Nature inspires illustrator for ‘Animals’

Rebekah Raye gazes out large windows at a mother bluebird feeding her baby in a tree. She can’t take her eyes away off the pair and the sunroom falls silent save for the gentle breeze sweeping through thrown-open glass doors.

Sitting on a green striped couch, Raye is suddenly distracted by a ruckus in her backyard. She darts to the door and calls by name to half a dozen roaming chickens, a gaggle of geese drinking out of a small plastic pool, and a calico cat sitting by two large wooden sheds.

Raye, whose home lies on a narrow, dead-end dirt road in East Blue Hill, is not a farmer. But animals are the focus of her artwork. The 47-year-old artist has surrounded herself with animals since childhood and has sought throughout her life to capture their nature and characteristics in sculpture and paintings.

Raye had never illustrated a book before Gardiner-based Tilbury House Publishers approached her last fall about painting the pictures for Passamaquoddy storyteller Allen Sockabasin’s “Thanks to the Animals.” But the Blue Hill artist knew she was fated to illustrate the tender tale.

“I had been asked by other authors to illustrate their books, but with this book I felt such an impact,” Raye recently recalled. “I got a feeling in my belly. Everything I believed in was right in this story.”

It took Raye six months to produce the series of paintings. She made numerous trips to Birds Acre in Ellsworth, Acadia National Park and beyond to closely observe animals in the wild and in captivity. Diverse reference books, some left open, are scattered about her spacious studio.

“I crave being able to see animals all the time,” she related. “Some people wonder how I can draw animals in motion. I watch them for a very long time and eventually I see the positions their bodies form and the way their muscles work when they move.”

Raye often listens to music while she works, and the drawings for Sockabasin’s book began to take shape in her mind when she heard the Passamaquoddy musician and storyteller read aloud the text in a recording.

“I played Allen’s CD and by listening to it I got a flood of images,” she said, her large green eyes lighting up. “It really helped me put the flavor of the story into my drawings.”

Raye works in mixed media, combining charcoal, pigma pens, watercolor and colored pencils in layers.

“When I begin a new work, it always goes through an ugly duckling stage,” she said. “It feels lifeless until you stumble onto the right color or shape, and sometimes I have to work a long time for this to come.”

While “Thanks to the Animals” has drawn much attention to her work, Raye is content to see her paintings and sculpture in a restaurant, dentist’s office, friends’ homes and other places in her community.

“You can walk into any house in this area and see Rebekah’s art,” said Robert Shetterly, Brooksville artist and president of The Union of Maine Visual Artists.