From music to art

A couple of weekends ago I did something I’ve been wanting to do ever since I first heard their ad on the radio (good ol’ WBACH again): I went to visit the Wiscasset Bay Gallery in the town that claims to be the “prettiest village in Maine.” Quite as much I love listening to music, I love looking at art. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that these two, along with traveling and writing, are among my primary joys in life (and what are yours?) But looking at art is a pleasure I rarely indulge in these days, for some murky reasons, not least of which is that I very rarely do anything for pleasure these days. I work, eat (and cook, and grocery shop, and clean up), and sleep. That seems to be it, to far too great an extent. I could now go into the reasons for this being the case, but we’ll save that for another time.

I don’t know if it really is the “prettiest village in Maine” – seems a rather presumptuous claim to me – but Wiscasset certainly has all the requirements: big old New England houses, with big old New England trees, little shops along the short business stretch of Main Street, which is also Route 1 (which you can take the full length of the Maine coast, if you’ve got all the time in the world and the patience of Job). The shops lean heavily in the direction of Antiques, which is typical of small Maine towns. I sometimes wonder: where do all these antiques come from? How is it there are enough to fill all these hundred of shops?

The village is up one of the myriad jagged fingers of the sea that make the Maine coast so tattered. To see it today it’s hard to believe that in the 1700s it was the largest seaport north of Boston. Where on this particular Saturday afternoon I saw only one small motor boat, complete with dog, there would once have been lined up a dozen tall-masted sailing ships.

The gallery, which is right there on Main, a short distance from the bridge that spans the Sheepscot River, had plenty of lovely art, that was depressingly expensive. There was one large seascape by the artist Keith Oehmig that I would have purchased on the spot for my friend Ernest – who loves the sea, and even more, where the sea meets the land: beaches, small seaports, docks and marinas – had it not been that the $8,500 price tag was out of my league. But, then, for this Starving Librarian anything over, say, $50 would be out of her league. I committed the amusing faux pas of asking the genteel saleswoman – and the salespeople in art galleries always seem to be genteel, or insufferably hoity, so rare to encounter just plain folks in such positions – about the artist “whose work you seem to have so much of – is his name Ohmia?”

“Eh-mig,” she pronounced, (I’d read it wrong, thought the final ‘g’ was an ‘a’.) “And actually, that’s my husband. This is his gallery.” I felt suitably foolish, but she laughingly assured me that everyone got the name wrong, and she did not seem to be offended at what might have been perceived as a wondering why they had so much of this one particular artist’s work.

Actually, most of his paintings are good, and a few are quite good. And I think he must be a pretty remarkable person – according to their web site he began collecting and dealing in art in 1985, at the ripe old age of 22, having graduated from college only the year before. So here he is at 45 with his classy little gallery, and he paints. Nice work if you can get it. And oh, yes, he’s originally from Tennessee. Here’s obviously someone who chose his home...

On my way back to my car – parked down the side street that lies just above the river – I heard the hoarse yelling of a train, signaling its approach to a crossing. This little side street ends at a public boat slip, and just before that is the railroad line. So I got to watch an old train, that looked like it was from the 50s, come chugging in, pause long enough for people to get on or off, and then roll away, toward (as I later learned) its ultimate destination of Rockland, farther up the coast.

A perusal of the Internet told me that this was the Maine Eastern Railroad, that runs May through October between Brunswick and Rockland, allowing passengers to see all the little coastal towns and scenery in-between. And this makes me think ‘hmmm.’ Because another of the joys of my life is trains.