dunno. It doesn't matter. It pretty much boils down to how you can take the boy out-a Port Clyde America, but there's no takin' the Port Clyde America, out-a the boy. It's a connection that can't be broken. There is this need in me to keep connected, that's all I know.


So, tell me, who'd have thunk it? Who indeed, in their wild-est dreams, that this place -- "Old Cony's" fish-shack -- humble as all get out, would have become the place of such fertility for me.

It's the place where it all began.

Even though the place is long gone from the physical world. . . torn down for the sake of progress over an eye-sore by the cove I grew up on, I come back to it over and over again, in my minds eye. Here I am to chase it down, and capture it again, in the wind, and the rain, and the snow, and the sunshine. Season in, season out. In writing or in paint -- ''In sickness and in health" -- HA!" -- more POWER TO 'EM these stardust ephemeral things that we call memories. Paintings, writings, you do it anyway, because it's what YOU CAN DO, and after awhile if you do it long enough, it becomes your life's work. I can't walk away from it, and I can't walk out. I got no choice. My paintings as are my writings are my bit of dream chasing, I guess. And just how do you chase a dream, exactly? There's probably just as many answers to that question as there are dreamers to dream. So you just go for it. How do you even catch onto it, much less hold it, you ask? Well again, that's up to you. Just remember, such things are made out of stardust in your hand, and may well be as fragile as a fire-fly caught by you as a child in the early days of spring. Home is where the heart is, so they say. It's a story as old as time, and still reaches out to comfort us. We all chase that elusive love. . . and we have it all the while.

"Old Cony", well, that's how I think of him, so that's what I call him. He's my father. Floyd Benjamin Conant, is his full real name. He is the son of Benjamin D. Conant and Grace Nevada Hussey, both out of Friendship, Maine, just across the St. George River. I am the son of "Old Cony" and Annie Dodge Oakes. Annie, " Old Cony" and I lived above "Old Cony's" fish-shack on Fisherman's Cove on what is now the co-op road, Port Clyde America. It's the place where I'd look out the window across the cove toward Monhegan Island, a straight shot out the mouth of the harbor. It's the place by that window up above the wharf there, where I sat on the tall wooden stool and dreamed. It's the place where I grew up. I was fresh as a fish out of Rockland General Hospital when my father and mother brought me down route 131 and they set up housekeeping up a-top the fish shack that was to be my home for the first 6 years of my life.The weathered shack is home, through the wildest driving seasons, and the calm sun warmed days of the heart. Some days it feels like it must have felt in Avalon, I think. "Old Cony's" fish shack, the cove, the sea just out beyond the harbor of Port Clyde. It has become the central point that informs my art as much as anything I know. "Old Cony's" fish shack. . . even though it isn't much to look at, it is one of the eldest of my muses.

Ok, that's all she wrote.


cwo

" A tiny soliloquy for Annie"

My mother,
Annie Dodge Oakes
Nov. 15, 1920 - Feb. 23, 1992
____________________________________

There are not really ANY words I can usefully come up with to tell you or otherwise convey how it's the weirdest feeling in the world to lose the person that brought you into it. Funeral parlors ought to have a bar serving straight shots to keep you "likkered right up" to get you through it; because it's such a shock to the system experience as it is -- to "go orphaned" in the world. It's even weirder still when they've been gone for longer than you even knew 'em for. Gets ya where you live, sometimes. God love 'em, too, there are days that come around where the feeling comes over you unbidden where you'd do just about anything to hear their voice again. Or just to sit and have a talk. . the talk could be about anything, "the weather, even" it doesn't matter. So today, my mother's been gone 15 whole years, which is more or less the "half-way" point of the time we had together mother and soning it over in Port Clyde. Amazing. Thoroughly, amazing. These little anniversaries are called euphemistically... "mile stones". My father, "Old Cony", has been gone since 1971. He died in the wee hours of the mornin' on the day after my mother's birthday -- like he just hung on those few extra friggen hours by the skin of his teeth, so he wouldn't have to stand accused of givin' up the ghost for her birthday. I'm just kiddin' -- but you know, I do kind-a secretly wonder -- in the "what WAS THAT ALL ABOUT" way -- the one when you put your hand up to cover most of your face, all the while peering out through your fingers. Although "being on the outside lookin' in" is a whole different story than being on the "inside lookin' out" -- son of Annie and Cony, or no son of Annie and Cony; I'm pretty sure their love affair had grown cold as a dock plank in January, or in this case, February, by then. They passed each other on the street like they were "over it" those couple of times I saw them on the main street going about doing whatever it was they were doing at the time. My mother going to the the "Port Clyde General", "Old Cony" to the post office. What-ever. By then Cony's fish house on the cove where we lived along what is now the "co-op" road was in pretty sad shape; holes in the roof and windows busted out of it. "Old Cony" was in kind of a similar state of being, himself, stiverin' around the Port Clyde streets. By then he was roomin' at the "Ocean House" and my mother and I were living beside the Baptist church in one of the Balano tenements. At any rate he didn't seem to come around so much anymore and sing "Turkey in the straw", like he used to. No-sir-ree. I was just about 15 years old when ''Old Cony'' died, and in my 36th year when my mother did. Of course "Old Cony" was born in 1900, and my mother in 1920; so there was a little "discrepancy" to begin with, since "Old Cony" would have been 56 and my mother would have been 36 when they had me. I'll be 51 when this August rolls around, which is about 5 years short of how old "Old Cony" when he became a proud pappy. Makes you wonder the twists and turns of one's fate, and how it doesn't matter what condition your condition is at the time. If they hadn't have by destiny met and been lead, I wouldn't have been here to tell the story. And that would have kind-a sucked, since all told it's been a pretty damn good life in spite of how I can be my own worst enemy sometimes. All I can say in this introspective moment I'm having today, is as I look back, I often was blind that another's passing isn't the end of a relationship, but in a greater sense, the beginning of a more enduring one; one that's got some real substance and power to it, if we let it in.



