Sally Caldwell Fisher, a longtime resident of the Bristol peninsula, has been painting her whole life. Fisher sold her first painting at the age of 17, the first step of many in a long and illustrious career that has put her paintings in the permanent collections of the White House and the Smithsonian Institution. (Johnathan Riley photo)
The Midcoast has drawn tradesmen and industry because of its natural resources, but, for artists, there is an intangible quality to what exactly makes this coast so alluring.
For American acrylic painter Sally Caldwell Fisher, who resides in New Harbor, a primal sense of belonging brought her here.
Fisher, a longtime resident of the Bristol peninsula in Round Pond, Chamberlain, and New Harbor, has been painting her whole life. Her first easel was the ping-pong table in her parent’s basement in Michigan.
She sold her first painting at the age of 17, which was the first step of many in a long career that has put her paintings in the permanent collections of the White House and Smithsonian Institution and sent her as far as Japan. Yet, Maine remains home.
“Maine was the biggest eye-opening love experience I’ve ever had,” Fisher said. “I’ve always been involved in working coastal living. As soon as I moved here, I fell in love, got married, and immediately began a family down at Kennebunkport. My husband has always been a commercial fisherman.”
When asked if the love experience was with the landscape, she said, “Not just that, with everything.”
Growing up just outside of Detroit, Mich., Fisher came to the coast of Maine as a youth, visiting the lighthouse and co-ops. She recalled the strong sense of belonging she felt when first coming to Maine and tucked that feeling away to return to it later in her life.
In her early 20s, recently graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor’s degree in English, she revisited that feeling of belonging and made her move to Maine, landing in Kennebunkport.
Fisher bought a 1967 Saab station wagon and regularly filled it with seaweed from the beach to fertilize her garden. Afterwards, she would put her paintings in the back of the car and try to sell them or get them into a gallery situation.
“I drove that stinky car right down to Kennebunkport and walked into a venerable gallery, Priscilla Hartley, and showed her a couple of pieces, and she said ‘We only represent American Watercolor Society (artists).’ So, then I opened up the back of my car and she said ‘Oh, wait a minute, I can sell these. These are good,’ and that’s how it all started.”
The subjects of Fisher’s paintings tend to be natural landscapes that are real places in New England. Someone looking at one of Fisher’s paintings may recognize sights local to the Bristol peninsula.
“We owned the house across Round Pond Harbor that you can see from the Anchor Inn on the northern point. We sold it after seven years because it became untenable, caring for a house of that size, so we let it go and moved somewhere more manageable,” she said.
When asked if she missed anything about that house in Round Pond, Fisher said, “Yeah, there was this rock. This rock was very meaningful to me.”
“The house was a dream: little lacy curtains kind of blown in the wind, and so our bed was right next to a window that opened up onto the sea, and down there was a rock this big,” said Fisher, holding her arms out as far as they would go. “Filled with garnet, and it was white, very white. So when the moon was up, just picture this big white boulder with the dark ocean and sparkly garnets. I just said to myself, ‘Wow, I get to see this. I don’t know how many people have ever really seen this.’”
She and her husband, Greg Fisher, after some time living in Maine, moved to Mystic, Conn., to pursue new artistic opportunities. There, both of their work was discovered by the Mystic Seaport Museum.
“Greg did hand-carved signs and I painted on them, and we got recognized by the Mystic Seaport Museum, where we both ended up having art,” Fisher said. “Then the gallery at Mystic Seaport noticed the paintings on the signs and asked me to be in their gallery.”
Fisher’s relationship with the Mystic Seaport gallery lasted for years and led to book illustrations, shows, and big openings for her work that were very successful.
Eventually, that work was discovered by unnamed New York publishers who helped put her work in galleries around the world.
Fisher said, “I was offered an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
She said that things went well with the publishers for a while, but what they were asking her to do was turning her into an “automaton.”
“I had constant input from people whom I did not respect about what I was doing,” she said. “I wasn’t emotionally or mentally or intellectually prepared for it.”
