By Diane Hudson

A lad o’ pairts discovers himself in Maine.

When asked to write a piece about my friend William Irvine by the editor who was smitten on seeing Bill’s painting Lovers by the Sea featured in a solo exhibit at the Courthouse Gallery in Ellsworth,
I decided to do the interview in person. As he’s recently turned 95, I seize the opportunity to have this visit (I mean, how much longer will he be around?).

Bill is quick to disarm me. “You know, people are living longer now than they ever have. Studies have shown that the person who will live to be 150 has already been born.”

With a rather wide grin, he says, “I was born too early.”

Maybe I’m Amazed

“But seriously, I don’t feel 95. I’m still the little boy in Scotland who tried out some oils and saw he could paint. I tell you, I got here so fast. People don’t realize the speed that life goes by. I’m actually amazed I’m this old.

“I’m lucky enough that I’m still physically able to come into the studio and work, and I find my passion for painting hasn’t changed since I was young. I still have the urge to work—it’s a lifetime obsession.

Chasing the Elusive

“I’m trying to produce the work that will finally please me enough, but you never do. Seeking that final painting keeps me in my studio all year. While I can, I’ll continue working till the last day. My wife will find me with a brush in my hand.”

I don’t remember when Bill and I first met. It’s as if we’ve always been friends. Over many years, he welcomed my partner Eddie Fitzpatrick and me to his rustic “wee hoose” in Blue Hill, where we’d all playfully forage for mushrooms or go to his cottage on Blue Hill Bay in Brooklin, again filling our tummies and souls, here with treasures found by the sea: mussels and clams.

“Eddie would forage enough mussels to take back to use at his restaurant [the Pepperclub in Portland],” Bill says as we sit on his deck overlooking the bay. We’re at the “cottage,” now his year-round home shared with his wife, Marge. I remember Bill digging clams everywhere here and ask if he’s still foraging.

“There are none to be found now—no mussels or clams at all. Still lots of lobsters out here, though! My son comes and finds chanterelles and ink caps by our drive. I find pink bottoms at the golf course, if I can get there before the golfers use them to practice their swings! Also, a friend delivers large [quahog] shells every week that I use for my palettes.

He needs a big supply of these shells, as he paints a lot.

“About three years ago, I sold 120 paintings in one year. I thought then, wow, I must be doing a lot of work! I figure [I’m averaging] probably a hundred or so paintings a year.

“Quite a few galleries are asking for work—I can’t keep up with it. And, I’m in the luxurious position of not having to sell.”

At the beginning of showing at Courthouse 15 years ago, Bill and Marge traveled to the South of France. He remembers “sitting at this cafe and thinking how wonderful it is to be able to do all this because of my paintings.”

A few weeks ago, Thomaston Place Auction Galleries set a new record for him when his oil on canvas Morning Harbour sold for $14,400—$12,400 over the estimate. “That’s an oldie. I think I painted it in 1973.”

Reflecting a little on how he started his life’s pursuit as an artist (we are now in his studio, just behind the cottage), he takes us closer.

“Where I grew up in Troon [on the west coast of Scotland, 35 miles southwest of Glasgow] in the 1930s and 1940s, I never saw any original art, only reproductions in newspapers and magazines. They were full of surrealist art, and I fell in love with that. One day, Johnny Walker, the whisky entrepreneur, who lived in Troon too, invited me to see his art collection at his house, “Pierceland.” It was mostly British art, but it was original.”

The real awaken-ing, however, was when he went to Glasgow to see an exhibit of Matisse and Picasso. “It punched me in the gut! I felt such a fire for painting, and it has never died. A painting by Picasso, Woman in a Rocking Chair—I saw it almost 70 years ago—I can still see right in front of me, it excited me so much.”

After doing his two years of National Service and graduating from Glasgow School of Art, he went to London, spending 10 years in the late 1950s and 1960s in Soho, the locus for bohemians such as Francis Bacon and other painters, writers, and poets. “None of us sold much, except Bacon. We’d get together and drink a lot. I always wondered why we never got drunk.”

While teaching in a school there, he met an American girl, Stephanie. “She was in the staff room, with her feet up,” he recalls, eyes lighting up. “We clicked, married, and were living in a tiny bedsitter [in 1967] when we saw an ad for a farmhouse in Skowhegan with 400 acres for $4,000.”

Sea Change

They packed up and moved to Maine. Hating the house at first sight, they got in the car and looked everywhere else, finally renting an A-frame in Milbridge. “Our only neighbor, a lobsterman, took us out every morning. There was blue sky and the water. I said, ‘I’m never going to leave here.’”

Eventually buying the house in Blue Hill, Bill set up his studio in the barn behind the house where he painted for nearly half a century.

When Stephanie died in 1985, Bill, heartbroken, tried returning to Scotland. “I realized my life [was still in Maine], so I came back.”

Ten years later he married Margery Wilson, who’d been a friend of Stephanie’s. The cottage in Brooklin, where I’m visiting,
is their place now.

The best way to talk about the painting that brought me here, Lovers by the Sea, is in Bill’s own words:

“I did not want to paint a dramatic expression of love, a passionate embrace, but more of a whisper, the quieter side, trust, togetherness, love that creates its own sanctuary in the midst of life.

“The sea to me is life. I have lived 95 years by the ocean, and I have always felt its eternal spirit that we as humans briefly share.

“That contrast between the universality of the sea and the intimacy of the lovers is what I feel gives the painting its emotional impact.

“Also, in contrast is the movement of the gulls to the stillness of the figures.

“I chose evening as a setting, that time when warm colors lie down like bedsheets, shadows embrace, and the intimacy of lovers becomes their universe.”