I hadn’t expected a reception, but one is waiting on Ted Tihansky and Alison Hill’s lawn. The artists and I have just strolled to their home from the Black Duck, one of two stores still open for business in what passes for a village on Monhegan Island. The sky is a robust blue, but an October wind whips over the headlands, a remnant of the rainstorm that drenched the coast the previous day. Bruised apples and yellow leaves litter the still-damp lane. [For the rest of this story, see the October 2008 issue of Down East.]

And what a strange reception it is. The guests, a half-dozen or so, are tall and scrawny, with coal-black skin reminiscent of the shriveled corpse of King Tut. Wrist-thin necks. Sagging breasts. Squinty eyes. Mouths open in laughter . . . or is it grief?
These figures are the result of how Ted Tihansky stays fit and warm during Monhegan’s off-season. Armed with a chainsaw, he spontaneously hacks fallen trees into wraiths and bizarre animal hybrids, then tosses them into a bonfire for a good scorching.
Presenting one joyful couple leaning toward each other, heads tilted, mouths agape, Tihansky says, “I did these two when we got married — Alison’s first year out here — and that’s what I think was coming from my subconscious. They’re called Singing Man and Singing Woman, and I think I’m just gonna have to keep ’em.”
The introductions continue. Here’s Skinny Man, lashed to a stockade fence by a twining wisteria, and Cobra, a snake with a profile like Marley’s ghost. “This is me trying to get a hold of myself,” says Tihansky, fingertips waxing the cheek of one stressed-looking fellow. “And this woman is having a hard time. I think it’s my female side freaking out at whatever.” Surveying the whole motley lot, he adds, “I never know what I’m going to make exactly. Once I do ’em, I go ‘uh-oh’ or ‘yaaaaay!’ They’re very powerful. Painting is my focus, but these come from a deeper level.”
Dressed in a bulky sweater and paint-spattered pants, his thinning hair pulled into a ponytail, Tihansky, 55, declares with boyish earnestness that he will keep carving log figures until he’s made sixty-five of them.
Alison Hill, 57, is wearing similarly splotched jeans and a ball cap pulled low so she is all blue eyes and pixie smile. The number sixty-five, she tells me later, has no significance. “Ted’s like that,” she says affectionately. “He’ll just come out and say, ‘I’m going to make sixty-five of these!’ or ‘I’m doing twenty of those!’ ”

Monhegan, a narrow, one-and-a-half-mile-long hulk of meadows and forest braced by glowering cliffs, has famously drawn artists for 150 years. In summer, when the island’s population hovers around six hundred, painters can be seen dabbing canvases atop every crag and on every lane and cove. This time of year, though, you can count on one hand the number of artists living on the island. Ted has been a year-rounder since 1999. Alison joined him two years later. Having traveled through the seasons with a community known for reticence toward newcomers, the two have acquired an intimate knowledge of the place that informs their work. They can’t help but paint the same coves, fish shacks, and lobstermen, often working side by side, yet their expressions are uniquely their own.
“Both are exceptionally talented portrait artists, and there aren’t a lot of artists who do proficient and excellent portraits,” says Elizabeth Moss Civiello, whose galleries in Falmouth and Scarborough show Hill and Tihansky’s works. Once married to the son of Henry Kallem, a prominent member of the Monhegan art colony, Civiello has a
particular interest in Monhegan art. “The technical aspects Ted and Alison have acquired as great portrait painters are applied to their plein air work. Portrait painting has given them the skills to capture tonal color differences in their paintings of sunsets and the ocean.”Civiello, a former full-time Monheganite herself, first met Hill on the island ferry. “She is a very modest and lovely person,” Civiello says. “Ted also is very modest and very eclectic. He’s the stereotypical artist personality — scattered, with flashes of brilliance.”
Before Alison, Ted, and I go indoors, there is one more character to meet. Propped against the deck, he leans back from the waist, one long arm downwardly outstretched. “That’s Pulling Man,” Tihansky says, rooting in the vines at the figure’s feet. “Pulling Man was made from a chestnut tree at the Shining Sails bed-and-breakfast . . . oh, here it is!” He plucks a skinny black arm from the tomatoes. Holding it against Pulling Man’s stump, Tihansky explains, “I made an error and cut it too deep, then he fell down and it broke.” (Ted’s artworks are often casualties of his kinetic work style.) “But when he’s up and leaning against something, he’s pulling. That’s important because people on Monhegan pull and push a lot.”

