Island Time
Gleason Fine Art exhibits Dorothy Eisner’s work from her summers on Cranberry Island
Gleason Fine Art exhibits Dorothy Eisner’s work from her summers on Cranberry Island
After spending the majority of her seven-decade career in art traveling from Greenwich Village to the mountains of North Carolina, the rivers of Montana and Coyoacan, Mexico, in 1960, Dorothy Eisner discovered Cranberry Island, Maine, a small island near Mount Desert with a community of artists that she worked and socialized with for the last 24 summers of her life.this period of the Eisner’s career is the subject of a new show at Gleason Fine Art, in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, that opens January 1 and runs through February 28.
Eisner’s career began in the 1920s, when she studied at the Art Students League with artists like Boardman Robinson, Kenneth Hayes Miller and Thomas Hart Benton.“the 1920s were an incredible time for women who wanted a career,” notes Eisner’s daughter Christie Mcdonald.“she had this great sense that she could do anything, and there was a great energy there.”the boldness of Eisner’s work on Cranberry Island in the ’60s reminds Mcdonald of her mother’s early work, when she was first coming into her own.
Mcdonald says during her childhood, Eisner’s work as an artist
remained completely separate from her duties as a mother. It wasn’t until Mcdonald started summering in Maine in the 1960s that she saw her mother at work. On Cranberry Island, Mcdonald says, “I saw the way in which this part of her life was very focused.at times, I really had a close view of how intense her work was.”
The island was a haven for other artists, including William Kienbusch, Robert Lahotan and John Heliker, with whom Eisner came into contact with on a daily basis. Mcdonald remembers the artists coming together for coffee every morning, looking at each other’s art and encouraging one another. Her fellow artists
also appear as subjects in her paintings, including William Kienbusch II and Five O’clock, which are featured in the Gleason show.
“Dorothy loved the closeness of those whose figures she imported and transformed in her paintings,” Mcdonald writes in her introduction to Painting My World: the Art of Dorothy Eisner about Eisner’s work during her Cranberry Island years. “If it was characteristically her husband, daughters, son-in-laws, grandsons, and friends, it might have also been anyone’s. Her secret was to make this, her ‘autobiography,’ general and accessible to all.”