Whose real is it?

“It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.“

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

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“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” 

Ecclesiastes

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One of the most enduring shifts both Sandy and I have enjoyed in the past two years of our accelerating loveship is a shift of geographies. Geographies of space and place, but also of imagination and dreamscapes. Of emotions and something like spirit – of artistic geographies.

Earlier this summer, we took the ferry from Port Clyde out to Monhegan Island which sits about 12 miles due south from the tip of our St. George Peninsula in the Gulf of Maine. It takes about 65 minutes to get there and when you do, you step off into a time and place which feels like it’s about 65 million years and miles from where you left.

On that first visit we stopped off at one of the many art galleries on the tiny island. Flipping through the boarded prints, we came upon an artist, Leo Brooks, neither of us had ever heard of. We were struck by his color splashes and his almost primitive rawness of joy, in his paintings of Monhegan Island’s everyday moments and scenes. Fisher peeps, dock hands, lots of fishes and brute beautiful skies and seas.

We’ve gone back to Monhegan twice since then, taking first Emy, Sandy’s daughter, for a very rigorous hiking expedition and then, earlier this humid August, Sandy’s brother David and family on a less ambitious hike. This third trip we bought one of those Leo Brooks prints we fell in love with and came back to the mainland with a mission to find more of his work.

Here’s the Leo Brooks print we bought –

When we asked framers and gallerists on Monhegan and St. George where to start ‘finding Leo’, they all said to check-in with Mars Hall Gallery (speak with Donna) on Port Clyde Road. Today, the past few days of rain finally broke and as the skies opened up we headed out with Sandy’s grandkids, Cypress and Flora. Our first stop was to check out something Sandy saw promoted on her social feeds this morning over tea – the High Season Market – then to visit Mars Hall further down the Peninsula.

We set off from our little cabin in Tenants Harbor for the short drive south towards Port Clyde. As we got close, cars were parked on both sides of the slim shoulders of Route 131, and we ditched ours and walked the last couple of hundred yards to the Ocean View Grange. We were curious to learn what a market with the neo-gilded age reference to “High Season” might look and feel like on this very un-elitist, quirky, rural sea-wrapped St. George Peninsula.

It’s difficult to describe the feeling both Sandy and I experienced walking amongst the displays of “artisan” crafts, the Japanese denim, the colorfully understated leather bags, the ephemera (ALL of it, without prices…). First we drifted across the lawns and under the tents outside the grange, then we entered the hall and that strange dis-ease followed. Everything was so curated. Just like the High Season Insta feed I screen-grabbed below.

But the organizers of the High Season Market had applied their selective curatorial skills to more than just their product shots on Instagram. Their IRL curation included the people – the ‘artisans’, the shoppers, their kids, their dogs, their babies – and it felt like they all had just dropped out of some alien sky.

Sandy and I, grand kids in gentle tow, wound amongst the tables and slipped uneasily but efficiently through the crowd and back into the Subaru.

“Strange vibe in there, very un-St. George”, I said pulling back onto Port Clyde Road heading south towards the Mars Hall gallery.

“It was like Hudson, New York” Sandy said, and I nodded a, “totally!” in agreement.

We both sensed a kind of hippie-Hamptons energy.

“Yeah, very neo-colonizer, wasn’t it?!”, I added. “Where did they all come from?”

The answer was waiting for us when we started chatting with Donna, the owner of the Mars Hall Gallery about a mile south from the Ocean View Grange.

“Oh, yes – the “influencers” you mean. This is the third year that crowd has descended. The woman who runs it is an influencer and those are her influencer friends from Instagram”, Donna recounted with an anxious ire that faded quickly when we told her we wanted to learn about Leo Brooks, and see more of his work.

Donna knew Leo and has become the de facto doyen of his work. As she showed us the pieces she had of Leo’s (and talked about the 300+ new pieces she was securing for a planned show next summer) we met another aging couple of similar aesthetic bent who were veteran Brooks stans. When the four of us stopped in front of an amazing Brooks painting of what I’m imagining titled, ‘Axe Woman’, and saw the price ($10,000) I suggested that the four of us split the cost four ways… Since we all lived here on St. George for big portions of the year, we could take turns housing the piece.

After wandering about in the sprawling, packed and welcoming gallery, discovering new artists and considering the several pieces of Leo Brooks’ there, we got back into the car and headed back to the cabin with Cypress and Flora, promising treats when we got there.

Sandy and I talked about the happy coincidence we both cherished: meeting later in life we found a partner who share such similar, quirky, tastes in art. Leo Brooks was the latest proof of this and it isn’t easy to name the features or characteristics of his work which touch us both so deeply and similarly.

His faces aren’t always as blank (literally) as axe woman’s, but the life of his subjects seems to come more through their postures and stances, their primitive blockiness. His subjects’ moment of depiction a framed capture of their work – their production. Brooks’ clouds can be surreal splotches or bands of color like kids draw. His fishes and mountains, outsized or miniaturized according to his own sense of unreal gravity and its hold on a happily cracked lens of perspective.

Driving home, considering all this, it struck me that Brooks’ body of work is as real as art gets. Its real comes as a bolt of recognition into my body when I confront his reality of a working day on the wharfs, hills, seas, cliffs and woods of Monhegan Island. The High Season “influencers”, with their over-cooled, post-suburban, Instagram-ready crafts, kids, dogs and spouses were about as unreal a scene as we’ve yet to encounter here on the edge of the sea amidst the spruce woods carpeted in moss of the St. George peninsula.

Sandy and I have just spent three wildly productive, busy yet serene months manufacturing a very particular reality here in our little paradise we named WildAir. My real has been the real of rocks as I tore up and re-assembled the craggy granite pathway leading to our cabin’s front porch. Sandy’s real has been the paints, the poems, the stenciled designs she has layered onto her Poetry Poles.

Our reals coalesced here outside and around our tiny cabin across the shimmery hot summer days of July and August. As I hauled stones up from the remains of a quarry which fill these woods, Sandy worked above me on the porch, painting her startling and brilliant Poetry Poles and installing them in our little clearing. The real of the remade granite path offering an advantaged view of her poles, standing up a colorful frame around the entry into our mossed-covered quarry, down there in the darkening real of WildAir’s spruce wood.

Here’s a snap of the finally finished granite walkway which took just a little of the workable life-span out of my back, neck, shoulders and hips these past months and it was worth it and then some…

And here’s a snap of Sandy’s first two Poetry Poles –

As I reflect on the past few weeks of hiking about these woods, islands and rocky shores, tracking the tides, discovering artists, puzzling over the clash of posh 30-something Tik-Tokkers and these aging, artful Midcoast ancients, I consider Baudrillard’s provocations about the new real as simulacra. The proof of the lie that there ever really was anything like truth for us to aim at. My real here, where the edge of this woods meets the edge of the world, is as real as real gets, for me. The closest I’ve ever felt to sharing reals has been these last few months of Sandy and me weaving our projects together here, from an away which gets less and less real with each shortening day of a late summer shared in our cove-side idyll of WildAir.