True Blue Island

Kat Farrin is a local artist on Peaks Island, Maine, USA.  These days sharing images via her observations of birds, plant life, and island landscapes on her daily walks and bike rides around the island. Often she makes paintings of the animals she sees on driftwood or rocks in an aboriginal dream time like way of pointilism . She participates in a weekly writing group and wrote a poem recently that I had the honor of being sent.

It is a windfall because Kat’s work easily invokes the voice of Peaks Island.  With an authority that is easy to respect, she speaks up on behalf of the value of surviving life and beauty.  The poem is called “small craft advisory” and you’ll  have to wait and read it in the March Edition of the Peaks Island News.

Grounded in the earth and real things that she sees, the work she does is worthy of attention.  It feels just like the antidote for the times we need. Recalling and presenting to us  reminders of life all around us so we can all remember to notice how beautiful life actually is.

For another more intimate installment of admiration for Kat’s work please find

“Rude Awakenings”
Making Peace with the Beast Machine
by Charles A. Kniffen

Chuck writes fondly
a great story of a time with Kat on She-Wolf, titled, Once in a Blue Moon. At the end of the chapter, he corrects himself, She-Wolf was powered by an eight-horse Johnson outboard. He had got the engine wrong on first recount.

In her own words,
“I grew up in the small town of South Bristol, Maine, 13 miles down a peninsula, part of the town being a bridged island, Rutherford Island.

I worked a year on my brother’s lobster boat and then hauled 75 traps from my father’s tiny skiff, Bluey, for a year. After that I got my own lobstering skiff, the Shewolf, and hauled 150 traps by hand for over twenty years.

Feeling the desire for a ‘real island’ I moved to Cliff Island and lived there for 7 years, working on other people’s boats. Then I moved to Peaks Island, where like many, I have lived here off and on for years. While on Cliff, I got a master’s degree, independent study, from Goddard College in writing and art.

I am very grateful for my four children and for nature, which to me is the great out doors, or god, and which somehow I seek..  through writing, taking photos, and through painting… often, but not always on wood drifted to shore.” Kat Farrin

see more work @katfarrin on instagram