With the region’s First Friday Art Tour – the first for 2023 – just days away, it seems appropriate to remember an artist who left us earlier this month.

Corinne McIntyre was living her dream … a full-time painter with a home by the sea. It seems surreal to be thinking about her, writing about her in the past tense. But there it is. Corinne passed earlier this month and Ocean Point and our hearts will never be the same.

Her love, her zeal for life was evident from that sparkle in her eyes to every stroke of her brush on a canvas. Corinne accomplished so very much in her long lifetime:

I first met Corinne when I worked at the Boothbay Harbor Region Chamber of Commerce, 1996, I believe. Her Ocean Point Studio/Visions of Maine was among the local galleries in the membership. Her positive energy and passion for life shone like a sunbeam; I remember thinking then, as I did last year when I interviewed her for my winter column, that I had never met another person with the zest for life that Corinne McIntyre did.

Corinne founded PAPME, Plein Air Painters of Maine, with three other local artists – Roger “Rembrandtski” Millinowski and Ron and Monique Parry. PAPME eventually became 600 members strong. For several years, local and regional artists and others from across the U.S., members of the Oil Painters of America’s Great American Paint Out would spend a week in September here in the Boothbay Region doing what they loved best: painting. Corinne organized these events in our earthy heaven. I remember covering that event several times and you knew Ocean Point, “OP” to locals and summer folk, would be one of the painting locations. Man, back in 2014 there were 53 artists here – among them the late Mitch Billis, Kathleen Billis, the late Helen St. Clair, Rick Reinert, Brad Betts, and Boothbay Register alumna Diane Randlett. It was always a thrill to watch them work, chasing the light and putting on canvas what they saw and were experiencing.

OP was Corinne’s “beat,” to put it into newspaper terms, and she was devoted to it. When I spoke with her in March 2022, she had just received a birthday card from someone who had been buying her art for a number of years and always stopped by the gallery on Van Horn Road in East Boothbay. She said so many people over some 30 years had become friends. Quoting her from that article, “I get to meet people all day … how wonderful is that? They love to tell you what they do and they are always happy looking at and/or buying something they love. I have collectors who come year after year ... The gallery is so much more than a place to sell paintings.”

For all the years she’d been living the dream, sharing her visions of Maine and her beloved OP, she told me she still felt like a beginner. Quoting from that article, “I think that means you are always thinking, always experimenting. I love painting more now than I have in my whole life. I just love every single solitary day.”

She was 91 then. I nearly fell off my desk chair when she told me during that interview. And when she wasn’t creating on canvas, she was concocting new recipes and dancing around in her kitchen! “I love every single day,” she said.

Farewell Corinne. Thank you for your visions of Maine ... the colors, the scenes many of us know and love so well. Those paintings are expressions of you we keep here with us forever.

Farewell Corinne, woman of boundless energy and passion … you are, and will always be, missed.