Growing up in the suburbs, the coast of Maine captured my imagination! After graduating from the University of Connecticut with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (focusing on drawing and sculpture), I headed to Maine.

Shortly after arriving late at night to a campsite on Deer Isle, I walked by the boat building shop of well-known boat designer and builder, Arno Day. The doors were open and a fully assembled oak keel of a boat sat on sawhorses primed light gray and braced off to the plywood floor. To me, it looked like a beautiful piece of sculpture just the way it was. I popped into his shop, looking to get a jug of water.

Arno was at his bench checking boat plans, and I asked him what the assembled keel of the boat was for. He said, “A lobster boat!” After asking more questions about the various ‘cut out’ (rib pockets) areas on the keel assembly were, he asked me “How would you like to build boats?’ And at 22, growing up in the suburbs of Connecticut and wanting to move to coastal Maine, I agreed. He offered me a job building traditional wooden lobster boats, and I moved from Connecticut to Deer Isle, Maine and went to work.

For 3 years, I worked learning the technical aspects of turning a pile of white oak, for all the structural members and a pile of rough sawn white cedar for the skin or planking on the boat….and turning it into a 3-dimensional object, a boat hull. This amazed and sucked me into wanting to know how.

The process is called ‘lofting’. Basically, taking a set of drawn 2 dimensional plans of a boat hull and using a ‘table of offsets’ to transfer measurements from the table offsets on to a pencil drawn, one foot grid. Then on to a freshly light gray painted floor to determine the shape of the hull at various points (called ‘stations”) about 3’ – 4’ apart, like slices through the hull…over the hull’s length. This gave the shape of the hull at that particular slice or station point…along the length of the hull.

Once the boat was framed and planked, seeing the cedar plank lines on an unpainted hull, from various angles, had a strong visual resonance. The freshly milled cedar planking filled the shop with cedar’s fragrance. Learning the craft and the woodworking skills to go along with the craft, at 22 years old….was a chunk of fragrant wood haven!

All the various assembled components that make the structure of a boat from the keel assembly to the steam bent ribs, all in white oak, held a great attraction to me in their abstract structural strength and honesty…. in what they were meant to do and how it all went together.

I worked with Arno for 3 years, but at $2.75 an hour and having no serious savings, I had to move on to a higher pay and began to build and renovate houses still on Deer Isle.

Going from making a rounded boat hull shape to everything in house building being Straight, Level, Plumb and Square was easier though not as satisfying – but financial security ruled.

There’s a whole different set of construction rules to adapt and learn. Even in house renovation and building, skills are required. I was always seeking the skills that produce quality from other seasoned carpenters.

The learned woodworking skills from boatbuilding to house building became intuitive after many years focused on committing to learn them and learn them well. This has given me a comfort level in art making as I draw on these skills which are no longer building a boat or a house, but they are intuitive and flow into the concepts that become 3 dimensional objects as sculpture.

Later, I made a connection with the Carpenters Union out of Bangor, Maine which offered higher wages and was put on a ground-breaking job of building a sewage treatment plant on the wind-swept Penobscot River, just south of Bangor.

It was a hard-hat job through the heat of the summer and the chill of winter building wooden forms for walls and floors of the treatment plant, then stripping the forms after the concrete was poured and set – over again, and again.

This was brutal work, but I wanted to learn how to do it. To do that, I had to adapt to the union culture and working with laborers from the deep rural areas in the backwoods of Maine. I could barely understand their dialect and philosophies, but it was a great antidote to the brutal work. Just working with them was a whole new world with new experiences opening to me – a young guy from the suburbs of Connecticut.

All the while, these relationships and construction experiences were resonating into the drawings and sculptures I was making at the time. Like the time on the Penobscot River, building the sewage treatment plant, when I watched the skilled crane operator lifting a loaded concrete bucket toward where the masons stood motioning to the place to pour. The brakes let go on the cable and the loaded bucket dropped and crushed one of the masons breaking his back and shutting down the job. An awful tragedy just before Christmas!

There was that windy day, when a gust of wind off the river caught a laborer as he lifted a sheet of plywood. Panic and intuition kicked in and he hung on to the plywood. Acting somewhat like a parachute, he went down fast, landing on rubble and luckily, only broke one leg instead of both…..or worse!

