I was born in Maine to a large, extended family of French-Canadian descent, a family where my grandfather shared fabulous tales of fantastic train wrecks in the dead of winter and of hunting dangerous bear in the Maine woods. He expressed often his commitment to feeding his large family year after year from a finely composted garden. In short, I was listening to his lore; he was speaking to me of the cycles of life.

I would watch my father set up his easel in our family's kitchen and attempt to create portraits of my mother as she posed wearing a blue dress and pearls. My mother, in turn, would do wonderful, intimate landscape and seascape paintings, copied from postcard and calendar images. Observing my parents work as amateur artists in our kitchen instilled in me a love of painting, and fostered in me the desire to pursue art as a career. Not merely their chosen subject matter, but the process of how they painted influenced my later work.

I left Maine to attend Syracuse University and eventually studied painting with Jerome Witkin. From Jerome I learned the importance of working directly from life, with an emphasis on developed, intense use of color, light and solid draftsmanship. Our human anatomy class proved to be a faith altering study of human cadavers. During the summer between my first and second years of graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art, I read a copy of Carolyn Chutes, The Beans of Egypt Maine. This book influenced my work tremendously. Its honest, candid narrative of a family living in the Maine woods encouraged me to paint what I knew: stories from my own childhood. I began to combine these tales with my newly learned formal art school training. Eventually, I created a number of large, dark images - narratives unfolding in the rugged beauty of the Maine landscape.

Although the stories of my childhood have played an important role in the development of my work, the land and its other occupants, animals certainly, have played a key role in my image making. This has been the sole focus of my work for the past few years, thus my "Orono Landscape," "Trickster," "Compost," "Fungus and Birch" and "Two Crows" images.Ultimately, these recent paintings elaborate a direct observation of the Maine woods. Decaying plant life, pine needles, animals, fungi and fauna articulate, in microcosm, Mother Nature in all of her intimate glory: or, as Sir Albert Howard, founder of the modern organic gardening movement describes it, "the cycle of life."

- Ed Nadeau