This artwork of mine, Postcard from Perkins Cove, Ogunquit, Maine, 2026 — available at the Ogunquit Art Association’s 72nd Annual Art Auction on August 1st 2026 — started started with the light. I saw it change from the window of the historic Thompson Farmhouse (1750) – the old, sturdy house on Shore Road where my wife and I lived for ten years – and it went from ordinary to pink in a way I couldn’t sit still for. I grabbed my camera and ran toward Perkins Cove. I already knew where I needed to be standing. What I needed to be seeing.
That certainty came from some good old-fashioned serendipity. You see, before we moved into the Thompson House in 2013, the space was being very actively used by Don Gorvett, an Ogunquit Art Association (OAA) artist who ran his Black Bear Fine Art Gallery out of it before relocating the gallery to nearby Perkins Cove. Some of his work was still on the walls when we arrived to move in. Some of his finished woodblocks, dark with ink, were on the floor leaning up against the walls. He came back for his belongings, and we became friends before I’d created a single piece of artwork in Ogunquit.
“There’s a lot of Perkins Cove in my art,” Gorvett told me later, “because I work with what’s around me when I draw and paint. This is where I’ve been.” He’d come to Ogunquit in 1968, right out of high school. ”I spent my first summer doing nothing but painting here,” he stated, “and thereafter, every summer.”
Gorvett was juried into the OAA in 1984 — a young artist himself once, in a town he’d go on to spend long durations of his working life in. In 2015, I interviewed him and fellow OAA artist Norman West for a feature in Artscope Magazine.
Gorvett talked about how, “There’s a certain iconography down in Perkins Cove and along the Marginal Way.”
West told me, “Ogunquit is my favorite place. In Perkins Cove the light is magic, it’s not like any light anywhere else. That’s inspired a lot of artists across the years and that’s why there’s such a legacy to this place.“
They were both correct.
In 2017 I was juried into the OAA myself — the arts organization Charles H. Woodbury helped found, grown directly out of the storied Ogunquit Art Colony (still going strong today at Barn Gallery) that has made this stretch of coast such hallowed ground in cultural history.
So when the quality of light went askew that afternoon in 2020, I immediately hurried to Perkins Cove, ran up the stairs to the patio outside Gorvett’’s old gallery, and captured the view from the same vantage point that helped shape part of how I understood this place.
It’s the vantage point of Gorvett’s woodcut Moonlight Drawbridge — an acclaimed reduction woodcut in a limited edition of 25, carved and pulled in 2015, showing this same bridge in winter, snow-dusted, lit by cold moonlight. One of the editions hangs in our home in South Florida, surrounded by the work of other prominent Ogunquit artists. But Gorvett’s Moonlight Drawbridge is one that always draws the eye magnetically – the one that showed me how to really “see” Perkins Cove. Standing on that patio in 2020, in the pink air, I was in the exact spot where Don drew his foundational sketches for Moonlight Drawbridge five years earlier.
Postcard From Perkins Cove is, in part, a piece of my artwork in conversation with Gorvett’s earlier work — my version of a view he taught me to see before I knew I’d ever photograph it myself.
The Perkins Cove Pedestrian Footbridge itself has its own history of being remade. The current iteration has crossed this forty-foot gap of tidal water since 1941, when the Ogunquit Village Corporation built it for just under thirteen thousand dollars, a year after the cove was dredged deep enough for larger fishing boats to pass through. It’s been modified since, and it’s about to be again — there’s federal money now behind a plan to demolish and replace the current bridge, adding a new harbormaster building alongside it.
What hasn’t changed over the years are some of the groups of people who gather around the Perkins Cove Footbridge. Lobstermen still work beneath it the way they did in the 1940s, when the shacks along the water were actual shacks, not yet galleries, gift shops, or restaurants. Painters still set up on the rocks nearby, easels angled toward the same view they’ve always favored.
But what is new is a third group: modern-era tourists, lots and lots of them, drawn to the same bridge for reasons that have little to do with fishing or painting. Salty air and weathered wood now share the cove with rum punch, ice cream cones, and stacks of colorful Ogunquit-themed t-shirts. It’s the same tension Don named when I interviewed him in 2015: “opportunities exist here for young artists,” he said, “even if the cost of living convinces most of them otherwise, but the art legacy here is always in danger of being swallowed up by the commercialism.”
My process for Postcard from Perkins Cove is a photographic collage process. Multiple photographs were taken separately and brought together: the footbridge on that otherworldly afternoon in 2020, the blank paper stock of a vintage postcard, an old Ogunquit postmark, and a page of my own handwriting. Arranged together and printed on Hahnemühle William Turner paper with deckled edges, they read the way a postcard from this place might, if a postcard could hold more than one moment at once – the same way Perkins Cove in Ogunquit seamlessly holds the ghosts of the past and the buzz of the present together.
My handwriting (illegible scrawl?) on the piece reads:
“The quality of light in Ogunquit misbehaves. Today it went pink. I ran from the Thompson House to Perkins Cove, camera in hand. The effect was strongest at the footbridge. It always is. Five minutes later, the world went ordinary again.”
This is the first piece in a new series of mine, and one of the most personal Ogunquit artworks I’ve ever created — built from the two things I’ve spent my life trying to get right, photography and language. It’s a representation of my memories and thoughts, of people, of place, written in the language and form of a vintage postcard.
Postcards fascinate me. In a town built on tourism, they’re often how we come to know a place’s history at all — the imagery that outlives the moment it was printed to sell. A postcard has its own life apart from the picture on it. Mass printed. Delivered to a shop. Bought. Written on. Stamped. Mailed. Postmarked. Read. Kept, or thrown away, or years later pulled out of a shoebox and sold again to a stranger who wants it for reasons the sender never imagined. And once it’s written on, it’s exposed in a way a letter isn’t. No envelope. The words are visible to every hand the card passes through before it reaches the one it was meant for. That’s what pulled me toward the form for this piece – and the future pieces in this series. A postcard tells two stories at once, and they don’t have to agree. The photograph takes you one place. The handwriting on them takes you somewhere else entirely…
