One of the great gifts of living in Maine as a painter is that the palette changes completely four times a year. Just when I’ve settled into the color language of one season, the whole world shifts and I’m working with an entirely new set of colors. It keeps my painting fresh and forces me to stay observant.
Here’s how the seasons move through my studio and onto my paper.
Spring: Tender Greens and Quiet Gray
Spring arrives late in Maine — later than most people who don’t live here expect. March is still winter. April is mud season. The real spring doesn’t start until mid-May, when the trees finally leaf out and the world goes from bare gray-brown to green practically overnight.
The greens of Maine’s spring are unique. They’re not the saturated, dark greens of summer. They’re pale, translucent, and yellow-tipped — the tender green of new leaves that haven’t fully unfurled. On my palette, spring means sap green, green gold, and lemon yellow, mixed with the cool gray-blues that linger from winter in the sky and water.
The light in spring is soft and uncertain. Days alternate between pale sunshine and silver overcast. I paint spring scenes with diluted washes and soft edges — the whole landscape feels like it’s holding its breath, waiting to fully commit to the growing season.
Summer: Full Saturation
Summer is when Maine earns its reputation. The palette explodes. The ocean turns deep blue to turquoise depending on the light. The spruce trees are so dark they’re almost black, creating dramatic contrast against the bright sky. Wildflowers — lupines, daisies, black-eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s lace — pour color into every meadow and roadside.
My summer palette is my most vivid: cerulean blue, ultramarine, phthalo green, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, quinacridone rose, and pyrrole orange. These are the months when I work with the most saturated pigments, when the paintings practically vibrate with color.
The light in summer is long and generous. Golden hour stretches from about six to nine in the evening, and the quality of that late-day warmth is extraordinary. I do most of my plein air painting during summer, chasing that warm, raking sidelight that turns the granite coastline to gold and deepens the blue of the water to indigo.
Autumn: Warm Fire and Cool Air
Maine foliage is legendary for a reason. The sugar maples turn shades of orange and red that look digitally enhanced but are entirely real. The birches go pure butter yellow. The oaks turn deep russet and bronze. Against the dark green of the spruce and pine, the deciduous colors are impossibly vivid.
My autumn palette is the warmest of the year: burnt sienna, raw sienna, yellow ochre, cadmium orange, pyrrole red, quinacridone gold. I mix these with the cool blues and violets of the sky to create the temperature contrast that defines autumn light — warm earth tones under cool, clear air.
Autumn is also when I paint the most food — farmers’ markets are overflowing with heirloom tomatoes, squash, apples, and preserves, all in that rich harvest palette. My kitchen becomes a still life studio. The same warm colors that appear in the landscapes outside appear in the bowls and cutting boards inside.
The season is brief and urgent. Peak foliage lasts about two weeks, and the pressure to capture it before the leaves fall adds an intensity to my painting that shows in the brushwork.
Winter: Stripped to Essentials
Winter in Maine is not for everyone, but as a painter, I find it essential. When the leaves are gone and the color is stripped away, what remains is structure. The architecture of bare trees. The geometry of stone walls emerging from snow. The long, blue shadows that stretch across a white field at three in the afternoon.
My winter palette is the most limited and, in some ways, the most beautiful: ultramarine blue, burnt umber, Payne’s gray, raw umber, and touches of warm violet. White — the white of the paper — does most of the heavy lifting, standing in for snow, sky, and the pale winter light.
Winter paintings require restraint. The temptation is to overwork them, to keep adding detail to compensate for the lack of color. But the strength of a winter scene is its simplicity. A few dark trees against white. A barn at the end of a road. The curve of a frozen stream. The most powerful winter watercolors are the ones where I stopped early and let the paper breathe.
The Fifth Season: Fog
Maine has a fifth season that doesn’t appear on any calendar: fog season. From late spring through autumn, the Maine coast is regularly wrapped in dense maritime fog that transforms everything.
Fog reduces the world to its simplest elements. Color becomes muted. Edges disappear. Distant objects fade into a soft gray that blends with the sky. Painting fog is an exercise in subtlety — working with the palest washes, the softest edges, the smallest tonal shifts.
My fog palette is almost monochromatic: cool gray mixed from ultramarine and burnt umber, with tiny touches of muted color for any foreground objects. These paintings tend to be my quietest and most atmospheric. They’re about mood rather than spectacle, and they appeal to collectors who value serenity.
How Seasons Shape My Collection
If you browse my Maine Landscapes collection, you’ll see the seasons moving through the work. No two paintings have the same palette because no two days in Maine have the same palette. That’s what keeps me painting, and it’s what gives each piece its own identity.
For more about my relationship with Maine: Why Maine Has Inspired Artists for Centuries →
