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Category: lobster buoy

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Support the Center for Maine Coastal Fisheries

 It’s time for Stonington’s nautical auction again, but this year the selection has gone wild.
Two Boat Rock, Jill Hoy
Regular readers know that I’ve supported the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries since before I moved to coastal Maine. A viable fisheries industry is crucial to Maine’s economy, but it also is the bedrock on which our tourism rests.
In past years, the Nautical Auction featured painted buoys. I enjoyed doing them, but I’m not a craftsperson. When they expanded their auction to include non-buoy items, I jumped at the chance to submit a conventional framed canvas. This year’s submission was painted off the deck of American Eagle last summer, and is of Scott Island off Stonington.
Fish, Peter Beerits
I like to leaf through the items on offer. This year the catalog includes more than 80 items across a wide range of categories, only tangentially related to buoys. There are gift certificates for seafood, and there’s pretty jewelry. You can get a one-year membership to the Farnsworth Museum. If that’s a little too arty for you, bid on a 3.3 HP Mercury Outboard Motor instead.
Andrew Gove’s, Bobbi Heath
There are B&B stays, personal boat tours and a sea-kayaking eco-tour. There’s a sail on the ketch Guildive out of Castine, or if you already work on the water, a gift certificate toward your boat’s lettering or a certificate for haul out or put in.
Cod Fishing, Siri Beckman
One lucky winner will see his or her name in Katherine Hall Page’s next mystery. There are antique, contemporary and cookbooks on offer, and an Opinel fishing knife.
Scott Island, High Tide, Carol L. Douglas
And of course, there’s art and a selection of buoys as well. But don’t take my word for it: the whole crazy array can be viewed here. The proceeds of the sale go to support sustainable, human-scale fisheries on the Maine coast.
Two Daughters Papercut, Larry Moffet
The bad news, for me, is the timing: the auction is Monday, August 7, at Opera House Arts. The preview starts at 5:30 and the bidding starts at six. I’ll be at Acadia National Park teaching my annual workshop.
However, we can also place silent bids by emailing Bobbi Billings or phoning the office at  207-367-2708. Bids will be accepted until August 4.
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The large, angry crustacean is on his way to Maine.

The finished buoy. You can buy this!

When I blogged last month asking for suggestions about what to paint on my 2014 buoy for Penobscot East Resource Center’s fifth annual lobster buoy auction, I received four texts in rapid succession:

“Mom! Paint a giant lobster battling the Kraken!”
“Mom! Paint an enormous lobster destroying a city!”
“Mom, paint a big lobster eating New York!”
“Mom, paint a lobster battling an army in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry.”

The major change I made was adding Black Hawk helicopters.
When your four most severe critics all come up with the same idea at the same time, you have to run with it. And it fit with the idea that I had been turning over but wasn’t sure how to paint.

Signed and titled by the artist, as always.
It’s no secret to Mainers that lobster prices steadily tanked from 2005 to 2014. At the same time, restaurant prices for lobster remained high. That’s a fascinating disconnect—one I think is beautifully explained here—but the bottom line is that lobster costs more in New York because consumers haven’t a clue what’s happening in local commodity markets.  That means there’s an artificially big profit being made, and it isn’t happening on the docks of coastal Maine.

When you live in a Magical Duchy, you don’t need to go to the Post Office. You just put your package on the back of the truck and it miraculously gets mailed.
A situation that needs fixing but seems to be out of the range of mortal ken calls for a superhero. Who better than a large, angry crustacean from the Atlantic depths?

I like painting from life, but that’s a little difficult in this case.
Last week I was reading about the influence of 19thcentury Japanisme on western art and thinking I was absolutely free of it. But I have to admit that I owe a nod to Godzilla, and maybe to King Kong as well. (After all, the Empire State Building is somewhere in that mish-mosh.) The Black Hawk helicopters, however, are just modern America.

Looking around for pictures of lobsters last month, I came across this rhyton from the Met, c. 460 BC, in the shape of a lobster claw. Good to know lobsters are an eternal verity.
The auction will be held Tuesday, August 5th, 2014 at the Fishermen’s Friend Restaurant in Stonington, ME. If you’re in Stonington this summer, you can stop by and see all the buoys and vote for your favorite (as long as it’s mine). You’ll also be able to bid on your favorites online. Watch this space for more information.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. My Belfast, ME, workshop is almost sold out. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

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Oh, buoy!

Day #2. Will finish today. I love this fundraiser for Penobscot Bay Resource Center almost more than anything else I do!
If I were gonna make a habit of painting on buoys, I’d find some way to hold them steady. I painted on this one for five and a half hours yesterday, and it wasn’t my painting hand that was tired, it was the hand clutching the buoy.
I haven’t got a table per se in my studio, so I sat in the dinette in my kitchen to work on this. That had the advantage of being more comfortable, but it had the disadvantage of exposing me to my peanut gallery.
How can you tell the lobster is attacking New York? Because that’s the Brooklyn Bridge!
“Do you really think a lobster could stand on his tail like that to attack the city of New York?” asked my son.
“A lobster could theoretically grow that big,” noted my daughter, who is a biomedical engineering major and presumably au courant on matters of biology. “Unlike humans, who have a finite number of cell replications, they can keep growing forever.”
Even my engineer husband and daughters haven’t found a way to make working on this buoy comfortable. Any suggestions?
“However,” she added, “I think the lobster should be lighted from the bottom. He is, after all, in the City.”
I hate when my kids are right. But I also plan to finish this painting today, so they can have it in Stonington, ME, by May 15.


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. My Belfast, ME, workshop is almost sold out. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Help! I need ideas.

The buoy itself, awaiting ideas. Any suggestions, friends?
Last year, when I got a buoy in the mail, one of my kids asked, “Who sent us an oversized dreidel?” This year, we’ve moved on, so the question is, “What should Mom paint on that oversized dreidel?”
Once again, I’ll be participating in Penobscot East Resource Center’s  Annual Lobster Buoy and Reverse Auction. There are a lot of very witty buoys submitted, some of which you can see here.
Last year’s buoy.
Penobscot East Resource Center works to rebuild a small-scale diversified fishery where fishermen and their communities are a part of the governance of fishing. They serve 50 communities from Penobscot Bay to the Canadian border. This is the most fishery-dependent stretch of the East Coast.
If you’ve followed the news, you know that lobster wholesale prices have been in freefall—they’re somewhere near a twenty-year low. This is devastating for lobstering communities. (The New Yorker did an interesting piece on why that hasn’t translated into lower restaurant prices, which you can read here.)
So they’re a good organization, and I want to support them by painting a good buoy, one that will make patrons smile and pull out their wallets.

Gnomes are known to indulge themselves at times. I’m leaning toward painting them, but am open to suggestions.
Last year I painted a mermaid on a rock. I discovered in the process that the tapered shape of a buoy makes a wraparound painting devilishly difficult. Still, I want to paint something realistic again this year (ahem). I’ve bounced around from gnomes to fairies to gluttonous gnomes feasting on lobsters while being serenaded by fairies.
Any suggestions, friends?


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!