Don Stone, Susan Gilbert, and Alice Boynton position themselves on the grass between Iannicelli's drying laundry and the poppy patch. Ted Tihansky and Alison Hill put a lot of body English into their work, so they stand on an adjoining lawn to get some elbow room and a different point of view.
``You could circle Kathie's house and paint for days," said Stone, who first came to Monhegan in 1958 and taught workshops on the island for 40 years. He won't say it himself, but he's the unofficial dean of the current generation of Monhegan painters.
``The challenge," said Stone, ``is to go somewhere on the island you've been before and paint like you're painting it for the first time."
There's probably no view on this 1 -square-mile island that has not been scrutinized by someone with a brush in hand. White Mountains landscape painter Aaron Draper Shattuck was the first on record, arriving by schooner for a sketching expedition in 1858, when fishing and flaking cod were the main occupations out here some 10 miles from Maine's midcoast. By the 1870s, locals had begun taking in artist lodgers. They've been coming ever since.
The Lupine Gallery represents about 60 of Monhegan's summer and year-round artists, a number that's ``only the tip of the iceberg," according to gallery co-owner Bill Boynton. Artists cherish both the distance from the distractions of the mainland as well as the easy give-and-take of a small, isolated community. The gallery provides a good overview of Monhegan's current painting scene. While abstract painters abounded in the 1950s and 1960s, the realism of plein air landscape painting dominates today. And not all of the canvases depict the wild headlands, some of the highest ocean cliffs on the Maine coast.
``Monhegan is known for its cliffs, but most of the artists like to paint the village," Boynton said. ``The buildings are real, humble. It's a working village -- not Camden."
