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.

Elegy for Jon 

1950-2014

I first met Jon Imber in 1975, when we were both working at the Fine Arts Library of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. We were then young painters emerging from the dominant mode of abstraction and beginning to paint in images again -- to paint from reality, to paint from dreams.

It was a very exciting time in the art world, and we had many interesting conversations about art. It’s hard now for young artists to imagine what a grip abstraction had on the art world in the 70’s – almost all academic and museum art was geometric or color field – Harvard’s one contemporary art course was nicknamed “Spots and Dots.” But Jon and I were always interested in images, in poetry, in dreams. And we both loved Bob Dylan!

I remember how he devoured art books – big piles of picture books were always on his desk -- everything from Giotto to Etruscan sculpture to Courbet and Picasso. I remember how eloquently he spoke about finding a new way to paint – not just paint as paint, but paint as a way of expressing your whole complex emotional and intellectual inner life.

A few years later, we met again at the opening of “Boston Now” at the Institute of Contemporary Art. David Ross was the director and he was making the ICA, then still in the old firehouse on Boylston Street, the most exciting place to be. I was by then an art critic, and I was covering the show for Art New England. The theme of the show was Figuration, and he was one of the featured artists. His paintings were very much alive -- strange, wonderful self-portraits, dreamlike narratives – embodying everything he had talked about so eloquently in the library. A few years later, I did a radio piece for WBUR on his first show at Nielsen Gallery. He once told me that he carried the tape of that story in his pocket for years.

At the same time, in what seemed like another world, my husband, Paul, and I were spending a few weeks every summer in Deer Isle, Maine, renting a cottage or sharing a house with the poet Mark Rudman and his wife, Mady. After our son, Alexander, was born in 1983, we began spending our Deer Isle weeks at Goose Cove Lodge. There, we saw beautiful paintings by Jill Hoy. We loved her work, but never met her because she was always painting outside, en plein air. One summer, we all went to visit her gallery in Stonington, and a young woman told us, “Jill isn’t here today because she’s getting married to some guy from Boston called Jon Imber.” My two worlds – the Boston art world, and the summer in Maine world, had suddenly come together in a mystical marriage.

From then on, we often saw Jon and Jill, and later Gabriel too, in Boston and in Maine, at studio visits, openings, dance parties, all kinds of festivities. We often celebrated Rosh Ha Shana, Jewish New Year, together, either at our house in Cambridge or together with Missy Greene and Eric Ziner in their beautiful gallery in the barn at Yellow Birch Farm in Deer Isle, Maine. I loved visiting his studios in Somerville and Stonington and watching his painting change – the landscape years, the Jill’s garden years, the de Kooning years, the return to abstraction, the loosening up of the brushwork. Always the art books, the Bob Dylan songs, the interesting conversations.

At the end of the summer two years ago, at our Rosh Ha Shana celebration at Yellow Birch Farm, Jon announced that he had been diagnosed with ALS. He had not been feeling well all summer, back and forth to doctors in Boston, and now this. Life began very rapidly to change.

Sometime last summer, as he was more and more confined to the house, he began painting the portraits of family and friends and people who came by to help. And so many people came by to help, to show love and support, first in Maine and then in Somerville! It was the beginning of a great outpouring of love and art, an amazing drive to continue to do what he had always wanted to do, and to be what he really always was. Just as when I first met him so many years ago, he was finding a new way to paint, a new way to use painting to express his whole complex emotional and intellectual inner life.

When I went to have my portrait painted in the studio in Somerville, Jon and Jill sat together side-by-side, painting, looking like an Egyptian sculpture of a king and queen on a double throne. He was helped up and down, with the brushes strapped to his hands. I was facing the wall with all the other portraits, and was suddenly reminded of Manet’s last paintings of flowers – the juiciness of the paint, the petals unfolding and falling, the squiggly stems seen through the glass bowls. Or, as Bob Dylan sang it, “vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme.”

Later, I began to think of all those portraits as a procession of friends coming with him on his last journey. I am honored to have been part of that procession.

This was published in the June issue of Maine Home + Design.

Maria Sings It Again Even More Tragically

Maria Callas singing Vissi d'arte from Puccini's Tosca