CAMDEN— This past June, when Coastal Mountains Land Trust Development Director Kathy Young put out a call to local artists to take a slab of a wood cut taken from a tree on Ragged Mountain and transform it into art, she had no idea how many people would take her up on the unique idea. Our initial story, The Giving Tree: Make Art From My Wood Cuts, detailed how many wood cuts were offered and turned into art that would eventually be donated toward their fundraising campaign for two easements along Ragged Mountain.

The offer inspired approximately 40 artists to create unique pieces of art for the fundraising campaign. They were auctioned Friday, September 23, at the Camden Opera House with artist Colin Page’s cliffside painting as the top selling piece for $1,005, followed by artist Anneli Skaar’s lighthouse painting for $800. Overall, the auction income from all of the artists totaled $6,600 during CMLT’s successful artistic event “Our Mountain Voices,” featuring a number of local musicians, artists, entertainers and stewards of CMLT.

Most of the artists painted nature or wildlife scenes on their slabs of wood. Some made mixed media collages and other artists took the wood in a new direction. Several sculptures were perched atop the wood as a base. Artist Roy Marshall used a skill saw to cut out a relief of the Mt. Battie Tower and bump it out in 3-D. Artist Elisa Lewis poured molten copper into the grain of the wood giving it the appearance of lava flowing through tributaries. Artist Jeremy Chapman transformed the entire wood cut into an intricate wood carving of a bird in a tree.

Some artists decided to be whimsical.

“Some people were making a statement with their pieces and some just created scenes of what they love,” said Young, who was particularly fond of a slab painted by Amy Lowry with a Polar Bear painted on it and three “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” ice cubes at the base of its dwindling ice floe with the bear muttering in a thought bubble: “WTF?”

Peter Linquist gave an architectural twist to his slab of in half and anchored it as a frame to his large mix media collage. Young even donated one of her own artworks, a collage of stones depicting the Ragged Mountain Trail that the campaign will eventually build.

All of it went toward The Round the Mountain Collaboration, a $4.2 million dollar campaign to build a nine-mile trail system encircling Ragged Mountain with four different points of entry and exit and permanently conserving 1,400 acres of watershed land surrounding Mirror Lake and Grassy Pond that are sources of drinking water for six coastal communities.

To see each of the artists’ art pieces click: http://www.coastalmountains.org/single-post/2017/08/04/Calling-All-Artists

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com