Anne DeCoster is a St. Paul native whose studio sits along the banks of the Mississippi River. In the mid-1960s she studied painting with Sidney Delevante in New York. During the same period she raised four children and wrote and illustrated two children’s books that were published by Doubleday. In 1974 she continued her studies at the Instituto Allende in Mexico and in 1984 she completed her MFA at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. DeCoster has taught at Hamline University, been a visiting artist at Macalester and St. Olaf Colleges and was a resident artist at Concordia College. In 1998 DeCoster completed a major commission of six paintings for Minnesota Life in St. Paul. DeCoster spends summers at her home on the St. Croix River where the moving waters continually influence her work.
I have had a relationship with Lake Superior nearly all of my life. I was a young girl when I first visited there. Childhood friends had family homes on Madeline Island, and I was lucky enough to be invited for weeklong visits. Its hugeness, its coldness, its clear, fresh water, and its great depth were endlessly fascinating and more than a bit frightening. Shortly after my children and I moved back to Minnesota from the east coast, the Edmund Fitzgerald sank and its crew members were never found. There were tales of people swept off sailboats, never to be seen again. Lake Superior and its legends are huge fodder for an imaginative mind. There’s mystery here beneath the sometimes wild, sometimes calm surface.
About ten years ago my relationship with the lake was enriched when I enrolled at the Grand Marais Art Colony for a week-long program of intense painting with other artists. I’ve been going each summer ever since, and now my trip has grown to two weeks. I stay in a little cabin that looks right out on the lake. Over time I have come to feel that this landscape, like other important ones in my life, has become a part of me. Painting the lake and experiencing the lake have become completely intertwined. It feels natural to be there, natural to take it in and natural to express its presence in paint.
The rocks in these paintings are near the harbor. They’re some of the most interesting rocks I’ve ever seen, quite red where the water has washed them again and again, black where they’ve been away from sun and water. They’re angular or sometimes softened.
Lake Superior, like an immense inland sea, makes you think about the world and time in very big terms. In this place where water meets land, the intersection can be gentle and harsh. Water would seem to be the weaker element since it meets the rocks and slides away. But water is eternal and relentless in its actions. Though rocks are solid and seem impregnable, in the very long run it is the water that eventually proves the stronger. Again and again it slaps at the rocks and, so slowly that we cannot see it, wears them away into sand."
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