As an artist, David Little has had his share of highs and lows, the inspirational and the fallow. What stopped his complacency on March 24, 2020, ranks right up there among life-changing moments.
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In those early days of the pandemic, he came across a New York Times article about ways to find cheer at home; it contained a segment called “An Artistic Exercise in Patience.” The writer, from Montreal, Canada, mentioned renewing his interest in ink drawing, which he had found absorbing and calming in the past.
Aha! David, who started out in the seventies and eighties doing abstract paintings and Chinese calligraphy, had been pursuing other media, and then other projects entirely, for the better part of four decades. What if he too looked back? Two light bulbs went on: first the one in his head, and then the one on the third floor of his barn, where 18 years of lyrical, Surrealist-inspired works (600 or so) were stored in portfolios. He cleaned up the space and resumed working as if reuniting with an old friend. “I was so excited to go back to what I did as a young man,” he says, “to revisit my past!” Over this last year, he has produced a large body of experimental mixed media work, numerous collages and ink paintings, the latter drawing upon his earlier study of Chinese calligraphy. Much of the new work is done while listening to classical music!
David calls this his “reset,” in the most exuberant sense. “This has totally re-energized my life,” he says, “and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”
David came to OLLI through his volunteer work as a history docent. Through his affiliation with Friends of Evergreen Cemetery, he co-led a series of four artists’ walking tours, starting with the first one in 2012. Four years later these tours were incorporated into an autumn OLLI class featuring a variety of subjects from “Maine in the Civil War” to “Notable Women” to “The Sinking of the SS Portland.” He co-led these “Artists of Evergreen” tours for several years until they came to a screeching halt with the pandemic. The first OLLI course David enrolled in, “Great Choral Pieces in Great Spaces,” to be taught by Carolyn Paulin, was abruptly Covid-canceled, like all classes in the spring of 2020.
David grew up in New York. He inherited artistic genes from relatives: his uncle the artist William Kienbusch was an Abstract Expressionist painter who summered on Great Cranberry Island, and his mother, “one of my greatest supporters,” painted still lifes, landscape, and figure subjects. David started painting at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and then transferred to Southampton College on Long Island, from which he received a BA in Art. He also studied classical piano. He subsequently earned an MA and MFA in Studio Art from the University of Iowa. For two summers in the 1980s he took time off from his job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
In March 1986, while working as the Registrar at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in Manhattan, a shipper from Fine Arts Express asked him, “David, what do you really want to do with your life?” His adventures in East Madison, Maine, painting from the landscape provided clues.
The following month David moved from Brooklyn to his parents’ home on the south shore of Long Island. By November he had married his sweetheart Mikki and two years later moved to Portland. Realizing his abstract work was a hard sell, David’s focus became plein air painting. In 1988, he began a 10-year tenure at Bayview Gallery, Portland. While living in Maine, David has curated or co-curated exhibits at Bates College, UNE, USM’s Glickman Library, Fryeburg Academy, and Round Top Center for the Arts.
Around 2011, he pivoted to “a second act in my career,” this one involving writing books. “I always wanted to do it but never thought I would,” he says. Art of Katahdin, which came out in 2013, combines images of Mt. Katahdin by distinguished Maine artists of the last 150 years with elucidating text. David’s brother Carl, who has written many books on Maine art and artists, edited the book.
The book was widely recognized and won the Boston Globe’s “Best of New England” award for non-fiction in New England. It was, in fact, the first book to focus specifically on the art of the Katahdin region. And it was written in the “Great Study” room on the 7th floor of the Glickman Library!
Katahdin itself is in David’s blood. He has climbed it and painted it numerous times. In 2006 he was one of 18 artists involved in raising money to help the Trust for Public Land, along with other organizations and private donors, purchase the Katahdin Lake parcel (4,500 acres including Katahdin Lake). These lands became part of Baxter State Park.
After Art of Katahdin came out, “Everything changed.” David became a public speaker, giving many book talks. He was reinvented, and his second act lasted until he saw that momentous article on patience, during the early days of the pandemic, in March 2020.
After Art of Katahdin, David and Carl collaborated on several other books, including Art of Acadia: The Islands, The Mountains, The Main (2016) and Paintings of Portland (2018). In 2016, at the behest of Lucas St. Clair, he worked with two great scholars of the history of Katahdin and Baxter State Park, John Neff and Howard Whitcomb to produce Penobscot: East Branch Lands, A Journey Through Time.
This book, which presented the prominent historical, cultural, and social features of these lands and the importance of the people who traveled to Katahdin from the East, was written to support the case for preservation of the proposed Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. Consisting of land donated by Burt’s Bees co-founder Roxanne Quimby, the monument was officially dedicated on August 24, 2016. Copies of the small book with color illustrations circulated in the West Wing of the Obama White House, at the National Park Service, and the Department of the Interior.
David’s work appears in the latest issue of Reflections, which received an OLLI-wide Zoom-launch in February. He is an outdoorsman who loves tennis, and whose walking mileage exploring the Portland Trails system hit new highs over the past year. He helped research, write, and edit some of the seven signs along the City’s new Baxter Trail, which runs from the Back Cove parking lot to Evergreen Cemetery and honors the Baxter family for their contributions to the Olmsted-inspired park system and the State of Maine. A lifelong journal keeper, David is mulling over his next project: a combined art book/memoir addressing the struggle to build a career in art and find an authentic voice.
All is well. “I’m using the brush more freely than ever before,” David says.
His painting—and his spirit—are unfettered.
—Amy Liston