“The moment I walked in, I said this is it,” says artist and collector Samantha Rand of her home in Freeport, which she bought in October 2020, just as the state opened up from the pandemic. After nearly a decade of peripatetic living, years in which she completed her MFA in Painting at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and stayed in borrowed or rented homes, Rand had finally found “my refuge.” The house is surrounded by woods and has sweeping views of Maquoit Bay, providing a stunning backdrop for her extensive collections of art, family heirlooms, and treasured objects gathered on world travels. “Everything that I had saved and had in storage for years has a home,” she says. “I knew where every piece of furniture was going to go.”
The three-bedroom, three-bath house started as a seasonal cottage and had undergone a complete renovation and expansion by the previous owners. The only change Rand made was the addition of a wood-burning fireplace, a tiled wet bar, and bookshelves on the focal wall in the living room. Above the fireplace mantel is a Narwhal tusk, and hanging dramatically overhead is an over 100-year-old whale jawbone inherited from her grandmother’s house on Nantucket. Throughout the home, family antiques are complemented by works of contemporary art, many by artist friends from Rand’s years of living and working in New York City, where she began her art studies as an undergraduate at Pratt Institute. More recent additions are by Maine artists, many of whom she met as a volunteer with the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in Rockland.
After years of working in public relations and traveling globally for the fashion industry, Rand spent a decade in donor relations in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while also studying painting part-time at the Art Students League. A health scare in 2003 prompted a life change. In her late 40s, she quit her job and left the city to enter the low-residency Master of Fine Arts program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. One winter, between semesters on campus and without a permanent home, she stayed at a friend’s empty summerhouse in Maine on Cape Rosier. “I’d never been to Maine, and here I was, alone in the woods! I toughed it out that winter, and when spring came around it was absolutely gorgeous. I loved it and decided that after school, I’d move to Maine.”
Rand now has a studio in the Fort Andross Mill in Brunswick, where she is working on a new series of abstract paintings inspired by French artist Nicolas de Staël, whose work she saw on a trip to Paris last fall. Working directly on raw canvas, she begins by pouring and staining color, building textures and intense hues with each subsequent layer. “When I get into the studio, time falls away,” she says. “I paint from a place of joy.” One of her brightly colored paintings hangs in the foyer of her home, across from an installation of 15 bold geometric paintings by Boothbay artist Robert Younger, a friend she met at Vermont College. In the adjacent hallway and up the stairwell are works by Maine-connected artists Ann Craven, Howard Greenberg, Fanny Broder, Rick Hamilton, David Wilson, and Hannah Berta.
A recent acquisition, prized for its subject, is a Katherine Bradford monotype, View of Maquoit Bay, that Rand spotted on a visit to the artist’s studio. In the dining room, a large, whimsical painting of sharks by Adam Umbach, purchased from a Carver Hill Gallery pop-up exhibition in Rockland, perfectly matches the sea blue Murano glass chandelier over the table. In the living room are works by Dudley Zopp and Elizabeth Greenberg, acquired from CMCA’s annual Art You Love Auction. In Rand’s bedroom, a chair covered in vintage Marimekko fabric, a serendipitous auction find, pairs beautifully with two Carol Eisenberg photographs. Over a brilliant blue dresser is a contemporary cyanotype by Elijah Ober, and near the tub, with its view of the bay, are photographs by J.T. Gibson and Joyce Tenneson.
“I’m very fortunate to have a platform to promote Maine artists. That’s what I’m most proud of,” says Rand. ▪
