Cooper Dragonette is a Maine painter whose coastal landscapes carry the imprint of more than a decade spent leading expeditions along the state's rugged shoreline with Hurricane Island Outward Bound. Deeply rooted in firsthand experience of tidal shifts, changing weather, and the emotional texture of remote coastal places, Cooper Dragonette paints not what he sees but what he has lived — merging plein air observation with studio recollection to create paintings that evoke temperature, time of day, and the sensory hush of a place remembered.
Working primarily in oil on panel, his compositions balance immediacy and distillation — each piece a careful reconstruction of feeling rather than fact. Represented by Portland Art Gallery, Cooper Dragonette recently set a record at the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust's Paint for Preservation auction with a sale of $16,000.
What does a decade of wilderness expeditions leave behind in the eye of a painter — and what does memory allow him to find in the landscape that direct observation alone never could?