Seascapes by PEM

Artist's Biography

pem@panax.com

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About the Artist

Born in Boston, Mass. in 1935, Philip E. McCurdy (signing as "PEM") is a graduate of Harvard University, with degrees and honors in both Biology and Science Teaching. He worked as a schoolteacher and Headmaster for 30 years, and as a corporate trainer, an educational consultant in Nigeria, England, and Israel, and as a foundation Vice-President. He retired from education and moved with his wife, Marla, to Ogunquit, Maine in June of 1999 and began full-time painting.

With some training in art classes at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Wellesley High School (MA), he began drawing as a freelance medical and scientific illustrator while in college and throughout his teaching career. During various professional occupations, he served as a cooperating teacher, illustrator, and field editor for several school textbooks in physics, biology, and general science. He also contributed illustrations to a number of scientific and technical journals. Major influences for current land and seascape paintings are Bruce B. Turner, Rockport; E. John Robinson, CA; and Fran Scully, Ogunquit

Mr. McCurdy is a member of the York and Newburyport Art Associations, and is a Signature Member of the International Society of Marine Painters. He teaches a popular beginning acrylics class -- You Can Paint! -- at Wells-Ogunquit Adult Community Education and at the YAA Gallery.

Personal Statement

My approach to full-color acrylic composition is significantly informed by earlier black and white, pen and ink scientific illustrating work. Representing the anatomy and structure of things fascinates me: rocks, waves, pools, clouds, beach sand, as well as objects on and around them: spray, foam, littoral debris, and wrack lines.

I now find myself as attracted to painting rocks as to painting waves - not at all what I thought when I first came to arts-rich Ogunquit (and met my wife-to-be) in 1954. In another twenty years major bits of our ever-beautiful local Maine seacoast -- particularly Ogunquit's Marginal Way - should be well delineated in my canvasses.

When viewers say, "Oh, we know just where that is," or "I could climb right out on those rocks," I am pleased. And when the Ogunquit columnist, Marge Tyrus, writes in the Coast Star, "McCurdy's works capture the finite details so familiar to residents. When viewing his works one truly feels they are physically present at the seascape locations!" I'm delighted.