cwo

Of "Night Air", ancestral love ballads, and Port Clyde wolfs (sic) singin' 'round the door. . .

"'When he paints wolves in the streets and fields of Port Clyde, one can hear the wolf at his own mother's door. . . ' "

David Grima, from his March 30, 2006 article on Charles Wilder Oakes, in Rockland's Courier-Gazette entitled: "Reaching New York."

"Night Air," 2006 Oil on paper, 22 x 30 in.
Private Collection, Denver, CO.


I did a drawing this morning for a new "wolf painting;" one in the vein of "Night Air," that was sold at the Outsider Art Fair in New York City a year or so ago. . . but it is a different one of course, and in it's own way "demanding," because of all the details I envision coming about in it. It didn't take long to fathom it's going to have to be bigger than the 22 x 30 inch paper format that I've done for the wolf paintings in the past. I'm thinking instead of being done on paper, this one will in all likely-hood be done on canvas or panel. It would look a little like this:

A lonesome moon shadow besotted brook goes to the cove, like how it is near "Johnny's Wharf" on Horse Point Road in Port Clyde. Two Wolfs (sic) survey the scene. No shortage of woods to head off into should it be necessary. There's a few fish shacks sitting cold and blue hued on the left over dish of moonlight shining down on the Port Clyde wharfs, heavy set now with lobster gear that's being brought ashore. Just beyond, the fishing boats sit snugly moored in the lee for the night, in safe harbor. All is clear. We see a big white ghost birch tree, festooned with autumn leaves and below that there's a plethora of pot buoys that washed up in the cove over the summer. The buoys are strung up like Christmas ornaments, dangling here, there, and everywhere. In behind the white ghost birch tree sits a salt water farm house, with the light on, inviting and warm; because home is where the heart is. In the mid-ground far enough away from the wolfs, there's a Blue Crane Heron standing stalk still in silhouette where the stream meets the mud flats. He's waitin' on his evenin' meal to make a slip up and come in too close. All is quiet and still except for there's an old gramophone outside the farm house ell. It is cranking some old well worn scratchy "parlor music" tune (probably that old time tune "Red Wing", that was all the rage at the turn of the 1900's). All the musical notes waft up the side of the ell of the building and join above the roof to become a birch bark canoe stranded (and lurching slightly) on the chimbley (sic) top. In the canoe there stands a Native American Indian and his maiden, (who is seated) and she is with child. She has one eye open, and one closed. Can you tell me, is it a "wink", or is it a secret side of fate, she's conveying? He is standing up in the canoe and has his tomahawk embedded in the wily ol' harvest moon. He's single handedly hauling them along up to the moon on a stream of an almost misty curling current of pungent wood smoke. Another Blue Crane Heron is sitting in the front of the canoe, like some wise old grizzled pilot bird that he is.

cwo

"Port Clyde's Renegade Painter," from February, 2007 Down East Magazine

Outside, Looking in
The paintings of Charles Wilder Oakes reflect a hard-knock life lived with humor and gusto.
Michaela Cavallaro, Portrait by Benjamin Magro






Welcome to the house art built," Charles Wilder Oakes says, climbing the steps to his home at the head of Harrington Cove in Spruce Head. But he's not just referring to artistic touches like the mosaic of a leafy vine he laid into the floor surrounding the wood stove or the attractive way in which he turned salvaged decking lumber into floorboards.

No, Oakes is referring to the fact that, for much of his fifty years, he survived by bartering his dense, fantastical oil paintings of life in Port Clyde for whatever else he needed -- some backhoe work to dig out a pond in his front yard, his red Chevy Cheyenne pickup truck, his RCA refrigerator. He even traded a painting for a portion of the funeral expenses when his beloved, irascible mother died in 1992.

The barter deals were necessary because, unlike many struggling artists, Oakes is unwilling to put his painting on the back burner while he earns a living. "He's sacrificed a hell of a lot to be an artist," says Dona Bergen, whose Mars Hall Gallery in Port Clyde represents Oakes. "He's lived in poverty for many, many years to do what he wants to do."

