Maine artist Neil Welliver dies at 75 Painter chose local woods as his subject

Neil Welliver, an artist internationally known for large-scale landscape paintings of the Maine woods, died April 5 at Waldo County General Hospital in Belfast. The cause, according to his art dealer and family friend Phil Alexandre of New York City, was complications from pneumonia. He was 75.

While many Maine painters, including Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Rockwell Kent, looked to the sea for subjects, Welliver was inspired by interior regions, sometimes trailblazing into the woods of his 1,600-acre farm in Lincolnville, where he lived for more than 30 years. He bore a slight resemblance to the writer Ernest Hemingway, had a thick mustache, liked chewing tobacco and often dressed as if he were headed out on safari rather than a painting expedition in the Allagash region, one of his favorite painting locations.

Friends and fellow artists, including Lois Dodd, who lives in New York City and Maine, remember him as energetic.

“I was always impressed by what he did to the property in Lincolnville,” said Dodd, who was with Welliver in the 1960s when he first considered buying the property in Maine. Both artists were visiting painter Alex Katz at the time and were interested in purchasing land in the area. Welliver eventually turned the Lincolnville property into a nearly self-sufficient complex of buildings.

“He loved to be outside. He loved the outdoors, and that’s what his work reflects. What I love the most are his smaller works, the ones he did directly from life. I liked the touch, the observation, the immediacy,” she said.

Welliver was born in Millville, Pa., in 1929 and graduated from the Philadelphia Museum College of Art. In the 1950s, he taught at Cooper Union in New York and earned a master of fine arts degree at Yale School of Art, where he studied with color theorist and Bauhaus figure Josef Albers.

Welliver’s paintings were featured in shows from the 1950s until 2004, when an exhibition of his oil studies was held in New York City. “He views the world through the prism of ‘all-over’ abstract expressionism, filling his canvases with rich, not quite realistic detail,” critic Terry Teachout wrote last year in The Washington Post. At about the same time as the show in New York, Welliver was given an honorary degree of humane letters by the University of Maine at Fort Kent.

The signature style for which Welliver would become known – the post-abstract expressionist landscapes – emerged definitively when the artist was nearing 50, according to Alexandre.

“He came to maturity in the late 1970s,” said Alexandre, owner of Alexandre Gallery in New York. “Maine was his only subject.”

The best known of Welliver’s paintings depict birch tree stands, panoramas of the wilderness, and reflections in streams and ponds. Collections of his paintings, drawings and etchings are represented in nearly every Maine art museum, including the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art and the University of Maine Museum of Art. His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Welliver was responsible for reinventing the American landscape tradition in a modernist idiom, and his paintings function as representation and abstraction simultaneously,” said Chris Crosman, director of the Farnsworth, which owns 15 of the artist’s works. “His decision to paint the Maine landscape is very important in terms of a non- or even anti-romantic sensibility: the raw, unkempt nature of second- or third-growth forests that are often anything but ‘pretty’ or comfortable. His paintings are very ‘tough’ but with tremendous vitality and presence.”

From 1975 until he died, Welliver made as many as 14 large paintings a year, some measuring as much as 96 by 120 inches. In addition to his own works, Welliver filled his Lincolnville home with pre-Columbian art pieces and Shaker-style furniture. He was a community supporter who helped build a school athletic field and an addition to the local library, and a conservationist who bought land to preserve it from commercial development. Two years ago, to simplify his life, he moved from the sprawling, remote property to a smaller house in Lincolnville overlooking the Duck Trap River.

Welliver was actively working until two weeks ago, when his health declined, according to Alexandre.

The painter is survived by his fourth wife, Mimi Martin Welliver, his sons Titus, Ethan and John (who lives in Rockport), three stepchildren and two grandchildren. He was predeceased by his second wife, two sons and a daughter. A memorial service will be held July 22, at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Belfast. The day would have marked Welliver’s 76th birthday.