"We will dip into the red ribbon trail here, which is going to go into the ancient forest. That's this dark green layer on the map, also known as the cathedral woods, or the old growth forest. That's land that's really been untouched."
Tolly Kaiser, a rising sophomore at Bowdoin college, is leading his daily tour group into the woods on Monhegan Island.
Anyone who has spent time on Monhegan, a small island 10 miles off the coast of Maine, knows how much artists love to paint there. Famous artists like Hopper and Kent have captured the light and landscape of the island going back over a century. Now, an exhibit from Bowdoin College and the Monhegan Museum is using that rich artistic body of work as ecological data.
Armed with a laminated stack of images of paintings, Kaiser, the summer intern at the Monhegan Art Museum, will take us on an hour-long guided tour of some of the most iconic paintings made on the island — by showing us some of the exact spots they were painted.
We start at the lighthouse, and follow him single-file down a trail through the trees.
"So now we're going to walk into the cathedral woods, and I invite you to use all of your senses as we sort of cross into the cathedral woods. There's a threshold that you can feel. There's a temperature difference. The ground changes. It gets a little more spongy, the scent changes, the color changes," he says.
And so does the sound. It's very quiet in the old growth. The ground is so dense with pine needles that not even our steps make noise.
Kaiser holds up an image of a painting from 1930: Emil Holzhauer’s “Cathedral Woods.”
"This looks so strikingly similar to how we see it today, because this is one of the parts of the island that stayed largely the same," Kaiser says.
The painting depicts a shaft of sunlight piercing through the dark canopy where a tree has fallen down. And right in front of us, a felled tree creates essentially the same scene. It feels like we've stepped back in time.
Artists have been visiting — and painting — this little island for more than a century and a half. And in that time, they've documented what feels like every inch of Monhegan's approximately one square mile. Through studying the work these of artists over time, the creators of the exhibition, "Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island," are able to trace and tell a story about the way the landscape has changed, and why — and the ways it has stayed the same.
Bowdoin College biology professor Barry Logan has been studying a parasitic plant called dwarf mistletoe and its effects on spruce trees on Monhegan for the past two decades.
When he saw a painting from 1955 of some young spruce trees that could very well be the exact trees he'd been studying, a lightbulb went off, he says.
"We've got this beautiful form of data, if you will, in the form of these landscape paintings and forest interiors," Logan says.
He realized those artistic works contained precise details of the ecological history of parts of the island — snapshots from a time and a place. Logan, along with Frank Goodyear, co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and Jennifer Pye, director and chief curator of the Monhegan Museum of Art and History, co-created the exhibition. Together, the trio selected the works and wrote essays for the show and an accompanying book.
Through the exhibit and walk, we can follow the story of grazing sheep turning the island to pasture, of the sheep's removal giving way to young forest and shrubbery, of the introduction of deer threatening the young forest and spreading ticks, and of the forest's recovery after the deer were removed.
And the researchers made some unexpected discoveries along the way.
"Now we have documentation from an artist that that mountain ashes were here as early as 1915, which changes the whole perception of what we knew," Kaiser says.
Through the exhibit, attendees can follow the story of how grazing sheep in the 1800s turned the island to pasture, of the pasture slowly giving way to young forest and shrubbery after the sheep were removed, of the introduction of deer which threatened the young forest and spread ticks, and of the forest's recovery after the islanders decided to eradicate the deer nearly 30 years ago due to the spread of lyme disease.
Logan says, overall, he thinks the exhibition tells a hopeful story about conservation.
"I think of it as a really hopeful story around land conservation that you know, these were heavily disturbed. As forests go, they couldn't have been more heavily disturbed. The forests were removed, and yet, without a whole lot of intervention, no tree planting on Monhegan to speak of, or elsewhere, really, like the forests have returned, if you allow these places to they will return to forest."
As for Kaiser, he was tasked with bringing the exhibit out into the wild.
"I was just told, like, go hike every trail. And so I did that to find the spots," he says. "I've made a map where I sort of pinpointed the coordinates where some of the most famous paintings that we have in the gallery were done."
Out on the Headlands, Kaiser points out some white spruce trees that are dying off — they've been infested with the dwarf mistletoe parasite. Kaiser says, while some islanders want to see the parasitic plant eradicated, dwarf mistletoe is native to the island, and is simply doing what it must to survive.
"We need to respect that this is how the island's ecology is going to go. The island's ecology is constantly changing, and this is another chapter in that story," Kaiser says.
A story told through paint, pastels and photographs.
"So thinking about how artists depictions have been showing us what we've seen in in the history of this island, and how artists will continue to show us how this land looks," Kaiser says.
Some 400 acres, nearly all of the Monhegan Wildlands, are preserved and managed by the non-profit land trust Monhegan Associates. But according to maps and illustrations included in the exhibit, it could easily have gone a different way; at one point, an architect drew up plans for hundreds of summer cottages along the headlands.
The tour ends out on the Whitehead cliffs, an iconic part of the Monhegan headlands. Kaiser shows us a piece by Edward Hopper. The painter likely stood exactly where we are standing today. Though the painting isn’t included in the exhibit back at the Monhegan museum, Kaiser added it to the walk because it was a favorite of his grandfather's — an artist from Cape Cod.
Although Kaiser has headed back to school, Museum Director Jennifer Pye and volunteers will keep up the art walks on Thursdays and Saturdays through the end of the show. Pye says the walk has become an essential extension of the exhibit.
"I think seeing this, going out there, and coming back in again, you get a deeper understanding of the work," Pye says.
"Art, Ecology, and the Resilience of a Maine Island" runs through the end of September.
