Island: Paintings by Tom Curry

by Terry Tempest Williams, Carl Little, Tom Curry

When artist Tom Curry first moved to Maine, his house overlooked a small, uninhabited island in Eggemoggin Reach. One day, while rowing across to the island, his boyhood fear of water came crashing in on him. So he decided to explore his fear head-on, and began painting the island “as a way to delve into my own darkness and seek a way back to the surface.” That series of paintings, capturing the island in all lights, weathers, and moods, forms the basis of this book. But the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. These paintings represent an ongoing “island as escape and entrapment, island as longing and memory, island as sanctuary, island as self in a sea of turmoil.” The paintings are accompanied by essays by Terry Tempest Williams, exploring Curry’s spirit of place, and Carl Little, establishing Curry’s art within the field of landscape painting.

80 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2012

About the author

Terry Tempest Williams is an American author, conservationist and activist. Williams’ writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of her native Utah in which she was raised. Her work ranges from issues of ecology and wilderness preservation, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature.

She has testified before Congress on women’s health, committed acts of civil disobedience in the years 1987 - 1992 in protest against nuclear testing in the Nevada Desert, and again, in March, 2003 in Washington, D.C., with Code Pink, against the Iraq War. She has been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of the Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda.

Williams is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World was published in 2008 by Pantheon Books.

In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfictionand a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. Williams was featured in Ken Burns' PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009). In 2011, she received the 18th International Peace Award given by the Community of Christ Church.

Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and a columnist for the magazine The Progressive. She has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College where she continues to teach. She divides her time between Wilson, Wyoming and Castle Valley, Utah, where her husband Brooke is field coordinator for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Reviews

[Yaaresse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deceptively simply idea beautifully executed. Terry Tempests Williams' writing is only the appetizer; the meat of this book is Curry's art. One small, uninhabited, non-descript isleand off the coast of Maine, a lump of land shaped roughly like a malformed meatloaf, becomes the artist's centerpiece. Curry captures the island in all lights, seasons, weather, moods, transforming it into a study of observation and perception. You'd think it would get boring, but I found myself wishing I could see these as a gallery show in their actual size. This is what your art 101 teacher was trying to get through your (ok, my) thick skull about looking at the same object different ways.

The only downside to this book is that I read it in Kindle. While I appreciate the chance to access it in that format, e-books never do justice to art and graphics. It's just an inevitable trade-off of print versus electronic formats. If you have the option, go for the print edition.

[Valerie Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Monet's haystacks, except for a beautiful island in Maine. Stunning!

[A.D. Morel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a beautiful book! First, Tom Curry's dramatic paintings fill many of the pages, one can become intoxicated with his vision of this single island that he painted over and over, in all times of day, all kinds of weather, through the seasons. The neighbors wondered if he had lost his mind -- "Didn't he paint that island already?!". He is unapologetic, and rightly so. His vision is enhanced by Terry Tempest Williams' warm chapter on Animation of Spirit: Painting the Invisible, and by Carl Little's deft provision of a context for Tom's art, and by sparse text from many sources that accompany each plate. I have given this book as a gift to beloved people in my life and kept a copy for myself. I know I will delight with each rereading. I never tire of the islandscape that these three artists have compiled for me.