Fisher felt a separation between her and her work, and never forgot Maine. “They wanted happy scenes from places where I have never been before and it was alienating. In my heart, I’m painting bonfires at Pemaquid,” Fisher said.
“I paint things that I’m very intimate with because that comes to me naturally. You know, sometimes I paint something I know so well that I might just get excited enough to put some light right here,” Fisher said, gesturing to a painting of coastline in Chamberlain where she and her family lived for years.
“Whether there is light there or not, it’s like, ‘I know you, I can do this.’”
Fisher described how her kids swam in the water in that painting.
“I used to do the art for Wooden Boat shows. I’ve done artwork for the America’s Cup campaigns. Even for the White House Christmas Tree Lighting, where I got to meet Bill and Hillary Clinton the night before he was indicted,” she said with a laugh.
Fisher’s contract with the New York publishers took her and her work to Japan, where she did a train tour of 11 shows in 10 days.
“That was a new kind of tired. I did not renew my contract,” she said.
The corporate world left Fisher feeling sad and separated from her work, and when asked what she learned from her time there, she said, “When it comes right down to it, it’s you and yourself and where you want to be, and what you want to accomplish. The transformation for me was immediate when I came back to Maine and opened my own gallery here: I know what rocks I like on this peninsula. I know what trees I like on this peninsula. I know where to go to find what I need.”
She recounted them as if they were old friends.
“There’s this great white pine out front of the house that makes me very, very happy: it’s a soldier, it’s a wolf. I don’t ever want anything to happen to it,” Fisher said. “There’s a twisted, twisty, little gnarled, beaten-up apple tree and Jim Gallagher’s yard. Oh, there’s a tree in front of the group home on 130 that is a remarkable oak.
“The rocks underneath the Pemaquid lighthouse, those come out and jut into the water because there are times when that is the most perfect composition I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Just those rocks, and I don’t know what it is, but I never ever get tired of it.”
“We are in the story of the rocks, and I always hope they won’t change, no matter what happens to what we have left of the earth. I just hope the rocks are (going to) be there to testify,” she said.
While the collision of elements on New England’s shorelines are important to Fisher and her work, the human elements and implied narratives may be what make her art stand out.
“A lot of people feel that the human presence trivializes a painting. I don’t feel that way. You know, they’re great schools of painting, which are all about the majesty of landscape and how meaningless we are, but I’d like to put ourselves into a landscape and watch us react to it.”
Fisher spoke about how the human element plays into the working waterfronts of the coast of Maine.
She noted how those people, so attuned to the elements they’re in, are barometers for what is happening in the natural world.
Fisher said she appreciates life on the water, living on the water, and always being engaged in one of the things she loves most about Maine.
“These spontaneous human activities that might be hard to explain to other people in the world — serendipitous things, characters working intimately with their surroundings in a very natural way, becoming totally involved in their surroundings. I bet you anything, a lot of the people right around here know exactly the trees I’m talking about,” Fisher said.
“You become embroiled in these town activities when you live in a place, which, to me, is one the better things about America, is to have this pride in whatever it is that you’re connected to in your community: here, that’s like Old Bristol Days. In this case it was clams,” Fisher said, pointing to a painting of a clam festival parade in Connecticut.
The people here know their peninsula, Fisher said.
“They know changes. You can watch these people sense the weather. You can read a lot from our working harbor, who went out today, who didn’t. I always loved the smell of diesel. I love the smell of bait. Yeah, we were part of it. We lived close so that we could always run down to the harbor and see what the guys brought in and so I was very much involved in the daily activities of people living on a peninsula. I love them. I have love for them. It’s just a way of life. That doesn’t fit all people, but those that it fits, just get it. They know when to go jump in the ocean. They know when to get out and look at the moon and they can do it. To me it’s paradise.”
For more information, go to sallycfisher.com, email sallycfisher@gmail.com, or visit her gallery in New Harbor at 23 Rodgers Road from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays.
(Do you have a suggestion for a “Characters of the County” subject? Email info@lcnme.com with the subject line “Characters of the County.”)
