Ronald Frontin

About the Artist

Ron Frontin is a contemporary Maine painter who continues the American realist tradition of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins with his fastidiously rendered figural images set on the coast and in the countryside. His subjects include the hardworking fisherman and farmers of Maine and his family and friends.
Frontin was born in Camden, Maine, in 1962 and today resides near the town of Rockland. Indeed, he only lived out of his home state briefly, while attending the Philadelphia College of Art (1981-85) and while apprenticing in Andalusia, Pennsylvania, with the noted realist painter Nelson Shanks (1985-88).
Frontin's outdoor scenes portray the hardy individuals who make their living from the fields, rivers, beaches, and bays of Maine. The artist, who himself enjoys working in the open air, is interested in painting people who are physically engaged with nature and who are unaware that they are being studied; the opposite of posed works, these images convey respect for the grueling and absorbing tasks of outdoor life and capture the particular light and mood of the Maine landscapes.
In his portraits, Frontin is inspired by the great art of the past. Whereas many contemporary artists use portraiture to their own ends, Frontin is interested in a traditional approach to the genre in which the artist's style is subservient to the subject, and in which the finished work is true to its sitter. He has created many commissioned portraits, including several depictions of prominent Maine figures, but he also paints subjects of his own choosing.
Soundly crafted and thoughtfully composed, Frontin's works reveal his desire not to impose his own point of view on a subject, but rather to derive inspiration directly from it, allowing its intrinsic nature to emerge
.