Today I wish a happy, healthy 70th birthday to friend, artist, inspiration, and North Country neighbor, Kevin Raines. His friendship like the springtime sun awakens bud and bloom, his storytelling and merry laughter uplift our gatherings, and his enthralling artwork makes Rosslyn more wild and enrapturing. (NB: Painting Home, the subtitle for today’s dispatch, is an allusion to a talk Kevin delivered at the Whallonsburg Grange Hall a couple of years ago.)
To honor this generous but gentle soul on the anniversary of his birth, I invite you into Kevin’s studio with me, with Susan, with Kevin, one decade ago.
We were fortunate to already own some of Kevin’s artwork, and we were contemplating adding his painting of an autumn Tamarisk bog to our collection.
As you may be able to infer from the photograph above, Kevin’s work invites the viewer to step inside the painting. A visually and psychologically irresistible magnetism lures the viewer into an environment rendered in pigments and brush strokes. The scene envelops the viewer, creating an intimate and transformative connection. If you have any affinity whatsoever for wild places, his large format paintings will seduce you like some sort of sacrosanct siren songs. (Yes, I just blurred the sacred and the profane. Think alchemy, not hyperbole.)
I mentioned above that the subtitle, Painting Home, refers to Kevin’s March 1, 2022 Lyceum presentation, “A Path of Many Guides: Painting a Way Home” at The Grange in Whallonsburg, New York (one of the “outer boroughs” of Essex, New York.)
In the second photograph above Kevin was blending backstory for the painting we were admiring together with the brought her tapestry of his love affair with the Adirondack Park. The through line resurfaced in Kevin’s Lyceum. Because I was unfortunately unable to attend Kevin graciously shared his presentation notes. The following excerpts (with the exception of the final words that I solicited from Kevin for an earlier blog post) all come from his notes.
At the risk of playing fast and loose with Kevin’s chronology, I’d like to lead with his bundled thoughts on home and artistic alchemy.
As a landscape painter my experiences and ruminations of home become physical in my drawings and paintings. You see, what artists do is take abstract ideas… that have no corporeal form and… turn those abstract notions into physical objects by touching them into existence.
— Kevin Raines (Source: “A Path of Many Guides: Painting a Way Home, Spring 2022 Lyceum Series: Making Home, The Grange, March 1, 2022)
“Touching them into existence”!Pigments. Brushstrokes. And sylvan hikes, riparian rambles, and backcountry paddles. Plus some of the most mesmerizing field sketches and notes. Followed by weeks and months in studio rendering his unique vision of nature. Alchemy.
To approach an understanding of Kevin’s notion of home, it’s essential to dilate one’s context to the whole of the Adirondack Park. 
I remembered the Adirondacks as a region of magnificent mountains and innumerable lakes and streams, where light, color, and temperature often changed unexpectedly; as a place where nature’s timeless cadence moved me, filled me, and absorbed me into itself. This realm of ancient ice caves, glacial erratics, giants and dwarfs, is a place where one can find peace in one’s own insignificance.
— Kevin Raines (Source: “A Path of Many Guides: Painting a Way Home, Spring 2022 Lyceum Series: Making Home, The Grange, March 1, 2022)
Kevin’s description of the Adirondacks as “a place where nature’s timeless cadence moved me, filled me, and absorbed me” is familiar to many of us who call this wonderland home. It’s why we’re here. And it’s a unique but fascinating way to think about “homeness”. Kevin underscores this concept of being absorbed into the Adirondacks, “a place where one can find peace in one’s own insignificance.”
Damn!
And that, my friends, sounds like a pretty close cousin to the experience that I described above, a viewer in front of Kevin’s artwork, enveloped, intimately connected and transformed.
The experience of home is about being connected.
— Kevin Raines (Source: “A Path of Many Guides: Painting a Way Home, Spring 2022 Lyceum Series: Making Home, The Grange, March 1, 2022)
Although my inability to experience Kevin’s presentation firsthand disheartened me (and may have led to any misunderstanding in my takeaway from his notes), I find consolation and confirmation in his perspective. Home — whether Rosslyn or the Adirondack Park — is where we find peace, where we gather and connect (and reconnect t!), where our individual selves extend and blend with our environment, timeless.
The word home has its roots in the old English word ‘ham’ and means a place where souls are gathered. I like that idea because as a house is lived in it grows rich in memories that welcome and enrich the inhabitants and guests who frequent the structure. Through the gathering of souls space becomes an extension of self, past, present, and into the future.
— Kevin Raines (Source: What Makes a House a Home?)
Our home is favored with friendships, Kevin Raines among them. And his singular portrayals of thriving places within the Blue Line concurrently welcome the Adirondacks’ natural environment into Rosslyn *AND* welcome us into the places he paints.
Thank you, Kevin, for painting home, and for imbuing Rosslyn, Susan, and my lives with gentle wildness. You are a dear and much admired friend. Happy birthday.
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