Karin Strong is devoted to the outdoors. She is, she writes, “a deep appreciator of beauty in landscapes,” including the wildlife outside her window. Part of that appreciation comes from spending time painting en plein air.
Strong traces her interest in on-site work from studying Cézanne during an eight-month residence at the Leo Marchutz School of Drawing and Painting in Aix-en-Provence in Southern France in the late 1970s. She was amazed at how the artist was able to paint Mont St. Victoire in so many different ways “and even make the landscape more interesting” than what she was studying.
Strong also discovered how much more difficult it is to paint on the spot than from a photograph or in the studio with controlled lighting. Outdoors, she notes, one has about two hours to complete something before the light changes, which adds “urgency and energy” to the artwork.
On the hunt for motifs in midcoast Maine—she lives in Cushing—Strong looks for a “feeling of space: ocean horizon line, distant mountains, or far shore.” At the same time, something in the landscape—a person, boat, animal—must provide “a sense of scale, story, and dimension.”
On a trip to Monhegan, a peregrine falcon viewed from one of the island’s headlands caught her eye. The beautiful flyer, one of many avian creatures that attract birders to this distant isle on the Atlantic flyway, is small yet mighty, in flight over a churning sea.
In the painting Lifting Fog, Lifting Sails, American Eagle, the celebrated schooner centers the painting, a single raised white sail reflected in the rippling water. Strong has applied the paint with gusto. One senses the clarity that occurs when the sun breaks through.
Light in the landscape draws Strong like a moth to flame. In her painting of the Long Cove Quarry in St. George, a favorite plein-air spot, a birch and small fir trees catch sunlight from their perches on the chiseled cliffs.
Strong’s favorite time of day is dawn when, she writes, “the world is semi-asleep and the breeze is just beginning to stir the water’s surface.” The clutch of boats in Sunrise over Owls Head seems to move in and out of that first light. The painting started as a plein-air study, where she captured the colors and elements of interest to her. She completed it in her “splendid and gracious painting studio” located in her laundry room.
As a founding member of the Midcoast Maine Plein Air Artists, Strong finds comradery with fellow painters. Started in 2019 with 20 artists, the group now numbers over 160. They plan “paint outs,” gathering by a harbor, at a quarry, in fields—or by a garden as depicted in the painting Afternoon with Friends. The group is now a part of the Plein Air Painters of Maine, which has branches all over the state.
Art Honors
Strong began painting in oils when she was about 12. She was a member of the Art Honors Society at Stamford High School, in Connecticut, where she also taught.
After graduating, adventures ensued. Strong went to Outward Bound in North Carolina, then boarded a research schooner in Cadiz, Spain, and crossed the Atlantic while studying oceanography through Boston University’s Sailing Education Association, or “SEA” program.
At Hampshire College, Strong created a curriculum for herself that emphasized biology, ethology, and drawing skills. After two years, she transferred to BU where she continued her animal behavior studies by training monkeys to aid quadriplegics, “sort of like seeing-eye dogs,” she explains. She earned a degree in psychology.
After moving to New York City, Strong studied at Pratt Manhattan, getting an associate’s degree in illustration, a “more practical” direction for where she wanted to go. She was a member of the Guild of Natural History Illustrators and the Society of Animal Artists, which require “strict adherence to scientific study and appropriate environments for the animals depicted.” She also took classes at the Arts Students League and the National Academy of Design.
At Pratt, Strong met her mentor, abstract painter George Nama (1939-2025), who taught classic and modern techniques of painting, drawing, and printmaking. “He was encyclopedic in knowledge,” she recalls, “and empathic in clarifying where a student wanted to go.” Nama convinced her to enter a national juried exhibition sponsored by the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club. She was accepted and won the “Best in Oil” award. She later served on the club’s board and became its president.
Strong’s pantheon of favorite painters includes the likes of John Singer Sargent and Joaquin Sorolla for their brilliant brushwork; Canadian Robert Bateman for his animal portraits; John MacDonald for his atmospheric landscapes of the Berkshires; and Vladimir Kirillov, who “expresses light and texture beautifully.” Their work keeps her going.
Upon moving to Sag Harbor, New York, on the South Fork of Long Island, Strong set aside her painting for a time to take on a wide variety of jobs. She worked in a frame shop, became a gardener and a teacher, varnished and repaired boats, and managed an estate.
Strong was never completely away from artistic pursuits, though. One summer, she assisted in the Master Workshop in Art program at Southampton College. She painted murals for the Quogue Ice House and Water Mill museums, and designed logos, brochures, and the like for various companies and organizations. At one point, she traveled to Russia to meet with women artists impacted by the Chernobyl meltdown.
