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Last fall, I interviewed my favorite working artist, Greta van Campen. I first encountered her work as a summer intern and new college graduate at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art and immediately fell in love. I hope you enjoy this edited version of a piece I wrote based on that interview.
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Gazing at a Greta Van Campen painting is like looking through an Instagram filter that smooths and portions out the world into luminous slices, dividing the Maine coastline into reassuringly geometric shapes, harmonious color gradations, and knife-sharp dividing lines, radiating out from a central point. Most of Van Campen’s paintings take Maine as their subject—specifically, the Penobscot Bay region, where green islands dot the blue bay, a welcome interruption to the viewer in the line between sea and sky. In the past ten years, she’s become a star in Maine’s gallery scene with her playful, profound oil paintings of islands, trees, and ocean that have captivated the hearts of lifelong Mainers, seasonal residents, and visitors alike.
Greta Van Campen, Sunset, Indian Point, 2019, 24x48" acrylic on panel
I spoke with Van Campen, a new mom in her mid-thirties, on the phone; throughout our conversation, she spoke slowly and thoughtfully, pausing between sentences as if to get the order of words just right. Van Campen lives in Thomaston, Maine, on the coast two hours north of Portland, in an old sea captain’s house, with her husband and their baby daughter.
In many ways, it’s hard to imagine how Greta Van Campen’s life could have gone any other way than it did; she has art making, and a deep loyalty to Maine, in her bones. The Van Campen family is a family of artists. George Ault, a prominent modern American painter active in the first half of the 20th century, was her grandmother’s half-brother, and Van Campen grew up in Thomaston, Maine, 90 minutes up the Maine coast from Portland, with two artist parents. Ault’s work, like Van Campen’s, features sharp lines—the lines of country barns, city skyscrapers, and brick factories, confronting the new features of the modern world. When I saw one of Ault’s oil paintings at the Whitney in New York last month, I was struck by the sharp, clean lines in his paintings that his great-nice’s work seems to have inherited—as well as the sharp, clear blue sky above a cityscape, sky that would have been at home in a Greta Van Campen painting.
George C. Ault, Hudson Street, 1932, oil on linen
“Art was definitely all around us” during her Thomaston childhood, Greta told me. “I don’t think I realized that other kids’ parents went to work every day. Everything we did was around the arts. I didn’t notice that it was different, it was just part of life. I was surrounded by a visual environment that I took for granted.” It is easy to trace the lines of continuity from the work of Greta’s parents, who are also represented by prominent Maine galleries, to Van Campen’s own paintings. Her mother, Susan Headley Van Campen, paints lush yet simple watercolors of country landscapes and flower arrangements; her father, Tim Van Campen, paints in a hard-edge style (more on that in a minute) and begins with the idea of representation, but overwhelmingly flirts with abstraction. “Both my parents were really influential in how I work.”
Greta Van Campen, Anise Magnolia, 2019, 6x6" acrylic on panel. Van Campen’s flower pictures (her second favorite subject) often appear as a sharpened, refracted view of her mother’s style.
Van Campen was working as an educator and an artist’s assistant after college, in Chicago, when she hit on the signature hard-edge landscape style that she still paints in today. I asked Van Campen about the mechanics of her painting style—I wanted to know how she achieves those sharp lines that captivated me. She explained: “They’re called hard-edge. My dad’s work is all hard-edge, using masking tape for the straight lines and painting in between the tape.” On Van Campen’s Instagram page, where she posts studio shots, bucolic Maine scenes, and pictures of her chubby-cheeked baby daughter, her progress pictures are littered with scraps of dark masking tape. In conversation, Van Campen seemed grateful for the technique that’s driven much of her work for the past ten years, but also frustrated by its limitations. Long, clear, hard-edge lines are perfect for painting the lines of a pink-and-orange sunset or delineating the border between sea and sky—but the technique doesn’t work as well for the trees, rocks, or people she sometimes drops into her paintings, or even the curves of the far-off islands she paints. Instead of combining hard-edge and freehand painting, Van Campen has made a habit of using torn pieces of tape to paint rounded edges. “I’m constantly peeling off little pieces of tape. For some edges I’ll use the torn part so it’s a jagged edge. I don’t know why I’ve done that to myself. I could combine the two styles, but I’ve made this rule that I can’t. The tape is as much of a burden as it is a tool.”
Greta Van Campen, Dawn, on the Rocks, 2019, 12x24" acrylic on panel
Aside from her obvious family ties, I asked Van Campen what brings her back to the Maine landscape as an artist. She answered without hesitating. “It’s the islands in particular that I love so much and love painting. When I lived down near Portland for a couple years, the coast there—the beaches just aren’t as island-y as up here in the midcoast. I felt like I was missing that when I was here [in Maine] but not in the midcoast. It’s definitely the layers of islands; as you look out at the ocean you’ll see in the foreground some closer land and then islands changing in color as you go farther in distance.” These views captivate thousands of visitors every year at Acadia National Park, up on Mount Desert Island, even farther north than Thomaston; dramatic green mountains descend into the Penobscot Bay, dotted with spectacular, verdant islands that extend into the horizon in fading shades of green and black against the midnight-blue sea.
The summer I lived up in Camden, Maine, I would often run or bike down to the public beach overlooking the bay at sunset, bathing in and absorbing the colors and gradations in sky and water. It’s easy to see how these islands could mesmerize an artist, never let her go until she’s translated all the curves and striations into bold lines, lingering to plant brushstrokes between them.
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This was a long one, but I hope you enjoyed it, and that you have a restful and safe Thanksgiving this week.
Cordelia