Oil & Water Unwavering eye for art made Thon a legend in his own time Port Clyde man represented bygone generation of artists

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Just days before Bill Thon died on Dec. 6, art writer Carl Little called him the last of a generation. Collector and art dealer John Whitney Payson described his work as more than real. A Maine governor once compared his artistry to that of Maine legends Homer and Marin and Hartley.

Even at 94, in failing health, Thon had the broad, strong hands of a builder, and why not? The long shed on one end of his Port Clyde home was lined with tools befitting a man who constructed his own house – a trio of drills hanging on one wall, a row of hammers, several pairs of pliers, a vise, nails and a bucksaw.

Next door was the living room with a sloping view of the ocean, but there was no picture window in the workshop – his studio. In the shed, the sea and the sloops, the trees and the rocks that found their way onto paper or canvas came from inside the artist.

William Thon was a painter, and moreover, one who chose Maine for his home and his inspiration more than a half-century ago.

Near the end of his life, Thon spent only brief periods in his studio. Macular degeneration destroyed his central vision, to the point that he worked only in black and white.

“But he hadn’t missed a step. It was almost intuitive at this point,” said Carl Little, who writes about art and filmed Thon for part of his Maine Masters series.

Little is the former associate

editor for Art in America, and comes from a family of artists – his mother, his brother, his uncle William Kienbusch.

But watching Thon paint, Little said, “was the first time I felt like I wanted to do it.

“He had all of this watercolor floating around on the paper, and by certain manipulations he brought out shapes – trees, rocks. I could imagine what the first days of earth were like.”

Thon had been drawing since age 6, but the life of a prominent artist was nothing anyone could have predicted. He painted his first ship, probably, while tenting on Staten Island with his family. His only materials were house paint and a bit of tent canvas. Later, of course, his depictions of ships and other facets of the sea were a large part of his six-decade career.

Thon dropped out of school and worked first in carpentry, brickmaking and laying out advertising. His only formal training came in a few weeks of night school.

But always, there was his art, often coupled with his love for sailing.

“In 1933 I went on a schooner to Cocos Island off Costa Rica, looking for treasure,” Thon recalled in an interview three weeks before he died. “We were eight months on the boat, left New York in February. I had a journal that I kept, sketches I made. We had the usual storms you run into, cold – everything you owned, you had on.

“We went through the Panama Canal,” he said. “They sent water to flood the locks, you did some bouncing around. We had a man fall overboard, but we fished him out OK.”

Thon was past 30 before his art started to get real attention with a painting shown by the Corcoran Biennial Exhibition in 1939. A few years later, he joined the U.S. Navy for service in World War II, a period during which he took two steps that would set the course for his life.

He and his wife, Helen, purchased some long-hoped-for coastal land, a few acres in the Maine town of Port Clyde.

In addition, Thon submitted a painting, “East Wind,” to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for “Artists for Victory,” a wartime exhibit on contemporary art. Works in the show numbered more than 1,400, but “East Wind” stood out, according to the owner of New York’s Midtown Galleries, Alan Gruskin.

“With little color, but dramatically lit, somewhat reminiscent of the great American romanticist Albert Ryder, it contrasted the darks with the richly textured whites to evoke the mood of a desolate and frigid wintry night,” Gruskin wrote in 1964 in “The Painter and His Techniques: William Thon.”

At the time of the show at the Met, Thon was serving on a subchaser in the Atlantic, but he and Gruskin came together some weeks later, with the result that Midtown represented Thon for more than a half-century.

After the war, the Thons built their house in Port Clyde. In 1947, the artist received the Prix Rome, which took him for a year at the American Academy in Rome, where he was a member, trustee and juror.

“Ultimately, I spent a total of four years in Rome,” Thon said. “I was twice made artist-in-residence.”

A 1958 sketch showed the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, waiting for the news of the election of Pope John XXIII.

“For several days prior to that,” Thon said, “the cardinals were meeting and casting ballots. If they disagreed, the smoke was black. They put up white,” the sign that a pope had been chosen. Later, Thon and other members of the American Academy were privileged to have a private audience with the pope.

“He blessed us all,” Thon said, pointing out that the moment made an artistic impression as well as a spiritual one. Kneeling before the pontiff, he recalled, “I couldn’t take my eyes off his red Renaissance shoes, realizing the design was 300 years old.”

The effect on Thon of his time spent in Rome was “enormous,” he said. “Seeing the history of art unfold in front of you was a revelation, putting your hand on a stone and knowing it was 4,000 years old.”

Even in the 1950s, Thon worked both in oils and in watercolor. Ever the builder, he would lay on the oils with tools such as putty knives and spatulas.

“And kitchen pancake turners,” he added. “I used to take my wife’s tools. I was experimenting, you see.”

