A stormy sea churns in kaleidoscopic clashes of blue, black and green on the second floor of a white frame house on 6th Street here, where a galleon, dwarfed by the waters below and thunderclouds overhead, moves bravely toward a distant patch of sunlight.
This farm town of 8,000 in north central Illinois is home to both Del Monte Sweet Corn, a pure prairie product, and August Holland, a landlocked seascape painter, who claims to be financially successful despite a serious problem with ocean access.
”One of my prints, called `Pearl of Wisdom,` sold a million and a half copies,” he noted proudly. ”It was in both the S&H Green Stamp catalog and the Gold Bond Stamp catalog a couple years running.”
”Rolling Surf,” ”Land Ho!” and ”Thunderhead” are just a few of the popular seascapes created on 6th Street by Mendota`s version of Winslow Homer, the patriarch of American maritime fine art, who hailed from Maine.
Homer elevated maritime art from the ”brown gravy school” of depthless renderings that dominated the field until his emergence in the late 1800s, according to Bert Jacobs, who sells Holland`s work at his Brigantine gallery in La Grange.
”If Holland didn`t do good work, we wouldn`t sell it here,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs recently ordered up 40,000 prints each of two of Holland`s religious-themed maritime paintings, ”Casting the Net” and ”Peace Be Still.”
”Churches all over the country will snap them up,” said Jacobs, noting that Holland is a member of the American Society of Maritime Artists ”and you have to be among the top to be voted into that group.”
”In 1987, I was in the top 10 finalists for the national duck stamp competition,” Holland offered.
In addition, Holland said his seascapes have twice finished in the top 100 among 2,000 entries in the national Arts in Parks competition.
Although Holland has not been to the real seashore in nearly 40 years, his seascapes have sold for as much as $16,500. And as little as $9.95, he said.
”I run into my paintings all over the place,” he said. ”Sometimes I feel great when that happens, and other times it might be a painting that I would like to forget. They aren`t all winners.”
Those who purchase Holland`s art usually have no idea that he draws inspiration from waves of grain rather than ocean swells, he said.
But with the nearest body of water being Bureau Creek, he really has little choice but to rely on his imagination for daily inspiration, Holland said.
In his studio just off the master bedroom, Holland paints among artistic flotsam and jetsam that include armada of model ships, a rubber seagull, a bowling trophy or two, and Sam, one highly amused goldfish.
”I get inspiration from books and a lot of times things just come to me,” explained Holland, who does go to one water source occasionally.
”Now that our three children are grown, my wife and I go every now and then up to Two Rivers, Wis., and stay at the Lighthouse Inn right on Lake Michigan,” he said.
”We stay in a second-floor room so I can look out at the lake and sketch. I like to do it with the window open, so in the winter I wear gloves. My wife, Judy, sticks it out, though her teeth tend to chatter.”
White-maned and elfin, Holland is a ”typical Mendota guy”-albeit one with the passions of an ”artiste,” according to his wife of 30 years.
”I met him at a party,” explained Judy, a parochial grade school teacher. ”He invited me up to his studio to see his etchings. You can imagine what I thought when I saw that the studio was off the bedroom.”
Now 63, Holland began painting full time in the maritime genre only four years ago after parting company with a small Mendota advertising firm where he had labored as art director for 36 years.
Years late and dollars short
”I wish I`d gone to painting full time 20 years ago,” Holland said.
”There are weeks where I make more than half of what my entire annual salary used to be in advertising.
”Now, I want to keep painting until I make Grandma Moses look like a young chick.”
A native of Mendota whose father died when he was just a year old, Holland traces his artistic roots to an uncle, a hobbyist painter ”who did a lot of landscapes and an occasional Indian,” he said.
”He was a meticulous old German fellow who lived just three blocks from our house. I`d go over and watch him paint, and he said if I was going to watch I might as well try it,” the artist said.
