Maine artist to paint 67 lighthouses this year

After the death of his wife, Dominic White quit his day job and is focusing on his art for a full year.

Dominic white sits on the breakwater at Spring Point Light in South Portland. (Photo by Troy R. Bennett)

Maine artist Dominic White wants to paint pictures of every lighthouse in the state — all 67 of them — and he’s giving himself a year to get them done. So far, White has finished nine, including beacons in South Portland, Cape Neddick, Northeast Harbor and way Down East in Lubec. He’s now closing in on finishing his 10th.

That will leave 57 to go.

White’s hefty, self-assigned task comes at a midlife crossroads. In 2024, his wife of 20 years, Jondi, died after a protracted battle with cancer. Her death drove home hard truths about the finite nature of human existence. Suddenly, all the things they’d planned on doing together “someday” were no longer possible.

This realization led White to reevaluate his artistic priorities and think about the creative personal projects he’d been putting off for years.

With this in mind, White quit his day job designing websites and stepped back from his portrait-painting side gig so he could spend a year focusing on his epic lighthouse project. It seemed like now or maybe never.

“I’m 55 and I've talked about doing it for years but I let life get in the way,” said White, who lives on Munjoy Hill in Portland. “Now I'm actually going to do this.”

Nubble Light by Dominic White.

Lighthouses have always been a part of his life. An avid sailor while growing up in Scituate, Massachusetts, his hometown Cedar Point Light still holds special meaning.

“You could be five miles off shore, with hundreds of feet of water underneath you, but suddenly you knew exactly where you were and had that feeling of safety and comfort [when it came into view,]” White said.

He didn’t get serious about drawing and painting until his final year of high school when an art teacher suggested he go to art school.

“Nobody had ever said I was really good at anything before,” he said.

At college — in a sensible compromise with his parents — White focused on commercial illustration, rather than fine art painting. After school, he painted commissioned portraits, taught himself graphic design, worked for a digital printing company and eventually switched to designing websites.

Along the way, his personal art percolated in the background but usually got lost amid the realities of daily life and making a living. But now, at least for a while, White is only painting what he wants, full time. Though he knows quitting his day job is a gamble, he insists he’s not afraid.

“When you go through something as horrible as [cancer] nothing else really scares you,” White said. “My wife is gone, I don't have kids. What’s the absolute worst that's going happen? It's almost freeing. A horrible, terrible tragedy happened but it definitely can't get any worse.”

Spring Point Light and Portland Head Light by Dominic White.

White is also relishing the challenge, trying to find fresh angles and original visions of Maine’s oft-depicted lighthouses. He’s approaching each one as an artistic experiment, utilizing different mediums from paint to pencils and pastels.

Some of his finished works are bathed in serene, summertime light. Other’s are capped with dramatic, threatening skies stretching out above the historic, life-preserving towers.

Last fall, he chartered a boat in Eastport to take him to several Down East lighthouses, getting views from the water, as old-time sailors would have seen them. White is currently working on finishing a view of Whitlocks Mill Light, which sits on the banks of the St. Croix River, not far from Calais. After that, he’s not sure what’s next except more art and more pictures.

“I made a promise to myself, I'm just going to do what I want to do for a while,” White said, “and say yes to everything.”

See more of Dominic White’s art at his websites www.mainelighthousepaintings.com and www.fineartnewengland.com.

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Tintyping all the time

I’ve been busy making lots of wet plate collodion pictures of both friends and strangers this month. I started by attending a four-day, advanced negative and albument paper printing workshop in New York. I generally make tintypes with this process but I’m working on perfecting my 19th century paper printing technique, too. At some point, either this year or next, I’ll be offering it as an image-making option.

In the meantime, I’m making tintypes all over. This Sunday, June 22, I’ll be shooting at the WW&F Railway Museum in Alna, Maine. There, you can get your tintype made AND ride a vintage steam train. How cool is that?

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Complaint department

1. Saturday marks my 22nd wedding anniversary. On the day we got hitched, in 2003, my wife and I worked some anti-Iraq War sentiments into our vows. It was our small protest against a dumb, costly, immoral war fought over imaginary “weapons of mass destruction.” Now, more than two decades later, we’re on the brink of getting into another stupid, Mid-East conflict over more likley non-existant weapns. Why does nothing change? Why are American politicians, on both sides, so consistently stupid?

2. I’ve lived in my house in Portland for almost as long as I’ve been married — about 21 years. The whole time, I’ve owned a car, and year, after year, after year I have to apply to the city for a pass to park on my own darned street. Today, once again, I supplied the requisite paperwork and was told it would be examined and, if found to be valid — just like the previous 20 years — I will be issued a pass good for only one year. Hey Portland, how about you just look at the tax map (where my house was just reevaluated to the tune of a 65 percent rise in four years) and notice my name is still on the receipt?

3. I’m not the kind of baseball or Red Sox fan who expects players to just shut up and do what management tells them — even though they’re making millions of dollars more per year than my entire, extended family, going back five generations will have ever amassed — but I sure wish Raffy Devers could have mustered a tad more humility and learned to DH like our beloved Big Papi did, back in the day. Instead, in the second year of his 10-year, $313.5 million extension, Devers is off to West Coast obscurity. But at least he’ll get to play third base with the Giants, even though he led all AL third basemen in errors for the seventh consecutive year in 2024, committing 12 errors in 138 games.

Your sountrack

On Saturday, June 21, I’ll be playing with Bailey’s Mistake at the 3rd Annual Cisco Brewers Irish Festival in New Bedford, Massachusetts. We go on at 3:45 p.m. but you’ll want to be there all afternoon and evening. Our set is surrounded by other excellent New England bands including The Pourmen and My Druthers.