Steel wool, sponges, other blotting items and even razors would be used to manipulate the paints when he did watercolors, using lots of water. With these paintings, the trick was not to apply the colors too heavily.

“The charm of watercolor is its transparency,” he explained. “If you lose that, you lose the whole charm.”

Often, a thin line of India ink was the basis of his spare trees.

“I say they’re trees, but they could be anything,” Thon said. “It makes pretty good logic. You can do whatever you want with a tree.”

Both in oil and watercolor, he had often painted in a segmented “prismatic” style, with the various sections of a picture presenting different angles. In the 1950s, critic Alexander Eliot termed the approach the “flawed crystal.”

Weather was a frequent Thon subject – hurricanes, wild oceans, wintry scenes. But there’s no question that boats and all manner of watercraft were a favorite to the end.

Ernest Ingersoll’s 1898 “The Book of the Ocean” sat on a table in Thon’s studio. Off in a corner, a pair of rubber boots was plopped near a stack of National Fisherman magazines from 1984. Ship models were everywhere throughout the home.

“The shape of a boat, to me, is a beautiful sculpture,” he said. “I had a Friendship sloop – I had that built. I used to race in the annual Friendship Sloop Days.” What kind of a captain was Bill Thon?

“Stern,” he said with a pretend frown.

Not all the items in his studio were related to the sea. In the middle of the space was a simple chair, kind of old. The charcoal sketch hanging nearby wasn’t a Thon, though it was dedicated to him: “To Bill, with love.”

The artist was 19-year-old Freedom Hamlin, a special friend and student at the Maine College of Art in Portland. Hamlin, whose mother, Heidi Stevens, worked for Thon, said she always was learning during the time she spent with the artist.

“We first started just talking,” Hamlin recalled, “and then he was telling me how to paint and what materials to get. He would look at my homework, and he painted in front of me.”

Thon didn’t think it was possible to teach art itself.

“You can teach mechanics,” he said. “You can teach painting. That little essence we call art, we really don’t know what it is. It’s very personal. If it isn’t, it isn’t any good.”

But Hamlin was learning.

“He told me what he saw, and that was teaching me,” she said. “He was really incredible – how he perceived the world. I want to get that, too.”

Indeed, Thon told a group in Bangor some 30 years ago, “It’s not what you look at that’s important, but what you see.”

Thus he would look at magnificent sights in Italy, for instance, then “distill” them into paintings back in Maine.

As Thon told Alan Gruskin for the 1964 book, “It seems to me that painting is largely a matter of the spirit, and the eyes and hands of the artist and the tools of his trade must be made to obey it.”

Thon was “never a photorealist,” explained John Whitney Payson, owner of Hobe Sound Galleries North in Florida. He purchased Midtown Galleries from Gruskin, and his Midtown Payson Galleries represented Thon in the 1980s and 1990s.

Payson described Thon’s work as “more than real. He captured the sense of the sea more than just about any artist I know. When you looked at a Thon you could smell the salt. You could feel the salt spray on your skin. They’re very much mood paintings. He just painted from the heart, really.”

Himself a Thon collector, Payson noted, “Different people like him for different reasons.”

Then-Gov. Kenneth Curtis, in awarding Thon a Maine State Prize in 1970, compared his works to those of John Marin, Marsden Hartley and Winslow Homer.

Over the years, purchasers of Thon paintings have included actress Dinah Shore, collector Joseph Hirshhorn, and Bangor businessman Curtis Hutchins. Thon paintings are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum.

When his wife died a year ago, Helen Thon left a collection of some 50 paintings to Bates College. The school conferred an honorary doctorate on William Thon in 1957.

Though his eyesight had diminished, Thon continued to paint. A lifetime of experience and memories made up for what his eyes could no longer do.

After all, he told Gruskin for the 1964 book, some paintings “are the spontaneous result of an immediate experience, others are seen through years of time and thousands of miles removed.”

Thon’s work, both current paintings and older pieces, are available through the Caldbeck Gallery, which mounted an exhibit this past summer.

What impressed Cynthia Hyde, who owns Caldbeck with husband James Kinealley, was how Thon’s work “just speaks to people when we put on a show. New people come – younger people fall in love with the work.”

And, she pointed out, his work continued to evolve in black and white.

Thon never was one to ship a painting off as soon as it dried. He needed some time to “live with” a piece before he was convinced it was finished.

“Hang it up awhile? Oh, sure,” he said. “I never let anything go unless I’ve had it two or three months. I get so excited about it, you see. I have to study it, see if it holds together.”

Then the viewers do their part.

“There is no art – except what you bring to it,” he pointed out. Call it a partnership between the artist and the observers. “It’s like a language we’re talking, we’re speaking. I’m able to communicate with them.”

And the message?

“That the earth is so beautiful,” Thon said quietly. “Please, come share it with me.”