Contemporary Arts

	Mary-Leigh Smart And Beverly Hallam At Their Home In York, Seated Beneath One Of Hallam’s Acrylic Paintings.

Maine is Their Mentor:
Mary-Leigh Smart, Beverly Hallam and the Surf Point Foundation

Mary-Leigh Smart and Beverly Hallam are the kind of women who inspire. Their lives embody creativity, dedication, and adherence to the highest standards of artistic excellence and community service. They are a treasure trove, housing the living history and significance of the Ogunquit art colony for the past 75 years and they deliver it, sharp as tacks, with humor, insight and aplomb.

Converging in the Ogunquit area from Illinois and Massachusetts respectively, Mary-Leigh Smart and Beverly Hallam were brought together by art, and they have remained friends and colleagues since the 1950s. Mary-Leigh Smart’s family, the Calls, first ventured to Ogunquit in 1918 when there were just a handful of summer people in the area. When asked why they chose Maine when others from central Illinois usually went to Michigan to escape the heat, Mary-Leigh replied, “My parents wanted to take me to the seashore, and eastern friends were unanimous in recommending Ogunquit.” From 1929 through the 1930s, however, the Calls spent two months of every summer in Europe, where Mary-Leigh became fluent in French and had the opportunity to study art history three hours each morning at the Louvre with Bertha Fanning Taylor, the English language lecturer. This solid grounding would serve her well in future pursuits. Mary-Leigh would go on to Wellesley College and Columbia University where her master’s thesis was focused on the writing of Andre Gide.

Concurrently, Beverly Hallam studied art, first at Massachusetts School of Art (later Massachusetts College of Art) where she received a BS in Education and then went on to get an MFA at Cranbrook Academy and Syracuse University. Beverly returned to Massachusetts College of Art and became professor of art. For 15 years she taught painting, drawing, design and methods of teaching as well as supervised practice teachers in the field. She also introduced the first courses in photography and theater arts.

	The Last Of The Pink Poppies. Beverly Hallam, Oil On Canvas, 2005. [18" X 24"]

During college, Beverly visited her high school art teacher, Anne Carleton, who painted in a fish shack in Perkins Cove, Ogunquit. Carleton introduced her to the Ogunquit Art Association and Beverly began renting places on her own in this coastal town famous for the turn of the century art schools of Charles Woodbury and Hamilton Easter Field.

In the early 1950s, Alfred Duca, a painting student at the Boston Museum School, started mixing a milk-like emulsion with dry pigment and painting with it. This emulsion was used commercially as a glue to bind layers of wood together to make plywood. Duca has been credited with first applying this commercial binder to the field of fine arts. He shared his knowledge of this new medium with his teacher Carl Zerbe, who was suffering from inhaling turpentine fumes while working with encaustic. Art News published an article on Zerbe and his use of polyvinyl acetate, touting it as a real breakthrough for artists because of its quick drying time, luminous palette and ability to create textures. Almost immediately, an art store in Boston was bottling the medium and selling it at a high price. Beverly asked a chemist friend to analyze the “milky emulsion” and found that she could obtain it from Borden Company in Leominster, Massachusetts. She recalls that Borden called it Polyco 953-7A, a polyvinyl acetate. The company provided her with five gallon drums of the emulsion. In return she was to show them the results of using the mixture. She was off and running—in fact, running all over the country demonstrating the use of this exciting new medium. Much later a commercial paint company, Permanent Pigments, put polyvinyl in jars and named it “acrylic”.

In 1956, Beverly’s life intersected with Mary-Leigh Smart’s, whose job was to select the lecturers for the Ogunquit Art Association. Mary-Leigh asked Beverly, who had rented a summer studio in which to paint, to speak about polyvinyl acetate. Beverly demurred, exhausted from a year of demonstrations of the new medium, in addition to her heavy teaching schedule. Undaunted, Mary-Leigh persisted until Beverly relented. From then on Mary-Leigh, Beverly and Mary-Leigh’s charismatic husband J. Scott Smart, an actor and a radio personality famous for the Fat Man series, became fast friends.

	Untitled. Beverly Hallam, Digital Prints, Created In Wordperfect, 2005. [7" X 7"]

Beverly gave another demonstration at the Ogunquit Art Association in 1962 called Printmaking in Painting and Decorative Design. She made wrapping paper using gelatin rollers and various objects which she inked and rolled over. It was a method of off-set printing by hand. She became so excited about the results that she stopped painting in acrylic and began creating monotypes with oil-based lithographic inks, an investigation which lasted for twenty years.

