Prints

One of my neighbors’ houses has this wonderfully character-laden door into the cellar. When the tree in front of it matures, the door will definitely be out of commission.

Two blue porch rockers sat under a tree in our garden for several years.  They were a great place for visits and conversations.  One day I decided to do a drawing of their section of the garden.  When I got finished, it looked like the rockers themselves were having a conversation, so this print became an homage to the rockers, their conversation, and the conversations they’d hosted over the years.

A clematis vine outside my dining room window is inclined to expand, by late August, beyond my expected limits for its scope. This time it worked its way through and around the shutter slats.

On Monhegan Island at The Trailing Yew, a classic boarding house, the horseshoe pitch is a focal point. Everyone gathers here to await the clanging bell that signals the arrival of each day's breakfast and dinner. Tinting the pine tree that overlooks this scene was an experiment. Fortunately, I liked the results.

A shasta daisy and the apple tree outside my kitchen window both bore fruit at the same time one summer. I looked out the window, and there was a print which needed to be put on a plate; thus, “The Kitchen Window”.

The red lily was the first plant I added to the garden at my house. The natural composition of form and color it made at the corner of the house made me produce this print, one of my earliest Mills scenes. The flag doesn’t really have blue stripes, but that was the color they needed to be - I think that’s what’s known as taking artistic license.

Sunflowers have an unending fascination for me. Each summer I try to develop my own crop, sometimes in pots, other times in beds. All manner of pests that roam the acreage at night work against my efforts, so when I do succeed from time to time, it is a great victory. When they endure, these horticultural wonders are sentinels, indeed, following the sun through the day and keeping silent watch into the early Fall.

In central Pennsylvania there is a well-known, most elaborate barn with a number of decorative stars in its structure. This bird house model of that star barn appeared one day in a garden shop in Maine, having been made by a man in Pennsylvania, and my mother decided it needed to live in our garden. To date, no bird has dared move into it despite the consistently open door, but it is a hopeful reminder, in our Maine garden, of our Pennsylvania roots.

A friend did a series of paintings of pears one year, most of them single portraits. Her pictures made me see them in a new light. Then, last March I went to the market looking for flowers to draw. The pears caught my eye, and I came home with pears instead of flowers. The more you look at them the more anthropomorphic they become. Here is a singing trio, The Three Boscs.