The Morning Sentinel

CANAAN

March 8

Artful Harvest

Canaan woman's creationshelping to preserve Maine's farmlands

By Erin Rhoda erhoda@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

CANAAN -- One local artist is doing with color what the Maine Farmland Trust is doing in practice: preserving Maine's vanishing landscapes.

Kathy Perelka, painter, selectwoman, farmland advocate and former art teacher, draws her inspiration from rural Maine. In doing so, she aligns herself with the only statewide land trust focused on protecting farmland.

The Maine Farmland Trust, based in Belfast, is trying to protect 100,000 acres of Maine farmland by 2014, to keep it suitable for farming, said House Majority Leader John Piotti, D-Unity, also the nonprofit organization's executive director.

At her home in Canaan, Perelka's bright pastel paintings of blueberry barrens and farm fields decorate her walls. She described each piece. "I love doing red," she said as she stood in front of one painting, of a brilliant red blueberry field, which she painted on Vienna Mountain, part of which is protected by the Belgrade Regional Conservation Alliance.

"These guys look like they're talking together," she said, of another painting, of hay bales facing each other in a field across from Bob and Dot Reisner's farm in Skowhegan.

Last winter she received an e-mail from the Maine Farmland Trust, and she immediately saw what she called an "identical philosophy" to hers -- to protect farming and farmland.

So she made the connection. She now has several paintings at the Maine Farmland Trust Gallery in Belfast, from which a portion of sales go to the organization. She also participates in about 15 art shows a year, she said, where she ends up talking more about Maine Farmland Trust than her paintings.

"What that association has done for my artwork is it's given a new depth of meaning for me," she said. "It's not just creating pretty pictures; I'm helping to preserve farmland."

The purpose of the Maine Farmland Trust, which is in its 11th year of operation, is to keep Maine farmland as working farmland, Piotti said. The land is preserved through agricultural conservation easements, purchase of development rights and farm transfer and estate planning. The organization also links prospective farmers to farmers who may be retiring and want to sell or lease their property but keep it as farmland.

"The reason why our work is so important is that farming is very important to Maine, and the future of farming in Maine is dependent on maintaining the land base. Farming is growing in Maine. A lot of people don't realize that. The number of farms has gone from 7,000 to 8,000 in the last 10 years," Piotti said.

While the increase is a good sign, there are "serious challenges," he said. The biggest challenge has to do with the age of farmland owners. When owners grow older and retire or die, the land becomes vulnerable to development, he said. According to an agriculture census, one third of Maine's best farmland, about 400,000 acres, will be "in transition" within the next ten years.

"So, to counter that, we've set a pretty ambitious goal of preserving 100,000 acres of farmland by 2014," he said.

All of the farmland preserved in the last 10 years in Maine totals 25,000 acres, and the organization has helped preserve 17,000 of that amount. So the current preservation plan is "a huge ramp-up," he said.

"We feel we have to operate at that level if we're going to really be responsive to this challenge," he said.

In the past three and a half years, the organization's membership has increased five-fold. Wrapped into the growing membership is the Belfast art gallery, which Piotti said accomplishes two main things: it shows the "vibrancy of agriculture," and it provides another way to connect with people who may not have heard of the organization's mission.

"And Kathy is a part of that," he said.

Perelka grew up on a farm in Canaan where she spent a great deal of time outside, she said. She even had a comfortable seat in a tree where she would sit and read.

She has continued to appreciate rural areas throughout her life. "I could work just in Canaan and that would last me the rest of my lifetime," she said.

But she has painted scenes in every Maine county, which she compiles in a calendar to sell in area stores.

"When you go to those barrens in Washington County, and they stretch for miles ... It's just red ... It just fills me up and flows out in my paintings," she said.

She described the farmland in Aroostook County that tiers up, whether the fields grow broccoli or support hay. "It just undulates and goes and goes and goes," she said.

"A lot of the places I've really been drawn to, they're in one form of land trust or another," she said. She has painted the Townsend farm in Canaan, which is protected by the Somerset Woods Trustees, for example.

She has done art since she was 4 years old, she said. She taught art for 30 years in area school districts.

She uses soft pastels on a sanded surface, so "it's immediate, vibrant, and it layers up, so it's actually 3-D," she said. Her paintings have as many as 20 layers. They sell for between $100 and $3,500.

Each painting is different, she said, but she generally does three-quarters of a painting in sitting. She then works from pictures and paints off and on, for days, until it is complete.

She brought out her favorite painting, of a field of cornstalks in January snow, the sky a strong blue. A farmhouse and barns appear as suggestions on the horizon.

The cornstalks are clipped, dead, lined in rows that stop at a place no one can see.

Unlike much of her artwork, this painting seemed to just happen. "I think I'd been painting it in my head for two months," she said.

She spent four hours at the easel, "but (the painting) was long done before I touched a pastel," she said, adding that the sky was so blue because it soon snowed.

Erin Rhoda -- 474-9534

erhoda@centralmaine.com