Hump Day Art -- Richard Roflow Watercolor

Here is yet another painting from the Blue Hill Bay Gallery, in Blue Hill, Maine. It is a watercolor by Richard Roflow called South Deer Isle Bridge. It measures 16 by 16 inches.

I thought it was an amazing watercolor. I realize this photo taken with my iPhone is horrible. I had to take the picture at an angle because of the reflective glass over the painting. Even with the horrible photography though, you can see it is an exceptional work. The water alone is quite an effect. I'm not art expert, but I thought this painting was very good.

The following is from an article in the Mainely Art section of the Just Art web site: Deer Isle [Maine) painter Richard Roflow was one of the winners in the 1995 National Park Academy of the Arts competition, Arts for the Parks. Most of the artist's paintings are inspired by the drama of the Maine coast and coastal weather.

"He rarely paints on a sunny day. It's always misty, foggy, and dramatic. He paints those days that Mainers know as being a Maine day," said Barbara Entzminger, whose Bar Harbor [Maine] Birdnest Gallery exhibits many of Roflow's paintings.

"I fell in love with Maine by reading the Kenneth Roberts novels when I was in high school," said Roflow. But it was more than 20 years later when he and his wife, Jerry, first traveled to Maine where they bought a wharf-side house on Deer Isle.

"I consider myself a light painter. I try to paint the light I see and how it creates distances," Roflow said, explaining the prominence given to plays of light in his compositions.

"Roflow captures the qualities of atmosphere and its light-color shows which most of us hardly notice," writes Fran Watson. "Tiny droplets of moisture in the air act as color magnifiers, bathing landscape in eerie glows of uncommon intensity for brief moments, transforming the ordinary into the exotic. The most familiar objects attain an importance through his eyes as he renders them with a combination of softness and accuracy. His depictions are tinted fragments of hushed time, caught in the manner of masters like Corot and Daubigny whose visions changed rural simplicity into mythological magic."