It was cold. Unforgiving. Relentless.

Last winter’s conditions weren’t ideal for plein-air painting in Maine. But in the midst of the freeze, splitting time between shore and studio, John Walker created some of the most arresting works of his career.

“John Walker: A Winter in Maine,” a collection of visceral, abstract landscapes, thick with paint and caked with mud, is on view through Jan. 8 at the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor.

“His use of color is outrageously inventive,” said Bruce Brown, curator at Rockport’s Center for Maine Contemporary Art, where the show made its debut in July. “They push, push, push. Everything just pushes – the use of materials, the buildup of surface, the sense of composition – everything goes right to the edge and a little bit beyond.”

A native of Britain, Walker has directed Boston University’s graduate painting program for the last decade. He took time off from teaching last winter to explore the coves and “ice cakes” near his cottage in South Bristol. Though he has summered in the midcoast village since 1970, he only started painting the landscape there six years ago.

“I finally found something I could paint that was somehow akin to my aesthetic,” Walker said by phone from Boston. “I just thought it was all too beautiful to paint and it wasn’t until I found something that felt literally down-to-earth. I found the dirtiest cove I could find and I found all these wonderful things.”

In recent years, he has introduced his students to the wonders of the Maine landscape. Each fall, a group of young painters accompanies Walker for a week in South Bristol. They are well aware of Maine’s place in art history, but that’s less daunting than the prospect of capturing the essence of what Walker calls “a spiritual place.”

“In the end, it’s a very humbling experience,” Walker said. “All that history is superfluous at that moment.”

In his own work, Walker shies away from the scenic in favor of the motion and activity that define the feeling of a place. His enormous paintings depict words from roadside signs and dark images of the sea and sky in glossy, built-up paint and swaths of mud culled from the cove. He used the technique in an earlier series of paintings about his family’s experience and losses in World War I, and he has perfected it over the years.

The gritty, dirty texture makes the paintings feel real.

“I just wanted to paint it as I saw it,” Walker said. “I see them as representational. If it’s a wet day I want it to be a wet day. I want all the nuances I get into the painting. It will be often an amalgam of sequences and times and weather conditions.”

Walker may well have redefined landscape painting, as well as Maine’s role in the art world. On viewing the show in Rockport, New York Observer art critic Hilton Kramer wrote, “Not since John Marin burst onto the scene in the 1920s and ’30s have paintings of Maine succeeded to a comparable degree in setting a new standard for pictoral innovation in the art world at large.”

These paintings don’t evoke the rugged coast of Homer or the romance of Wyeth. They are singularly Walker.

But the painter brushes off such praise.

“That was a surprise,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t agree with that, of course. He is fallible, [but] that was very kind of him.”

Bruce Brown, the CMCA curator, says the glowing review was justified.

“First of all, they’re like no others,” Brown said. “That is the thing. In all the years that I’ve looked at landscape paintings, John has a truly unique vision of them.”

Brown was blown away when he first saw Walker’s work several years ago in Boston. Though he is represented by Knoedler and Co. in Manhattan and his work has garnered national attention, he’s a relative unknown in Maine. He keeps a low profile, and has shown his work only a handful of times in the state, but “A Winter in Maine” may change that.

Before the Rockport show, Brown didn’t know what to expect – the paintings aren’t easy or pretty – but the response was overwhelming. Viewers spent hours staring at the work, and for the first time, two people picked up chairs and moved around the gallery so they could sit in front of each painting.

“You simply are riveted to them,” Brown said. “They draw you in. They are so powerful you can’t escape them, even if you want to.”

That’s the reaction Walker hopes to get when he puts paintbrush to canvas. It’s an elusive goal, but that gives him the incentive to continue.

“That’s really the first thing – how do I imbue this square or rectangle with feeling?” Walker said. “Suddenly, it’s like a little lightbulb goes on and the canvas just seems to glow. It’s very rare. I think that’s what keeps you going. That’s why you keep painting, to get that transcendental type of thing.”

Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 and kandresen@bangordailynews.net.

If you go …

John Walker: A Winter in Maine

Where: University of Maine Museum of Art, 40 Harlow St., Bangor

When: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday, through Jan. 8

How much: $3; no charge for museum members and UM students with Maine Card

Contact: 561-3350