One day earlier I was aboard the Elizabeth Ann as she plowed out of the fishing village of Port Clyde into big gray rollers whisked up by wind and the previous night’s full moon. It was nigh impossible to focus on the horizon as the boat scaled one steep wave then plunged into another, flooding the bow and squirting icy seawater through the edges of the cabin door. The boat, which carries mail, freight, and passengers to and from Monhegan, was on her fall schedule — one round-trip daily, down from three in summer. Come November, the wood-heated Laura B, a modified World War II army
patrol boat, will make the thirteen-mile journey three times weekly, the island’s only link to the mainland until May.
Monhegan’s spruce-covered precipices did not materialize in the heavy downpour until we were minutes from the wharf, where a small crew decked head to toe in orange oilskins got to work tying and unloading the boat. A couple of battered pickups stood ready to haul luggage for two dollars a bag. Passengers set out on foot, following dirt roads edged with stacks of green and yellow wire traps, piles of fluorescent buoys, and other gear peculiar to lobstering, the chief occupation of about one-third of Monhegan’s seventy full-time residents.
His first two winters on Monhegan, Tihansky plied that trade as Captain Dan Murdock’s sternman. “I did it to become integrated,” he explains, sitting now with Hill in their living room-cum-gallery whose walls are covered floor to rafters with paintings. “I didn’t want to be an outsider.”
Raised in Pennsylvania coal country, he had no prior fishing experience. His job was to empty each hauled trap of unwanted crabs and fish and re-bait it with a mesh bag of rotting fish parts. Lobsters, if there were any, were tossed into a tank. “You go by that tank and — bang! — their claws go up, and they got you,” Tihansky says, clutching his throat where a lobster latched onto him one day. “You have to scream and drop to your knees while Dan gets the pliers to put pressure on the other claw, hoping they let go. I mean, it scared me. Four in the morning. Eighteen degrees. Staying out there eleven hours.” A few times, while dropping re-baited traps from the moving boat, his legs got tangled in the lines and he was dragged toward the rails. Murdock heard his screams in the nick of time. “It would have been all over,” Tihansky says, wide-eyed. “How long are you going to survive down there? Seventy fathoms. It’s sick! It’s crazy!”
The experience influenced Tihansky’s artwork practically and inspirationally. “I was a good bait bagger — fast — and I would get ahead, so I’d scratch paintings onto scraps of wood with a bait iron.” Pieces like his life-sized painting of two lobstermen pulling a skiff onto Fish Beach ring true, he says, because “I did this work. Dragging that skiff from low tide was about the worse thing you could think about after eleven hours of work. Lobstering hooked up with my artwork, with the will to continue painting. It was an experience I had to have to see how hard anything is, whatever you do.”
Some afternoons, still wearing his reeky Grundens, he’d catch the Laura B and drive nonstop to visit his sweetheart in Newport, Rhode Island. “He’d come into my studio totally covered in fish stuff,” Hill recalls. A longtime Newport resident, she was making her living as a portraitist, taking commissions for oils and sketching pastels at sidewalk fairs.
She inherited her mother’s gift for portraiture, but in college she’d been practical, majoring in psychology, then earning master’s degrees in art therapy and art education. Neither of these subjects figured into her first jobs, however. Hill’s admiration for strong women — her portraits of Monhegan’s female lobstermen are studies in grit and femininity — was nurtured working as a union carpenter and telephone lineman. She is a serious body builder, winner of the 1986 Miss New England Natural Bodybuilding Championships. After suffering a back injury, she took up painting in earnest, studying at the Lyme Academy in Connecticut and the Art Students League in New York, where she attracted the attention of Deane Keller, legendary for his art courses on human anatomy. In a recommendation, Keller wrote that he’d encountered only one other student with Hill’s ability and spirit in forty-five years of teaching. (It is Ted who reveals this
tidbit, prompting Alison to remark, “You’re embarrassing me!”)
