Last week, master artist Brenda Bettinson invited me to Barters Island to see her latest work. Of course, I went.

As the soft-spoken woman and her gallery owner Cordula Mathias described the works, I had trouble concentrating on their words as the overwhelming images seemed to shut out the sound.

Let me warn you up front not to make an appointment to see her work if you are looking for bright sketches of happy dancing seagulls, flying schooners scudding before a summer breeze, or a gaggle of giggling lobsters gallivanting in a glorious sea of melted butter.

Bettinson did not make art designed to bring pleasure to the viewer. In fact, once you see it for yourself, you might find your late night dreams colored with dark and fearful images. It is done to make you think, to internalize. Most of all, it is intended to make you remember the Nazis and their legacy of evil.  And remember you will.

Bettinson is from away.  She was born on England’s east coast, at King’s Lynn, a medieval trading port, and grew up not far from London where she acquired vivid memories of the nightly “show” put on as British fighter planes battled German bombers and V-1 buzz bombs whistled through the night sky. “We knew from the whistles where they were going to hit,” she said.

Her parents didn’t want her to study art, but she convinced them to let her try, and a few years later, she found herself at the Sorbonne for grad school. Moving to the U.S. in 1960, she was invited to join the faculty of New York’s Pace University where she became a full professor and chair of the art department. Much of her work explored the themes from the Judeo-Christian traditions.

In 1966, the Vatican Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair featured four panels of her work. “My work was displayed next to a Michelangelo. I was in a pretty good neighborhood, don’t you think,” she said with a laugh and a smile.

That was the year she won the Gold Medal of the National Arts Club of New York. It was also the same year she purchased a small plot of land near the north end of Barters Island. “I came up here in 1964 and was enchanted. It was so peaceful when compared to the bustle of the big city,” she said.

Last fall, her work depicting the battlefield horror of World War I was featured as part of a display at the Holocaust and Human Rights Center at the Augusta campus of the University of Maine.
The horror of war and its terrible effect on women motivated her latest work.

She took 16 months to create a series of paintings depicting impressions of the Nazi concentration camp at Ravensbruck located about 50 miles north of Berlin. Accounts say more than 55,000 women perished under brutal conditions imposed as the facility became the primary training ground for the Nazi’s notorious women concentration camp guards.

Bettinson’s latest paintings, 13 in the central section, are designed to be displayed horizontally in a 21-foot long line. An additional four works provide a preface to the primary display. The central section of the work, done in muted grays and blacks, provides a walking tour of the horror and sadness of “that place,” she said.

It begins with a depiction of women, standing in line. Despite the bitter German winter, they were issued flimsy dresses and denied necessities, like underwear and hygiene products. The figures are depicted in line as a guard dog snarls at them. In the background, a row of perky crimson tulips provides a stark contrast to the prisoners.

The paintings continue with a portrait of the thuggish camp commander, a scene of new arrivals, stripped and forced to go into a shower hall not knowing if water or deadly gas would drop from the ceiling. Next up is a series of legs showing how “doctors” slashed them so they could try out “new medicines.”

A portrait of a prisoner stuffed into a small box, where she could not stand nor lay down, is followed by a sneering, sinister SS officer and another of a pile of bodies scattered around as autumn leaves.

The final panel bears the hand-painted characters from a homemade sign erected after the war: IHR SEID NICHT VERGENSSEN - You are not forgotten.

While the post-war sign is a wake-up call for residents and tourists, Bettinson’s paintings are stark reminders of the camp’s awful history of brutalizing women.

I will not be able to forget Bettinson’s latest paintings for a long time, if at all.

Her works are at Mathias Fine Art. For an appointment, call 633-7404.