Boothbay Windjammer Days

Once a year, Boothbay Harbor stops being a quiet Maine harbor town and becomes something closer to a reunion of old wooden ships. Windjammer Days brings tall ships in from up and down the coast — sometimes from much farther — for a week of parades, tugs-of-war across the water, and a harbor so full of masts it looks like a painting before anyone's picked up a brush.

George has shown his work there for the last three summers, set up in Artist's Alley alongside painters, potters, and craftspeople working in just about every medium there is. It's a different kind of show than a gallery opening — no white walls, no hush. People wander over straight off the docks, still salt-air windblown, and stop because a lighthouse or a harbor scene catches something they recognize. More than a few conversations start with some version of "I know exactly where that is."

One year, the festival asked George to do something he doesn't often do in public: paint. Not finish a piece — start one, in front of whoever wandered by. He set up his easel, laid in the first wash across a blank canvas, and let people watch the unglamorous part most collectors never see — the part before a painting looks like anything at all. A few minutes of quiet color on white canvas, and somewhere in there, a boat, a shoreline, a sky started to take shape.

It's a strange thing to paint in public. Most of the work George does happens alone, over weeks, with plenty of room to second-guess a color or scrape something back and start again. At Windjammer Days, there's none of that — just the wash going down, a small crowd, and whatever happens next. He'll tell you it's a little nerve-wracking. He'll also tell you it's some of the most fun he has all year.

He's been invited back every summer since, and every summer he says yes.