Ronald Frontin
http://frontin.com
Ronald Frontin is a contemporary Maine painter who continues the American realist tradition of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins with his fastidiously rendered figural images set on the coast and in the countryside. His subjects include the hardworking fisherman and farmers of Maine and his family and friends.
Frontin was born in Camden, Maine, in 1962 and today resides near the town of Rockland. Indeed, he only lived out of his home state briefly, while attending the Philadelphia College of Art (1981-85) and while apprenticing in Andalusia, Pennsylvania, with the noted realist painter Nelson Shanks (1985-88).
Frontin's outdoor scenes portray the hardy individuals who make their living from the fields, rivers, beaches and bays of Maine. The artist, who himself enjoys working in the open air, is interested in painting people who are physically engaged with nature and who are unaware that they are being studied; the opposite of posed works, these images convey respect for the grueling and absorbing tasks of outdoor life and capture the particular light and mood of the Maine landscape.
With their poetic undertones and personal subject matter, Frontin's paintings have an affinity with those of Andrew Wyeth. Soundly crafted and thoughtfully composed, Frontin's works reveal his desire not to impose his own point of view on a subject, but rather to derive inspiration directly from it, allowing its intrinsic nature to emerge.
- From the Spanierman Gallery Exhibition portfolio - 2002