”I was 6 years old when I got my first paints from a hardware store. Ever since then, I`ve felt that the day was wasted if I didn`t do some painting and create something.”
Holland`s early interest in painting led him to the American Academy of Art in Chicago, which he attended 43 years ago. While a student for three years there, he did landscapes and some seascapes, which he tried to sell in the lobby of the former Edgewater Beach Hotel on the city`s North Side.
He sold a few, but not enough to support himself after graduating from the art school. He considered Paris and the starving artist routine, but wound up back in Mendota, where his ailing mother needed help.
`Jaws` opened his eyes
Back home, Holland hooked on with the advertising agency and continued to paint and do free-lance illustration in his spare time. His interest in seascapes was submerged until he made a killing in sharks.
A jigsaw company offered him a free-lance job to draw a puzzle. The topic was ”Jaws,” and his painting of a shark on the attack proved so popular that the company ordered up three more.
”I made enough in royalties in three months to buy a station wagon,”
Holland recalled. ”Eventually, they sold 640,000 copies of those puzzles.”
His interest in seascapes was born again.
”There I was, in the middle of a cornfield, making money on sharks,” he recalled. ”I decided to get more serious about maritime art.
”I do contemporary fine art paintings, not stuff sold in hotels-not the assembly-line art where one guy paints a cloud in one corner and another guy paints a seagull in the other corner,” he explained.
Guiding the way
Holland`s artistic voyage from the backwaters of art to the heavy seas caught the wind when he apprenticed himself to Charles Vickery, one of the genre`s most acclaimed artists, and a fellow Midwestern maritime painter.
Vickery, 79, lives in La Grange. His works hang in the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, D.C., the Wisconsin Museum of Art in Madison, and the Union League Club in Chicago, among other places. ”He is ranked among the top maritime artists in the world,” according to Jacob, who also sells Vickery`s work.
”I went into a gallery in La Grange about seven years ago and saw Charles` work and I said I`d like to meet him,” Holland recalled. ”The sales clerk said, `Well, he`s standing out there in the parking lot right now.` So I went out and introduced myself and now we are two good buddies. I usually go to his studio and paint with him at least a couple days a month.”
Vickery, a native of Hinsdale, also attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago. And he, too, once exhibited works in the lobby of the Edgewater Beach Hotel, but the two men had never met until that fateful day in the parking lot in La Grange.
”I`d been wanting to meet him for 20 years,” Holland said. ”His maritime paintings are considered unapproachable by other artists. He is at the top of the field.”
There are a few other respected maritime artists living inland, but it is not an easy handicap to overcome, Vickery said.
”As long as I am close to the lake, it`s not so bad. I go to Lake Michigan two or three times a week to look at the water and get ideas, but I get to the ocean once or twice a year to study it,” said the La Grange artist, who tells clients that he lives between two oceans ”for your shopping pleasure.”
`Needs to get his face wet`
As a pupil, Holland ”has made pretty good headway,” Vickery said. ”He has worked pretty hard, but he needs to go and study the ocean. He has seen it, but not as an artist. The ocean has a grandeur and scale to it that the lake hasn`t got.
”A marine painter needs to get his face wet and to get out there on the ocean in wild weather so that the whole thing comes to you.”
Less the poet than his mentor, Holland is more the typical-and practical- Mendota guy, still trying to get a few basics down, he said modestly.
”One thing I`ve learned is that for a long time I was making my storm clouds too foreboding,” he said. ”You have to leave the possibility of goodness ahead with some rays of sunlight, so that people can see there is a way out-some light at the end of the tunnel. Otherwise they won`t buy it.
”Oh, and I learned, too, that when you are painting a beach scene you can`t have the sand looking dirty because women won`t buy it,” he added.
”They don`t like the thought of dirty feet tracking things into the house.”
In fact, in some ways, being a cornfield-faring seascape artist has its advantages, Holland noted.
”You can`t be too realistic,” the artist said, ”it turns people off.”