Strong met her husband, James Ritter, at a contra dance at the Water Mill Community House in 1996 and they married the following year. They moved to Maine in 2018 and have been “feeling blessed to be here ever since.”
Home in Cushing
Born in New York City, Strong grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, the oldest of six. Her father’s father, Corrin Strong, was U.S. Ambassador to Norway in the early 1950s, during the Eisenhower years. Corrin and his wife, Alice, fell in love with the country and the people. Their friends Leif and Sigrid Mathiesen had an unmarried youngest daughter, Mette, who would eventually fall in love with their youngest son, Peter—Karin Strong’s parents. Her father became president of the American Scandinavian Foundation, furthering the family’s Norway connections.
Strong relates how her grandparents gave the Norwegians Andrew Wyeth’s painting Albert’s Son (1959) after their ambassadorship ended. Today, she finds herself living about a mile away from the Olson House “totally by coincidence.” One of her earliest landscapes depicts the Wyeth homestead, a fact unbeknownst to her at the time she painted it.
Grandmother Alice Strong, a sculptor and painter, became good friends with impressionist Frank Benson’s daughter Eleanor. In 1948, Eleanor asked Alice if she would like to buy her parents’ house on North Haven. Alice and Corrin bought the property. Karin grew up summering on the island with her cousins; there is a photograph of her at about 7 years old dressed in a brilliant white dress, digging for clams in the mudflats.
Music and performance also marked Strong’s family. Her mother was a singer, dancer, and drama student, while her father played cello and sculpted. “We all had to take piano lessons,” she recalled, “and then choose an instrument to get into music deeper.” She took up the flute and then guitar, which she still plays whenever she can.
Strong recently began to learn Norwegian, a nod to her heritage. The country’s culture of imagination has always fascinated her. She loves the legends, of the “nisse,” a gnome that left the gate open and let the cows get out, or the light on a mountain that is a troll opening its eye. She also appreciates the Norwegian focus on nature. She took a plein-air painting trip there in the early 1990s and found the power of the changing landscape “a thrill to paint.” She is a fan of the work of several late 19th- and early 20th-century Scandinavian painters, including Peter Severin Krøyer, Wilhelm Hammershøi, Frits Thaulow, and Anders Zorn.
From early on, with memories of North Haven in her head, Strong set her sights on living in Maine, where she has come to know “the non-stop beauty of the weather, land, sea, sky, and woods.” She is happy and honored, she says, to be a witness to “all this gorgeous nature” and feels driven to express its beauty.
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Carl Little is guest curator for the Castine Historical Society’s summer show, “Francis Hamabe’s Maine: A Life in Art.” His article on two vintage Steinway pianos on Sutton Island appears in the 2026 Island Journal.
More About Karin Strong
Karin Strong is showing in various venues this summer, including Salt Pond Studio in Friendship, Arts in the Barn in Cushing, and Craignair Inn by the Sea in Spruce Head. She will also have a solo show at the Craignair Gallery and is displaying work at Mount Pleasant Dental Wellness in Warren. Find more of her work at karinstrong.com.
Arts in the Barn
For the past eight years, Strong has managed the Arts in the Barn program in Cushing; former manager Judith Bascaia helped her navigate the organization over the first two years. Located a mile or so from the famed Olson House on Hathorne Point Road, the unheated, uninsulated structure, built around 1972, has about 30 by 40 feet of exhibition space. The venue is active from June to September/October and mounts three “community shows” a year, open to amateur and professional artists alike, in all media.
The 2026 season features exhibitions on the themes of summertime (June) and Maine wildlife (July). At the end of August, the Barn will offer a non-juried arts and crafts show called “Creations in Cushing” where any theme is welcome. Each show features 20 to 30 artists.
Between community shows, individual artists can rent the barn and exhibit their work. The Cushing Historical Society, which owns the building, hosts yoga classes and theater camps for kids and adults, as well as various presentations (the Arts in the Barn Facebook page provides updates).
For Strong, Arts in the Barn is all about creating a place for community where “no one is turned away.” At the same time, the barn fits her philosophy: “If everyone did creative things, we would have a lot more peace and satisfaction in the world.”
Strong will be taking a sabbatical this year and plans to get to know interior Maine better with her husband, a canoe, a paint box, and a dog (“and probably some black flies”). Victoria Christopher, whose daughter runs Dolce Vita Bakery and Café in Thomaston, will manage the shows.
Maine boasts many such local vibrant art venues that spring to life in the summer. Be on the lookout for shows in your neighborhood.
