Jon and Jill

I was fortunate to be a friend of Jon Imber (1950-2014) both in Boston, where Jon and I moved in the same art world circles, and in Maine, where our family has lived every summer, first in Deer Isle and now across the Reach in Harborside.

Jon met the wonderful artist Jill Hoy in 1989 at the Stonington summer home of legendary painter/printmaker Karl Schrag. It was love at first sight and what Shakespeare (in Stonington) would call “a marriage of true minds.”

I often saw Jon and Jill painting together on Deer Isle with their twin easels set up in a field, by a pond, or near the sea. Jon had been a studio painter before he met Jill, but she encouraged him to go outside and paint what he saw. Even when he moved back into the studio, a few steps away from their house in Stonington, he set up his easel with a view of Jill’s garden, a fabulous multi-colored paradise of lilies, lupine, foxgloves, snapdragons, and wild roses.

Jon and Jill’s paintings changed the way I look at this beautiful landscape, too. Jon immortalized Stonington Harbor; Fifield Point; the Lily Pond; the Pink Lily Pond; the Causeway; the Deer Isle Bridge. Walking or driving around Deer Isle or Harborside, I would often say: “That’s a Jon”, or -- especially when the light was glimmering on the water -- “That’s a Jill.” Even after Jon moved indoors and started painting abstractly again, his work was filled with the spirit of the landscape, the sound of the sea.

In the Fall of 2012, Jon was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a progressive neurodegenerative disease, and began very rapidly to decline. His last summer in Maine, the whole community came together to help. Friends donated physical therapy, built ramps, drove and carried him, helped him figure out ways to keep on painting. Deer Isle artist Holley Mead organized a meal train to bring dinners for Jon and his family. I made soup.

I made soup from the vegetables in my own garden, with help from Four Season Farm, Tinderhearth, David’s Folly, Yellow Birch Farm, Little Island Oyster, and other local farms. Whenever I stopped by to buy supplies, my farmer friends would say, “Take a little extra for Jon.” The whole Peninsula was pulling for him.

Sometime that summer, as Jon was more and more confined to the house, he began painting portraits of family and friends and people who came by to help. And so many people came by to help! It was a great outpouring of love and art.

That summer, although he was more and more immobilized, and using only his left hand, Jon painted a hundred portraits. They were exhibited at Haystack in November, in a beautiful and moving show.

The same outpouring of love and art continued when Jon and Jill returned to their home in an artists’ building in Somerville, near Boston, for what was to be a long, hard winter. Their son, Gabriel, a sophomore at Bates College, took the semester off to stay home and help. Friends and family brought food and flowers. Helpers and healers came every day.

Jon continued to decline, and continued to paint, with the brushes strapped to his hands, helped by his amazing assistants, Chris Hassig and Adam Eddy, and often painting side by side with Jill.

He painted portraits, and he painted flowers. He had always loved the flowers in Jill’s garden; now he was painting flowers in a vase.

Even at the end, when he couldn’t use his hands, Jon found a way to paint with the brushes strapped to his head. In his last days, in Somerville, as the Spring bulbs were just beginning to arise, he was still painting amazingly beautiful pictures of an orchid plant. He was an inspiration.

(A version of this story appeared in the May 1 issue of Island Advantages of Stonington, Maine.)

Thanks to Four Season Farm, Tinder Hearth, Yellow Birch Farm, Little Island Oyster Co., David's Folly Farm.