The first painting on Carol L. Douglas’s list of favorite pieces in her collection is one she wanted to buy, but didn’t.
It’s an acrylic painting by Bruce Bundock. Douglas knows Bundock through the Rye, New York, event Painters on Location. “Bruce has a knack of seeing the beautiful in the mundane; he really does love the regular folks of upstate New York and their lives,” says Douglas. “He’s one of the few artists I’ve wanted to buy because I believe his work will appreciate over time, but I didn’t buy this. He sent it to me as a gift.”
“From Loblolly,” by Maurice J. Moss, 1980, oil, 9 x 12 in.
The Maine artist is drawn to Bundock’s work by both his process and his approach. “I like his paint handling, his composition, and his drafting, but most of all I like his worldview,” says Douglas. “He really makes no distinction between the grand and the prosaic.”
Serigraph by Stanley Handelman, 1992, 6 x 9 in.
Next is a plein air piece by Maurice J. Moss. “I bought this painting secondhand,” says Douglas. “I know nothing about the artist other than he was an Exhibiting Member of the Rockport [MA] Art Association from 1979 to 1992. The painting is of the Straitsmouth Island Light from Loblolly Cove. I’d wanted to relocate to Maine for years, and although this is Cape Ann in Massachusetts, it looks enough like mid-coast Maine that it represented that for me. I love its loose brushwork and the color sensibility of the painter, who drives our eye to the lighthouse by diminishing the foreground greens and emphasizing the red of the keeper’s house.”
“Rising Tide at Wadsworth Cove,” by Carol L. Douglas, oil on panel, 12 x 16 in.
Finally, Douglas turned the spotlight on an Israeli artist, Stanley Handelman. “I lived in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood for 21 years,” she explains. “Since the serigraph has white space in lieu of a specific setting, I can mentally project the trees and houses of our old neighborhood into it. That neighborhood is vastly different from where I now live in Rockport, Maine. It hangs in my front foyer as a reminder of where I’m from.”
