Carl Little – Terry Havey Hilt’s Private Cache

Terry Havey Hilt has worked almost exclusively in watercolor since she was a kid. Hilt remembers at age twelve painting little lighthouses on seashells for Ed Foster, a self-taught watercolor painter from Machias, who sold them for a quarter apiece. She also recalls at age sixteen being introduced to the watercolors of Susie Thompson, Chenoweth Hall, and John Marin while visiting the Hilt family in Addison.

By age twenty, Hilt had studied art history at the University of Maine. Ten years later, she took watercolor classes at a community arts center in Baltimore and exhibited some of her work. After completing her graduate work in psychology at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and setting up a practice, she traveled with her husband Dana on his work assignments, visiting art museums across Europe and the US. They also began to “seriously” collect Maine art.

Turning fifty, Hilt decided to limit her psychotherapy practice and use her pent-up creativity to begin to build a portfolio. She engaged watercolorist Valerie Binder from Baltimore to critique her work. Binder also introduced her to the Alfred Stieglitz group as she thought Hilt’s paintings spoke best to that art period.

Renowned Asian art collector John Ford bought Hilt’s first painting. A lover of the modernist period, Ford suggested she begin to approach galleries. She eventually shared her work with Sam Shaw who exhibited several pieces at his gallery in Northeast Harbor. She showed for a number of years at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland and later at Schooner Gallery in Milbridge where Norma Marin, John Marin’s daughter-in-law, bought one of her paintings. Today she is represented by Littlefield Gallery in Winter Harbor.

“Watercolor is as fluid as the mind in free association,” writes Hilt. She relishes “the spontaneous and creative manipulation of pigment, unruly water flow, and quick brush handling” required to turn “disorganized space” into a composition.

Watercolor notoriously misbehaves and mistakes are made. While artist in residence on Monhegan Island in 2005, on a visit to Elena Jahn’s studio, Hilt came to understand that some of these “magnificent errors” might be worth saving.

Hilt offers the following thoughts on the influence of that studio visit on her most recent work, a series of dazzling collages created from rejected watercolors.

In thinking about this interesting Maine Arts Journal topic, many thoughts and remembrances of the art process occurred that are related to “stuck.”

 

I will never forget visiting Elena Jahn’s open hours at her studio on Monhegan when I had an artist residency there. She kindly took time to reveal for me her cache of “unresolved” work spread out on a (usually tucked away) flat surface. She softly ran her hand through these fascinating shapes, markings, and experiments, picking up a few to gaze at them, moving the pieces gently around with a kind of kaleidoscopic effect.

 

We both were momentarily caught up in a silent reverie as this seemed like a drawer full of valuable living ideas and creative possibilities. Elena said she hoped to someday use the work. Since then, I have thought of this moment quite often.

 

As the years passed there were many such times I struggled and had to stop work on a watercolor painting that was smudged, was bad or too weird, or just didn’t seem to work. Because of Elena’s “reveal,” I also kept a cache of these “not quite there” pieces.

Over time, quite an accumulation of saved pieces of various colors, shapes, and lines made up my “private” collection. I thought they would never be seen, until . . .

 

Our old farmhouse in Lamoine is drafty, so my studio was too cold in the dead of winter to do much work. Forced to retreat to a warmer room to work, one that I didn’t want to mess up with wet watercolor paint splashes, I safely played with these accumulated pieces, mixing and grouping them into synchronous arrangements of colors and styles. Collages seemed to almost build themselves.

 

I ordered a puzzle-making desk so I could spread the pieces out. I purchased glue and scissors and a number of pre-stretched canvases to use as supports. I felt like I was making a puzzle that had no preconceived picture.

I love experiments, so I turned and fitted and snipped to fit the grouped pieces onto the support. Once an interesting composition developed, I carefully glued these watercolor gem pieces together onto the canvas. It was so intriguing and satisfying to give these shapes new form and allow a new life for them. I sprayed each finished composition with fixative for preservation. The work gave a modern twist to the green idea of reuse!