Edgar Allen Beem – Molly Holmberg Brown Paints with a Cartographer’s Sense of Place

Molly Holmberg Brown is an artist, scientist, athlete, and mother. She has made a name for herself as an artist who paints maps. Her business, MollyMaps, combines cartography and fine art in painterly maps that are not aids to wayfinding but rather orient viewers to natural landscapes. “The mission of MollyMaps,” Brown explains on her website, “is to better understand our place on a dynamic planet through map-making and creative geographic expression.”

Brown accomplishes this mission not only by creating maps but also through commissions, public art works, community mapping projects, education projects, and workshops. These ancillary activities have taken a backseat to Brown’s day job as a career counselor at Bates College, but she still finds time for her art, both mapping and otherwise.

Brown has painted maps of Portland, South Portland, and Cape Elizabeth as well as the Presumpscot River, Penobscot River, and Casco Bay watersheds, Monhegan Island, and the Dawnland world of the Wabanaki. She also creates custom watercolor “mental maps” that depict places near and dear to her clients, emotional biographies in bird’s-eye views, and personalized landscapes.

Brown lives in a little seaside neighborhood in Cape Elizabeth with her husband, two children, and dog Zephyr. Her parents were both pediatricians in Bangor, and she grew up in Orono, where she was a soccer and track star. These days, she surfs at Higgins Beach and Pine Point in Scarborough. At Orono High School, where she has been inducted into the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame, Brown was as interested in art as she was in sports. In fact, she chose to attend a student weekend at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle rather than go to her senior prom. She considered art school but, wanting a broader education, attended Middlebury College in Vermont, where she graduated in 2001. At Middlebury, Molly Holmberg majored in geography, having discovered a preternatural affinity for maps. “I fell in love with spatial perspective,” she says, “looking at everything through a spatial lens.”

Brown approaches mapping as a creative act, an art form, and a way of expressing her spatial imagination. Artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Mark Bradford have made maps and used them as inspiration. In Maine, Shannon Rankin (now in New Mexico) is one of the best-known artists who incorporates map elements in her work. Less literally in terms of mapping aesthetics, one thinks of the airplane views of the islands of Penobscot Bay and the glass globes of Eric Hopkins, the aerial views of familiar places by Yvonne Jacquette, and the Emerging Cartographies drawings by Alison Hildreth. Perhaps the most famous map-as-art image is Saul Steinberg’s View of the World from 9th Avenue, which perfectly conveys a New Yorker’s provincial sense of place. Steinberg’s myopic classic is a work of humor, of course, but it also underscores an important aspect of how maps render and diagram the world.

“Maps lie,” says Brown. “None of them are true. None of them are correct. Mapping taught me the difference between precision and accuracy. Precision is the resolution of correctness. Accuracy means that Mount Desert Island in the right place.” There is a whole spectrum of aesthetic fidelity in art that ranges from hyperrealism to pure abstraction. Molly Brown’s maps are somewhere in the middle as pictorial sketches that animate cartography.

“I am definitely a low-fidelity artist,” she says. Brown traces her mapping art to the spring semester of her junior year in college when she went to Tibet. In Tibet, she did some of her first mapping, making hand-drawn maps to promote community-based tourism. Subsequently, she was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study cartography in Peru, Bolivia, Madagascar, Scotland, and Mongolia. She earned a masters and PhD in geography at the University of Colorado. In 2005, as an intern at the New York Times, Brown was assigned to map the London bombings carried out by suicide bombers. Years later, in 2020, she created a map showing the diaspora of Syrian refugees. These political maps were departures for Brown.

“I don’t see myself as a political artist,” she says. “There are other ways to create change by helping people feel more connected to the planet.” MollyMaps are not about wayfinding but about orienting the viewer to a special place, whether natural or experiential. In her most recent work, Brown has begun to incorporate 3D elements such as embroidery that give texture to the landscapes she describes. She has also begun collaborating with cartographer Margot Carpenter of Hartdale Maps in Belfast. Carpenter brings digital expertise and labeling skills to Brown’s painterly watercolor evocations of place.

Brown and Carpenter, for example, worked together on a map of Coastal Mountains Land Trust holdings. “Molly and I have been in each other’s orbits for years, but only recently started collaborating,” says Carpenter. “The way she paints a landscape brings an ecological sensitivity to the whole landscape that isn’t immediately apparent. For example, the oblique view she recently painted for the Coastal Mountains Land Trust shifts the conservation group’s landholdings from names and acres to connections within the greater geography. All of a sudden, it’s easier to see that the parcel on Hurd’s Pond isn’t an isolated bit of protected land, but is connected to Wescott Stream, which flows into the Passagassawakeag River, and then joins Penobscot Bay. While other mapmakers’ oblique views can be beautiful, her brushwork articulates connected spaces in a unique way.”

“My core values come through in my work,” says Brown. “It’s about inspiring a sense of place, the planet around us, the rivers, the mountains, and the watersheds. They nurture us.” As a Maine native, Molly Brown naturally finds herself inspired by water, whether the surf at Higgins Beach or the lakes and ponds of her childhood. “I come back to water again and again in my work. It’s a great force that can nourish us.”

A family camp on Harriman Pond in Dedham holds a particular fascination for the artist. “It’s very deep,” she explains. “The depth of the pond is in my psyche.”

The seventy-five foot deep pond is central to a body of work Brown calls Limnols, monoprints that elegantly portray lakes and ponds in cross section. She also paints abstractions that describe the meander and flow of streams, simplifying these watercourses to ribbons of color.

Brown’s most identifiable paintings, however, are those that interpret the watersheds of rivers such as the Presumpscot and Penobscot.

“The power behind things is what I’m trying to show,” Brown says. “As a Mainer, I have a sense of water. The Penobscot River is a big, powerful river. It’s a powerful thing. It can take your life.” Molly Brown brings a lifetime to bear on rendering the physical complexity of her native land in two dimensional images that are part map, part painting, and all art.