Solitary Prey Tenants Harbor artist Barbara Ernst Prey finds inspiration in Maine surroundings

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For the first time in her life, Barbara Ernst Prey faced a blank canvas and couldn’t paint. People in her hometown on Long Island, N.Y., expected the artist to use her brushes and pallet of watercolors to express the sorrow and rage they could not give voice to in the wake of Sept. 11.

“Go paint,” a patron told her. “You bring the beauty and hope we need now.”

But like her friends and neighbors, Prey simply was too numb, too shocked by the enormity of the tragedy to do anything. Forty people from her adopted community of Oyster Bay – friends, neighbors and the parents of her children’s friends – were listed as “missing” when the twin towers crumpled. One of those friends she had known since college.

In the aftermath, Prey, 46, did something she had never done before – retreated to her family’s summer home in Tenants Harbor. She had spent summers in Maine painting for nearly 30 years, but had always left when the August nights grew chilly. In the fall of 2001, she drove north hoping to recharge the desire that had defined her life.

Driving down a familiar road on the St. George peninsula, Prey passed houses known to her from years of traveling the same route. Out of the corner of her eye, however, she caught a flash of red fluttering behind a porch rail, a hint of blue wrapping a newel post in an embrace, and white stripes in windowpanes.

The flags, hung on front porches, on the sides of barns and in front windows, embodied not just the collective grief of the nation but Prey’s personal grief as well.

“The first painting was this little flag wrapped around [the flagpole of] an old Finnish church,” she said. “It was really an emotional experience – just exciting finding things I wanted to paint – things I wanted to say. It rekindled my painting, but they were stark, simple, up close, not landscapes with the broad vistas I had done before.”

Her work now on display in the Blue Water Gallery in Port Clyde is a combination of the scenic landscapes she is best known for and the close-up detail she recently discovered could tell just as compelling a story. All the paintings in her current show, “Conversations: From Maine to the White House to Space and Back Again,” are of local sites.

Prey painted “Ghost House” in a cove near Port Clyde, where she first observed the scene from her kayak. In the foreground are two lobster boats, but beyond them, through the mist, is the old captain’s house still waiting for some sailor’s return. In movie terms, the painting is a medium shot, rather than the long shot or distant view shown in “Evening, Lobster Co-op.”

“Garden Party” is Prey’s close-up – the view she found so satisfying in her post 9-11 studies. The pink and purple flowers dance against a white clapboard backdrop lit by clear, pure sunlight.

Interiors also are a relatively recent departure for the artist. “Bridal Basket” was painted from the center aisle of the Old Harrington Cove Meeting House, its box pews inviting yet slightly scary – like the prospect of marriage for some.

These new paintings belie the frenzy of attention Prey’s recent commissions have brought her. In 2002, she was commissioned to paint the International Space Station for NASA to hang in the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. She spent a year studying models and sketching.

“It was an amazing year in so many different ways,” she said. “It stretched me visually and artistically. It stretched my whole world because I had to paint something not built yet.”

While working on that project, first lady Laura Bush called “out of the blue” and asked Prey to do the 2003 White House Christmas card. The Bushes were familiar with Prey’s work. A cousin has given them two of the artist’s landscape paintings. Prey’s painting of the Bush family’s home on Walker’s Point hangs in the private residence of the White House.

From April to August of 2003, Prey made half a dozen visits to 1400 Pennsylvania Ave., sketching and photographing rooms in the White House. In the end, the first lady chose a watercolor of the Diplomatic Reception Room, the place where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his fireside chats. The card went out to a record 1.5 million people and Prey found herself the subject of intense media attention.

As she was finishing up the Space Station painting, NASA officials asked her to create a painting as a tribute to the seven astronauts who died when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on Feb. 1, 2003. The hardest part, she said, was finding a way to depict the tragedy in a way that made the painting an uplifting memorial.

In the end, she and NASA decided on a painting that shows Columbia lifting off at the launch pad. That instant, with all its power and possibility, is one all shuttle astronauts cherish, according to Prey.

“The energy and the excitement of the takeoff was something they had worked for all their lives,” she said. “They worked so hard to get where they were. This must have been a great moment for them.”

The past few years have been full of exciting moments for Prey. After her Columbia tribute piece was unveiled on the first anniversary of the astronauts’ death, Prey went to Oslo, where she participated in a seminar with Norwegian artists. Her work also is exhibited in U.S. embassies around the world through the U.S. Arts in Embassies Program.

It is to Maine, however, that she returns every summer to get her creative juices flowing. Although she was raised in New York, her roots in Maine go back to the 18th century.

Prey’s interest in art literally began at her mother’s knee. As a little girl, she spent hours watching her mother, Peggy Ernst, head of the design department at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., paint at her home studio in Manhasset, Long Island.

Prey sold her first painting to former New York governor Hugh Carey when she was still in high school. A graduate of Williams College and Harvard University, her paintings have been purchased by several major museums, including the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Taiwan Museum of Art, and private collectors.

The artist is thrilled to be back in Maine, showing Maine paintings.

“These are the first paintings I’ve shown since the White House Christmas card and the space paintings,” Prey said. “They took me out of my usual realm into a whole different venue. That really stretched my painting ability, but now I’m back to painting what I love to paint and I think that really comes out in the new work.”

It has also brought her visually back from the isolation of grief into conversations in a community.

The first painting in her post-9-11 series was of two red Adirondack chairs, solitary, empty and facing in different directions. A similar painting in the new series shows six nearly identical chairs, intimately close, gathered from across the lawn for conversation at sunset.

Prey expects to continue her dialogue with the land, water and light that fill her summer days in Maine.

“I have years of material waiting to come out,” she said.

Prey’s work will be on display through Aug. 22 at Blue Water Fine Arts in Port Clyde. For information, call 372-8470 or visit her Web site at www.bluewaterfinearts.com. Judy Harrison can be reached at 990-8207 and jharrison@bangordailynews.net.