HR Kenyon – all rights reserved

Kenyon’s travels were far less extensive after the turn of the century but were, nonetheless, quite frequent. New Hampshire, became one center of his activity near Wilton, and New Hampshire: Flowering Trees was painted near there, looking out over the soft rolling mountains. Dark blue hills in the distance are tinted with pink and green while the foreground is a light green with touches of blue, yellow, purple, and pink giving a colorful bloom to the landscape. The most striking feature is the flowering white bush that relates formally to it. The sky, painted by brush, was run over with a palette knife while still wet in diagonal strokes, making flat bands in the texture that, from a distance, give a vibrant airy feeling.

Another site Kenyon traveled to was Ogunquit, Maine, where there was a flourishing artist colony. The first record of Kenyon’s presence there is 1908. It is interesting to note that the sea was very close at hand to Kenyon in Ipswich, but it held little interest for him. Instead, the marsh that created a deep flat barrier between him and it — and an occasional beach scene that, like the marshes, is strongly horizontal.

However, at Ogunquit the sea and its rugged coast were the attraction. The paintings Kenyon did here are startlingly different in style from the majority of his work, for while the size remains small there is an expressionistic explosiveness in both color and paint application.

HR Kenyon – all rights reserved

The violence of means evident in Ogunquit, Maine Coast is unexpected and idiosyncratic. The paint is applied in a thick, juicy manner with a broad range of color. Despite the weighty peninsula that dominates this scene everything is agitated. The clouds in the bright sky engage in a frantic dance. At close hand every stroke of paint engenders this feeling, causing the blue of the sky to be as agitated as the clouds. The thick green paint that describes the turf atop the cliff has been scored by the brush handle, leaving writhing linear tracks through it. The cliff has been scraped as well to give it a planar structure. The rocks as they swing toward the foreground intensify in their earthy density to be touched by an intense red on those closest at hand. The sea and its breakers carry less inherent sense of drama here than does the artist’s method of painting.

The intensity of expressiveness is clearly under control, for the violence he does to the paint is in the service of a convincing image. Here, and in an occasional inland scene, Kenyon abandons his usual descriptive sensitivity for what appears to be sensitivity shattered by forces he could deal with only passionately. One is left to wonder if Kenyon’s view of the sea as he grew older was not affected by his earlier tragic experience.