WILLIAM IRVINE
The Rough Sea
oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches
SOLD July 15 – August 10, 2026
William Irvine: Heading Home
Artist’s Reception: Wednesday, July 22, 5–7pm
William Irvine, who turned ninety-five this year, painted an impressive forty paintings for his fourteen solo exhibition at Courthouse Gallery. Irvine continues to surprise his collectors with the tender embrace of Lovers by the Sea (30 x 40 inches) and the glorious, sun-soaked yellow of Heading Home (36 x 72 inches), his last large painting in this series. In the exhibition catalog, arts writer Jorge Arango declares, “No one on the planet does anything like Irvine does. This uniqueness of vision, and the persistence and prolific nature of its development are astonishing.”
Irvine, who was born and raised in Scotland, was an abstract painter living in London when he came to Maine in 1968. “Something in my painting completely changed,” recalled Irvine in a studio visit with Arango. “There was something about the Maine landscape that didn’t lend itself to abstraction.”
Arango elaborates on this defining transition in his essay: “To be sure, Irvine didn’t abandon abstraction completely. Instead he began deconstructing his subjects into basic components and reassembling them in recognizable yet not realistic ways. His seascapes became a kind of coalescence of abstracted geometries: triangular sails, as in Among the Clouds; square clouds, which also appear in many of his paintings; the simple line of a lobster boat’s wake, as in Heading Out; and waves that look like jumbles of blue triangles, most evident in The Rough Sea.
WILLIAM IRVINE: Heading Home
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