Art From the Heart

I found my first paying job as a fine artist in the classifieds of The New York Times in 1968. It required me to make the exact same watercolor painting 300 times. They would then be framed by the employer and sold in five and dime stores in the south under the pen name Anne Saville. As I recall it looked something like this, only better:

I forget what the pay was -- something like three bucks each -- but as an already starving artist living in New York City, it was good enough for me. After the first hundred I got a little sick of doing them, but I kept at it since I had signed a contract to deliver all 300 by a certain date. Boy, was I glad when that was over and I was free to paint whatever I felt like, whenever I felt like it.

I assumed all artists must feel that way, but not here in Maine. Many of them, if not most of those who want to earn money that way, paint the same scene over and over again: Casco Bay islands covered with green trees, floating in blue water, underneath a blue sky dotted with white clouds. The tourists like those. I have painted that scene once or twice myself. Here's one of them: 

That was fun, so I did another. That was enough. So I was mystified when I went to my dentist's very upscale office today and saw all the walls hung with like 30 paintings that looked exactly like my description above, except some were at sunrise and some were at sunset and some had dark water and others had whitecaps and some clouds were fluffy and others were flat. All by the same artist. I wondered if that's what she has in her heart, or if it's more connected to what's in her bank account.

Meanwhile, I paint what I feel, which varies from day to day. My latest painting is this: