ROCKLAND, Maine — Growing up in Gardiner, Connie Hayes had a lot of interest but little scholastic exposure to art, other than occasional extracurricular activities. So she took private art classes, where Hayes discovered Vermeer and the Impressionists.
And she took to reading art magazines, from which she learned to love Odile Redon and treasured an image by Ben Shahn so much she tore it out of one periodical.
Nary a Maine artist among those early influences. Yet Hayes, now a Rockland resident, has become one of her home state’s big names in painting, attracting critical attention for her Borrowed Views series and other images of Maine and beyond.
Hayes’ eye for the beauty in a space and a place, communicated by way of boldness in line, light and color, is now on display in “A Decade of Views: Works by Connie Hayes” at Dowling Walsh Gallery.
The selection of 150 paintings, including 30 pastels, features a number of Maine cities and towns including East Boothbay, Vinalhaven and Stonington, as well as spaces and places in other parts of the country and the world, which Hayes has visited as part of Borrowed Views, a now 20-year-long project.
The name “Borrowed Views” refers to perspectives captured at homes in which Hayes has been invited to be alone — although sometimes her architect husband, George Terrien, stays with her — for a certain period of time. With the owner gone, Hayes sketches and paints the home, the grounds and whatever else strikes her fancy. The owner has the first right of refusal to buy whatever Hayes produces.
Hayes has done up to seven homes a year and traveled from France to San Francisco, from Sarasota, Fla., to Lubec. The Maine homes, however, seem special.
“These are almost all treasured private places that don’t get rented, that have the history of the family or people, that have their special touches,” she said. “Many times you’ll see on the doorways their children’s marks of how they were growing. There’s a lot of tradition, especially in cottages and summer places, especially in Maine. A lot of those are on the water and a lot of tradition takes place in those houses, and it’s wonderfully quirky.”
Regardless of where she happens to be borrowing a view, Hayes paints interiors and exteriors, towns and cities, harbors and roads. The common thread is color, and her use of one aspect of a painting to highlight another.
In her painting “Iron Bed,” for example, she depicts a room using a palette of mauves, browns and pale yellows which serve to make pop one long, vertical slice of turquoise sky outside. It’s a contrast that speaks to Hayes’ motivations in painting interiors; for her, the way the exterior is framed — whether it’s a bright blue sky or deep blue water — is what is enticing about an interior.
“Light is very important to me but I think of myself as a colorist and the game of playing with colors,” she said. “I’m very interested in having a painting be dynamic and there are certain ways to check to see if your painting is dynamic, such as percentages of color in a painting. If a painting is 80 percent muted and 20 percent bright [and] not 50-50, that’s one of the things that can make a dynamic situation.”
Hayes also incorporates tiny splashes and dashes of color — glow spots, she calls them — such as in “Green and Green,” a view of Vinalhaven with a few shots of an electric green.
“I like putting in shockingly dangerous colors but not too much of it,” she said. “If I used a lot of this green, you might back away from the painting like, oh, I can’t stand it. But because there’s all this other warmth surrounding these glow spots, you can tolerate that much chartreuse.”
Reds show up often, too, whether it’s a roof or a truck or a shed — or all three, as in “Red Pickup, Red Shed, Red Roof, VH,” in which the reds form a series of steps up to the top of the painting.
“A Decade of Views” also includes work Hayes has done on her own, including a series of paintings of an island near Vinalhaven. The series is her own version of Monet’s haystacks — Hayes uses the fog-shrouded island to experiment with color and space.
“In this series I have loved the way fog can drift in front of [the island] and obscure the forms,” she said. “Each one of these is like a little laboratory. How many bright spots can I get away with? What if I don’t touch the edge here but do touch the edge there? … How can I stretch the definition of yellow?”
There are also a series of still lifes of roses, a two-year-old in-studio project Hayes often works on in winter, when she feels the need for color during Maine’s colder months.
Over the years Hayes did let Maine artists infiltrate her sensibilities. It was painter and University of Maine faculty member Michael Lewis who, while Hayes was a student at the UMaine campus in Orono, first gave her an indication she could be an artist. Hayes has also come to admire Fairfield Porter, who painted on Great Spruce Head Island.
Yet, perhaps as a result of those early years of tearing paintings out of magazines, Hayes is distinctly her own artist, with her glow spots, pops of color and hints of blue sky.
“Sometimes when I’m painting, all of a sudden I’ll do a color combination or shape and I’ll think, ‘Oh, I’m being visited by Porter or Monet,’” she said, smiling. “I’m like, that was a nice little visit and we can be friends, but this is my painting and you can’t take it over.”
“A Decade of Views: Works by Connie Hayes” is on display through the second week of September at Dowling Walsh Gallery, which is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays (to 8 p.m. Wednesdays) and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. For more information, go to www.dowlingwalsh.com or www.conniehayes.com. Hayes’ work is also on display through mid-September at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay.