Why is it hard to tell the truth?” the painter Robert Shetterly asked a group of sixth-graders gathered around him at the Blue Hill Consolidated School library.

“You can get in trouble,” one of the pupils answered.

“It can make you feel scared,” another piped in.

“Right,” Shetterly said.

As the children spoke, a row of Shetterly’s portraits, depicting Rosa Parks, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Walt Whitman, formed their own audience behind him and bore silent witness to the discussion. They are part of a series of 50 paintings that Shetterly is working on that portray Americans who tell the truth. When they are finished – he has nearly 20 done so far – Shetterly plans to donate the collection to a library or museum.

“You couldn’t live with other people if you couldn’t trust them,” Shetterly said to the children. “We count on people, and most of the time, they tell us the truth.”

But what happens when they don’t?

It’s a question the Brooksville artist has wrestled with since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. After his initial horror subsided, he began to feel hopeful that the tragedy would cause the U.S. government to reassess its place in the world. As reports surfaced that leaders knew of the possibility of the attacks beforehand, Shetterly’s hope turned to anger.

“As soon as you start that cycle of finding out that you’re being lied to – whether in your government, your church or your family – it begins to make you suspicious,” Shetterly said during an interview in his Brooksville studio. “We all value the truth so much, but at the same time it seems so rare and it seems strange that it requires courage to be able to do it, but that’s true.”

He wrote letters to Maine’s senators and representatives. He wrote editorials and letters to the editors of local newspapers. But his anger remained.

“I began to think I needed to be able to do something that wasn’t just feeling angry,” he said. “I needed to take that anger and turn it into something that I do best, which is not writing flamethrowers to the editor.”

So he did what he does best – paint.

Shetterly, 56, came of age in a politically charged era. He was shaken deeply by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The Vietnam War left him disenchanted. And the political climate after the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as the growing talk of war with Iraq, pushed him to his limit. When he talks about politics, he speaks passionately and unwaveringly. When he started the portrait series, he was dissatisfied with the country’s leadership, so he looked to other leaders.

It all started with a quotation from Walt Whitman, which he had pinned to the wall in his studio: “This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown.”

He thought Whitman’s words eloquently expressed what’s important to him, so he painted a portrait of the poet and scratched the quotation deep into the surface of the piece. Shetterly thought it would help him work through feelings of helplessness, and it did for a little while.

“I thought that was going to be the end of it,” Shetterly said.

As it turns out, that was just the beginning.

“America has had a lot of great and courageous leaders in every realm – politics, culture, religion. There are people who have dared to tell the truth,” Shetterly said. “My own anger about being lied to, I was transferring it from me to these people who had been great truth-tellers and letting it come through them.”

His regular style of painting – figurative but ambiguous and surreal – wasn’t working for him anymore, so he decided to put it aside and dedicate his time to paint portraits of Americans, such as Frederick Douglass, Robert F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt and Mark Twain.

“The work he’s been doing up to now is wonderfully surreal and enigmatic. It asks more questions than it answers,” said Carl Little, an art critic and author who lives in Mount Desert. “With this newer work, there is an answer – it’s in the literature, writings, speeches and sayings of these individuals, and in their actions.”

The more he painted, the more he wanted to paint. So he set a goal of 50 portraits, which he plans to donate to a museum or library. He is in the process of writing grants to fund the project, because he has no intention of selling the paintings. And he doesn’t want to separate them, because he feels they are more powerful together.

“I want them to stay together and have a conversation with each other,” Shetterly said. “I want them all there so you get the energy of all these people together.”

The figures in Shetterly’s current body of work evoke traditional portraiture – light, luminous faces against stark, somber backgrounds. The body blends into the darkness, so that the face is the strongest element. He starts with the eyes, and he isn’t happy until they stare back at him.

“I want the likeness to be almost as though they’re coming out of time,” Shetterly said of the paintings, some of which depict living people, others of which portray historical figures. “I want that sense of them present as spirits.”

He then scratches a quotation into each painting, to show the viewer how each of his subjects made a difference. Underneath Rosa Parks, the civil rights hero who took a stand by sitting down, he etched “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” Henry David Thoreau’s suit, which resembles a tombstone, is carved with the epitaph, “The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.”

“I really want the quotes to be a punch in your gut,” said Shetterly, who has a big, black notebook full of notes he has taken while researching each of his subjects. “If you were looking at a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt, without a quote, you would kind of recollect something about who she is – she was Franklin’s wife, she was an important American in the ’40s and ’50s – then you look at the painting and go on. With the quote, when you look at the picture, you start to think they’re actually speaking directly to you and the condition of our lives at this moment.”

Though the paintings speak specifically to Shetterly’s political views, their message is universal. During his visit to the Blue Hill Consolidated School, his message had less to do with terrorism and war than with truth and doing the right thing.

“I think the way he approaches it in the way of truth-telling, not necessarily in a political angle, but truth-telling as a basic philosophy is very important for these kids to hear,” said Margaret Baldwin, a longtime art teacher at the school. “It’s something they’re constantly struggling with in their own lives, to have integrity, to not be influenced by their peers, to be responsible. Students, they need to find out the bigger truth, and not just what’s told to them, so they can make good judgments.”

Baldwin, who was a neighbor of Shetterly’s when he lived in Surry, draws with him on the weekends. During one of their meetings, they were talking politics, and he showed her the portraits. She thought her students would respond to them and asked him to bring them in.

“I love them,” Baldwin said. “I think they’re incredibly powerful. They really speak to you, not just the words, but the expression on their faces. They really lock you in. They really challenge the viewer to be true to their own self and sure of their identity.”

And they do the same to Shetterly. With each portrait, he finds himself engaged in a conversation with history. And he, too, is challenged to be truthful and courageous.

“I look into their eyes, when I get their eyes right, and they look in mine,” Shetterly said. “I really care what they think of me – am I going to live up to their expectations?”

According to Carl Little, he already is. The paintings have created a stir both in the art community and the community at large.

“I think Robert is doing some really important work, probably his most important work in a lot of ways,” said Little, who first saw the work during an exhibit at Frankie’s cafe in Ellsworth. “I think this is going to another level. This is really making a statement: Look at these people. Listen to these people. They tell the truth.”

Robert Shetterly’s portraits will be on view at the Blue Hill Congregational Church through March. They then will travel to the Ellsworth Public Library and the Blue Hill Library.