Robert Pollien

"Otter Point" oil on linen

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses
are truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy
even into the era of manhood.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Painting at the water’s edge has become central to my practice as an artist. Mount Desert Island has attracted artists since the 1840’s when the artists of the Hudson River school began showing works based on artistic explorations of the Maine coast. After my first residence at Acadia in 1993, my family and I decided to relocate to Bar Harbor to further deepen my study of the island.

My approach is somewhat aligned with Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau who turned to the natural world and rejected unthinking conformity, instead advocating that each person find, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “an original relation to the universe.”

It is in this spirit of turning to nature that I pursue quiet contemplation of the coast, making small paintings that give evidence of my deep appreciation of this landscape.

– Robert Pollien

Robert Pollien

Maine painter Robert Pollien earned his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Robert has been awarded a Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in painting. He has received support from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the Monhegan Artists’ Residency Corporation, the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center at Rolling Acres Farm and the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, among others. In 1993, he served as the first Artist-in-Residence at Acadia National Park.

Robert currently teaches at the University of Maine, and at ArtWaves, a community art center recently established in the village of Town Hill in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Pollien’s paintings are in numerous corporate, public, and private collections. He is represented by Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland, the Littlefield Gallery in Winter Harbor, Maine and Artemis Gallery in Northeast Harbor, Maine.

Visit his website.

Robert Pollien offered a slide presentation surveying his career as a painter, and his ever-changing relationship with crows, at ArtWaves MDI in August 2019. Pollien, who was Acadia's very first Artist-in-Residence in 1993, was a Resident Artist with the program 2019.

NPS Photo / Jay Elhard

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