Meet the artists
Lundell and Maine to be featured at Art in the Park ... Naturally
BY SUSAN CODY
Neal Maine
The Seaside Mill Ponds Natural His-
tory Park is close to Neal Maine’s heart. He
donated photographs for Art in the Park …
Naturally and Virtually’s Saturday auction.
The park is not a typical park with play-
ground equipment, sport fi elds and picnic
tables. It is a place to walk and explore wild-
life and its environs.
“I’m excited about this because I think this
is a good entry point to focus on the art instead
of the science,” Maine said.
Maine has gained a lot of science expe-
rience at Mill Ponds — looking at plankton,
banding birds and taking photographs. He and
others have banded more than 147 species
there. He believes the park could be an educa-
tional resource for the whole community.
A science teacher for 30 years at Seaside
High School and a founding member of the
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North Coast Land Conservancy, Maine is per-
haps now better known for his stunning wild-
life photographs.
Maine said he laments not including more
art in his science classes. “In its true form, if
you just have scientifi c description, it’s not
very friendly,” he said.
Looking at objects scientifi cally often
leaves one stuck without seeing the larger
context.
“In the world I live in now, it’s really
about developing the art of seeing,” Maine
said. What we end up seeing is only what is
refl ected. If you look at a leaf, the only reason
you see green is because those are the light
rays that are refl ected. That doesn’t mean it’s
a leaf.
“A leaf is a lot more than refl ected green
light. It’s got a complete life. It’s interacting
with all the chemicals in the air, it’s breaking
up molecules. It’s dynamic, almost an inde-
scribable phenomenon.
“Being a biology person, I am usually
looking for live things,” Maine said. “I got
going photographing water skippers. All the
things they do. You don’t know that water
skippers have these pads that don’t break the
meniscus of the water because they’re trans-
parent, but they still block the sunlight, so you
get this deep contrast. And this is what you
see, a water strider with six little legs — and
its shadow is a whole new creature. Then if
you get the right angle between those legs that
come out, they trap a little drop of water.
“This is the art of seeing.”
Artists have the most advantage for explor-
ing how they see, Maine said. “When artists
paint or draw, they communicate what they
see in those light rays that bounced off the
leaf.”
Maine began using photography in his
classes because his young students had trouble
focusing. Suddenly, they started seeing things
diff erently, he said. While they were using
photography, they were learning biology. By
narrowing the frame of observation, they could
interact with what they were seeing.
“It seemed to serve as that intermediary
method of connecting with nature,” he said.
Maine would like to see mini workshops
at the Mill Ponds, where people could learn
about plants, birds and other wildlife. Pho-
tography, visual art, photography and birding
classes could help others appreciate what is
right there in Seaside.
Neal
Maine
Marcus
Lundell
Marcus Lundell
Artist Marcus Lundell has an unusual style
— he paints backwards. That is, he paints on
glass windows from behind the glass while
looking from the front.
Lundell likes to walk the Mill Ponds Nat-
ural History Park when he spends summers
in Seaside. It reminds him of his childhood in
Coos Bay, where he stomped around marsh-
lands, built forts and caught tadpoles.
Now he’s at home hiking daily up and
down hills with his two dogs in a nature
reserve in Santa Barbara, California.
“There are abandoned olive groves, sage,
canyons — beautiful stuff ,” he said.
Lundell is a retired airline pilot. For 30
years, he found looking out the plane window
at countryside to be mesmerizing.
“When you’re a little boy and you’re play-
ing, all those cliff s leading into the water are
right there and tangible. The degradation of
the land is always changing because of the
tides,” he said. “And it’s very similar to what
you see fl ying over deserts and mountains
and canyons. I see these miniature worlds out
there.”
One might think Lundell would choose
to paint landscapes but he has fl own to the
whimsical side of art. The images he paints
come from his imagination.
He started playing with fun characters
while drawing single-caption cartoons for
Willamette Week when he lived in Portland.
He said he had a great time painting people of
all diff erent sizes and shapes.
“It’s like a landscape of the world,” he said.
The painting he donated to the Art in the
Park ... Naturally and Virtually features a
portly gentleman from a bygone era with
bright pink cheeks, a beauty mark and a pow-
dered wig. He is posing holding a full crab
on a plate. All this is surrounded by a gaudy
golden frame.
Lundell began painting on glass in college,
when he had no money but wanted to give
his mother a nice painting as a Mother’s Day
gift. He found an old window and decided he
wanted the image behind the glass to give it a
more fi nished look. To accomplish this, he had
to paint in reverse with the foreground fi rst
and the background last.
Lundell’s light-hearted paintings show joy
he perhaps dreams up as he is walking the
beach or the Mill Ponds in Seaside.