In 1980, Beverly found that the gelatin roller would not create the effect of soft clouds that she wanted. She dug out an airbrush that a friend had given her years before. Following the directions in the box, she zipped in the clouds and again was so excited about the results that she stopped making monotypes and turned to the airbrush. The airbrush period was one of her most significant, leading to enormous canvases of flowers which sold as quickly as she could produce them. Beverly grew almost all of the flowers she painted and arranged them on her dining room table. The late afternoon sun, streaking through the vertical louvered blinds, created linear patterns on the flowers which were often reflected in mirrors. These airbrushed still lives are startlingly handsome, prodigious and coveted works.

Because of a mild case of emphysema from the airbrushed pigment, Beverly, now in her eighties, has returned to painting with brushes. Additionally, she creates abstract images on the computer and has had two solo exhibitions of these prints.

In 1958, Jack and Mary-Leigh Smart, along with other artists and patrons in Ogunquit, wanted a home for the Ogunquit Art Association, which had rented an old barn since the 1930s. With land given by John Lane and the Ogunquit Playhouse, and donated lumber and labor, the Barn Gallery was built on prime real estate on Shore Road. At that time Ogunquit was a dry town and the openings at the gallery, famous for their “fish house” punch and martinis became a not to be missed social gathering, at times attracting as many as 300 people. Gaining museum status with its changing exhibitions,

	Untitled. Beverly Hallam, Digital Prints, Created In Wordperfect, 2005. [7" X 7"]

educational programs and the Hamilton Easter Field Art Foundation Collection (now housed at the Portland Museum of Art), the Barn Gallery continued to serve as a premiere contemporary art space. Mary-Leigh and Beverly were active board members and officers. In 2003, Barn Gallery Associates generously donated the Barn Gallery building and land the Ogunquit Arts Collaborative, a 501(c)3 corporation. A contemporary wing was built onto the Ogunquit Museum of American Art and the Barn Gallery endowment was donated to the museum.

Beverly’s life changed dramatically when she received the first Blanche E. Colman Foundation Award and went on sabbatical to paint in Europe for a year. She returned to Massachusetts College of Art only long enough to find a replacement, and in 1962, moved to Maine, where her mother was born and now lived. She bought a studio, Stonecrop, on Shore Road in Ogunquit and began to paint full time. Her semi-abstract work was inspired by the tide pools and rare geological strata found in the rocks along the Maine coast. In Maine she also found a community of artists and a relationship with the light that differed radically from the city.

On July 15, 1951, Jack Smart and Mary-Leigh’s first date was a trip to Old Orchard Beach to hear Jack’s old friend, Louis Armstrong and his orchestra. (Jack and Mary-Leigh married six weeks later.)

Ten years after Jack’s death, on Louis Armstrong’s birthday, August 4, Mary-Leigh had a call from a realtor friend, informing her that Wild Knoll, a grand Maine summer cottage on 40 acres of ocean front property, had come on the market. Mary-Leigh asked Beverly, who had always wanted an ocean view, if she would like to look at the property to see if it might suit the two of them. Hesitant to move to “the country,” Beverly was wooed by the crashing surf and dramatic light, and the first step toward Surf Point Foundation was taken. An architect-designed contemporary home and studio were built as a duplex, and Wild Knoll was rented to the poet May Sarton who remained there until her death in 1995.

In 1987, Mary-Leigh Smart’s asset managers advised her to establish a nonprofit entity to leave her property and other assets to. Devoted to contemporary art and artists, Mary-Leigh conceived Surf Point Foundation, an artists’ colony to be instituted on the property after her death.

	Untitled. Beverly Hallam, Digital Prints, Created In Wordperfect, 2005. [7" X 7"]

Beverly and Dr. Katharine J. Watson, former director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Chair of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, have worked with Mary-Leigh in organizing the Foundation. Established visual artists, art critics, scholars, architects and landscape architects may come to the residency and stay for up to a year with the requirement that they create or finish a body of work and exhibit it in Maine before returning home. In the case of scholars and critics, a paper needs to be published. Beverly is leaving her studio, living quarters and assets to the Foundation.

Beverly claims no mentors. Mary-Leigh says Beverly has always been hers, but for both women Maine has been the ultimate mentor. These faithful aesthetes and resolutely independent women now mentor untold others. They have contributed significant advances to the cultural life of the state and have created an exemplary legacy of spirit and dedication to the arts. Surf Point Foundation will give the precious gift of concentrated creative time. The groundbreaking work and devotion to teaching of Beverly Hallam, combined with the physical setting and sustaining assets that Mary-Leigh Smart has contributed, have established an artistic lineage that will forever feed aesthetic advancement in Maine.

	Untitled. Beverly Hallam, Digital Prints, Created In Wordperfect, 2005. [7" X 7"]

Photos By Stuart Nudelman.