It was at an art fair that Hill met Tihansky, who’d arrived in Newport in the late 1980s with a resume that also included training at the Art Students League and Lyme Academy, as well as Paier College of Art. He invigorated the local art scene by opening a gallery that heralded show openings with free concerts and plays. (He remains a Newport favorite and is represented in many private collections.) He and Hill began painting together occasionally and, after a few years, friendship blossomed into romance.
In 1991, Tihansky received a fellowship that allowed him to travel the country and paint. His last stop, Monhegan, muse of Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, three generations of Wyeths, and countless others, kept pulling him back — summers at first, then one winter, then another. In spring Hill came to work with Tihansky at the Trailing Yew, a rustic inn popular with hikers and birders. Their tiny bedroom was furnished with one single bed and a kerosene lamp. “I was madly in love so I didn’t care,” Hill says. “I thought we’d be going back to Newport at the end of the summer. Then Ted announced he wanted to stay.”
Seven years later, Hill delights in the endless inspiration embodied in an island so small the din of breaking waves is inescapable. “The light is always a little different,” she says. “There is never enough time. Even when the days end at nine o’clock, you work to the last minute because there is always something more beautiful to paint.”
She enjoys Monhegan’s rhythms — the camaraderie of many painters in summer, the introspection of winter, when she and Tihansky don one-piece storm suits, sling easels over their shoulders, and trudge through snow to paint scenes the other artists never see. The frigid temperatures turn their palettes stiff and sticky, but they use that to advantage, the thick colors adding dimension to their paintings. “Ted is hard core, but I don’t last too long out there,” admits Hill, who regards the off-season as an opportunity to paint the stoic faces of Monhegan in her studio. Island living has allowed her to develop as a landscape artist — she renders her subjects with loose, choppy strokes, emphasizing mood and form over details — but portraits are her first love, and hers are luminous.
Hill learns about her models as much through conversation as quiet observation. “You have to get inside that person and get who they are,” she says. “I get a sense of their expressions and what’s behind their eyes.” Thus, she coaxes from the canvas not only the sure-footed stance of Angela Iannicelli but something deeper as well — the inner resolve and determination of a lobsterboat captain and single mother. Her perceptiveness results in family portraits that seem almost alive — a child’s shy smile, a baby’s innocent appraisal, a mother’s gaze, full of pride and unconditional love.
Like Ted, Alison eased into the tight-knit community by making herself useful. She taught art classes at the schoolhouse (enrollment: five) and served as vice president of the public library. “You don’t want to be in anybody’s face,” she says of the unwritten protocol, “but I’m like that anyway, so it was a good fit for me. I have a lot of space to do what I want.”
Tihansky’s work, too, has been influenced by Monhegan’s blend of intimacy and isolation and a life paced by nature in all its brutal beauty. His short, quick brush strokes have become more energetic, seeming to dance and leap upon the canvas. His landscapes in particular are drifting from impressionism toward rhythmic and soulful compositions that embody not so much Monhegan’s surface as its essence. Manana Island may glow like a charcoal ember under a sky seen as orange, red, purple, and gray streaks. A frenzied grouping of thick white, gray, and brown strokes becomes identifiable as a snow-covered road because of the sketchy figure walking upon it. (That would be Ed Donegan, the man who taught Tihansky the ins and outs of sterning and a favorite model for both artists.) “I have this desire to express what moves me in the moment,” Tihansky says. “Staying in the moment. That’s the only time I was ever happy in my life. I can’t rush anymore. I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen three hours from now. It’s this moment, the present, the now.”
Today Hill and Tihansky are fully embraced in Monhegan’s hug. They create and sell artworks to benefit island institutions. They accompany fellow islanders to legislative hearings on school issues. Every Trap Day, when Monhegan lobstermen set their traps together, they help load thousands of traps onto pickups for the short jaunt to the wharf, where they unload them. “We’re mixed up in the whole deal here,” Tihansky says. “The school teachers are going to work. The kids are going to school. The carpenters are indoors working. The fishermen are fishing. You better get out there and do what you’re supposed to be doing, too. This is what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to be painting here.”