Through the medium of oil paints, Tarlin uses color, composition, and composition to emulate a feeling or stimulate a recollection of a place. “A walk in the sunshine on a bluff on Orr’s Island, while bombs were dropping on civilians in Ukraine, led to my painting ‘Complexity and Calm,’ she explains, “an image of a flowering hedge filled with interlocking brambles and vines reaching for the light against a clear blue sky and sea side vista.”
“Like the social world in which we live, nature presents our strengths, oddities and failures in full display: towers of granite, twisted thickets, crumbling shores, potential underfoot and powerful storms. This confluence of human qualities, attributes, and imagery from Maine is what I paint…”
On Wednesday, August 26th from 2:00 to 3:00pm, Tarlin will host an afternoon of tea and conversation at the library. She’ll share photos and discuss the influence of travel and the experience of other cultures on creating art, in particular a recent visit to the coast of Cornwall and to London's Tate Gallery to view a show of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable’s paintings. She’d love to hear your art-related travel stories too!
About the Artist
Joanne Tarlin paints semi-abstract symbolic landscapes in her studio in Harpswell, Maine. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, Boston, MA and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design. She is currently President of the Union of Maine Visual Artists. Her work is exhibited in Bayview Gallery, Brunswick, ME and in GalaRay House, Boston, MA.
Artist Statement
The paintings created for this show are reflections of how I view the world: beautiful, sublime, threatening, and filled with controversies and disagreements.
The imagery is drawn from my surroundings in Maine. I live on a peninsula where trees, granite, brush, wild roses and more line the coast. I have witnessed weather from shores high above the Atlantic on the east side of neighboring Orr’s Island. Recently, I crossed the ocean to visit London and Cornwall. I walked the trails of Land’s End where the English Channel and the Atlantic meet. The heaths and moors, soaring sedimentary cliffs, bluffs and sandy beaches couldn’t have been more different than my local shores. Some of the paintings’ qualities are drawn from this experience.
Like the Romantic poet Charles Baudelaire, who wrote of the torment of love with metaphors from nature in his folio “The Flowers of Evil,” I too am in love and tormented. I love life, being surrounded by natural beauty, living in Maine and traveling to experience other cultures. I’ve traveled to Cuba, Morocco, France, Russia, Viet Nam and Spain. In all these places, I met friendly, talented people and explored our planet’s natural wonders.
Knowledge of activities antithetical to my principles riles me up with an energy that finds release in painting. I make dynamic marks, select vibrant colors and vary textures even as I present soft atmospheres with blooming flowers and pastel sunsets.