But the days of digging returnable bottles out of snowbanks for grocery money are quickly receding into the distance for Oakes. (His paintings now sell between $650 to $28,000.) Thanks to intervention from a few well-connected patrons -- Bergen being one of them -- Oakes' career is poised to take off. For the second year in a row, he will show paintings at the Outsider Art Fair in New York City -- last year, all five of the pieces he showed sold quickly. This year, he's got a larger space at the fair, as well as a one-man show at a nearby gallery that runs into early February.

It's pretty heady stuff for the kid who grew up poor in a shack on the edge of Port Clyde Harbor. But Oakes seems to be taking it all in stride. He notes that he kicked a pretty powerful drinking problem last year -- "I was drinking fifteen to nineteen sixteen-ounce PBRs every night and still painting," he says, shaking his head in wonder. Oakes' first can of Pabst Blue Ribbon -- and quite a few after that -- came courtesy of his uncle Walt Anderson, the fisherman and local character who was a muse and model for Andrew Wyeth [Down East, September 2001]. Though Oakes kept the carousing up for years, last spring he went through an introspective period. "I spent a lot of time putting the house and land together; it's a metaphor for putting me back together," he says. "I could see I've got to quit drinking, I've got to trust that the paintings are going to come. Walking through that, it feels like I've been richly rewarded."

Ralph Saltus, a New Yorker who has summered in Maine since the early 1970s, feels strongly that Oakes' moment has come. Saltus first saw Oakes' work a few years ago and has since taken him under his wing, not only buying three of his paintings but also talking up his work in Manhattan and eventually making the connections that led to Oakes' inclusion in the Outsider Art Fair. "He has, to my mind, one of the most thoroughly original styles and folk inspirations and color I've seen in many years," Saltus says. "He's entirely genuine; he's not affected at all. His paintings are from a wellspring of many experiences in Port Clyde, with the best and the worst that's gone on there."


Oakes knew early on that he wanted to draw and paint. A book that he and Bergen are compiling of his work -- Oakes writes stories, essays, and poems that go along with many of his paintings -- includes some of his earliest drawings, such as a pen sketch, dated 1973, of a mouse hole as seen from the inside. Even at age seventeen, Oakes was creating intricately, detailed images that reward the patient viewer. His early attraction to the artistic lifestyle is evident in the motto he chose to run next to his senior portrait in the yearbook: "A poet of life, a painter of beauty, and a minstrel of love."

Margaret Lewis, an art lover and a selectwoman in nearby St. George, took an early interest in Oakes, picking up art supplies for him and signing him up for art classes. While Oakes says he's thoroughly indebted to Lewis -- "She was as much a savior as a patron," he notes -- the art classes didn't exactly take. "It was snotty, highbrow summer people trying to teach this local street urchin about art. But I didn't follow what they wanted," he says.

Indeed, Oakes' vision is singularly his own, rooted as it is in the particulars of his personal history. The Ex-Wives' Clambake, for example, really does feature all three of Oakes' former spouses, although he notes with a grin that the two women in the center appear a bit more amply endowed in the painting than they do in real life. Every detail in the thirty-six inch by forty-eight inch painting is significant; the buoy in the foreground, for example, displays Oakes' father's colors, despite bearing his mother's name. ("You might say my mother and him jumped the fence," he says, explaining that he wasn't given his father's last name since, inconveniently, the man was married to someone other than his mother.) A bait bag just like the one in the tree hangs in Oakes' second-floor studio, and the burgee that says "Herring Gut" is both a nod to painter William Thon and a reference to Port Clyde's original name.

"I probably try to pack a little too much into each painting," he admits. "One of my ex-wives used to say to me, 'You've painted five paintings into that one -- now go get us some money.' "

Though The Ex-Wives' Clambake was finished in 2004, Oakes continues to tinker with it. He recently built a ten-inch wide frame for it that includes a mosaic border constructed out of glass and broken pottery he found in the cove where he grew up. "It's likely that some of this stuff came from my folks' house -- it's likely something my mother broke over my father's head," he says, clearly pleased with the possibility.

In paintings that Oakes has begun more recently, the writing has begun to move from the back to the front, to become more integrated with his colorful, slightly off-kilter depictions of day-to-day life in the Port Clyde of his youth, a place where existence isn't easy but where good humor and a certain mysticism are pervasive. "I call this stuff a bootleg version of folk art," he says.

Bootleg or not, Oakes' work is easy to appreciate, even if the life that inspired the work had its grim moments. As Ralph Saltus puts it, "It hasn't been easy; he certainly had a colorful childhood. But," Saltus continues, "he portrays it with compassion, with warmth, and with humor where I think many others might grumble."

It's just possible, Oakes thinks, that thirty-five years of stubbornness, hard work, and sacrifice will pay off. "I've stuck to it, wondering if the lights were going to go out," he says wryly. "But I just don't know how to do anything else proper."