Then there was Charlie who wore stained, well used thermal insulated tops and bottoms underneath his work clothes in the heat of summer saying it insulated him from the heat. I found this hard to believe….but went along with it and respected it.

Some laborers had skinned, fly covered carcasses of foxes or muskrats that they had trapped earlier and now were baking in the hot sun in the back of their old pickup trucks. These were, as they say, from the deep “willy wags” of the Maine outback and as unique in character as the world that they came from.

The culture and personalities of Maine union workers drove a spike of interest into my days. This was a full course meal of interest to me throughout each workday. The affectations, lingo and philosophies that came from a deep rural lineage and experiences, just grabbed each day right from the start and straight through to the end.

Going from the high tolerance craft of wooden boatbuilding to the blunt and brutal craft of form and concrete construction churned at complete opposite ends of the spectrum. But this too, had its hold on me to learn this new set of brut skills and absorb the Maine “hard hat” culture that existed within the union ranks in the state of Maine.

I sucked up all these “hands on” experiences like a sponge and learned from those that took their craft seriously. All the while, continuing to make art when I could, as the growing skills I was acquiring were filtering into the art that I was making.

As time went on, I started showing my work in Maine, first, at the Frost Gully Gallery in Portland, which had recently opened by Maine artist Tom Crotty, later at the gallery affiliated with the University of Maine in Orono.

As a young artist, the artists and sculptors H C Westermann and Alberto Giacometti held my attention with the work they were doing.

I had sent H C Westermann (Cliff) a letter when I was building lobster boats, saying how much I liked his work. I said that I was working at finding my way as an artist, while building lobster boats in Maine. He wrote back, starting a correspondence that would last over the years.

Cliff’s sculptures, finely crafted wooden constructions exploring the idiosyncrasies of contemporary life and culture, were a breath of fresh air next to the trending New York art world and resonated with me and many young artists.

He and his wife, artist, Joanna Beall Westermann, had moved from Chicago to Brookfield, Connecticut where Joanna had land on which they were building their house and studios.

In 1978 while going through a separation and divorce and taking a break from living in Maine, I moved to New York city where I worked as a carpenter. A very different experience – instead of backing up to the job site unloading, now using elevators to move materials and feeding parking meters.

After living in the city for a year or so, Joanna Westermann reached out to me and asked if I would be willing to help Cliff finish building their house. I absolutely agreed and for 3 summers, I lived and worked with Cliff to finish projects on their house from framing walls to screwing down a random width oak plank floor from trees cut down to clear for the house and studios. Cliff had a great sense of humor and was a real character. Working beside him was a great opportunity to share the skills I had learned while living in Maine, which he appreciated.

He was a big cigar smoker, “Bances.”

One day, while screwing down the plank flooring in their bedroom with a handheld ‘brace and bit’ (he had given me) with 2.5” #12 brass flathead screws, I heard him yell for help in the kitchen where he was belt sanding flush, wood ‘dutchmen’ (a butterfly shaped piece of wood to plug a rotted knot hole).

I ran into the kitchen; Cliff was lying on the floor. The 4” Makita belt sander had grabbed the cuff of his jean overalls and sucked a 4” wide swath of jean all the way up to his crotch. The belt sander switch was stuck, and the sander was making stabbing lurches at his crotch. I yanked out the cord from the wall socket as he lay on the floor panting away – cigar in mouth. First words out of his mouth, “Jesus Christ, it almost sanded my balls off!” As I reached down to give him a hand to get him up, he panted out, “Roge, would you do me a favor and light my cigar?” I grabbed his Bic lighter, lit his cigar and got him up.

To actually be working with him by day on his house, and at night in his studio, was a golden opportunity to work side by side with an artist that I had great respect for and interest in. After dinner, Cliff would often invite me to walk up the hill to his studio where he would put in a few hours. Not feeling very comfortable about, “What should I be doing while he’s fully engaged in making a piece of sculpture?” And thinking how awkward it would be to be there making a piece of sculpture myself…..I chose the safe bet….make sawhorses! I knew I had to find my own voice.

While they were very private people, building their house and studios, and working on their art, we spent a lot of time together and became very close. Working beside Cliff was a gift and a treat I will remember for life.

In between Westermann’s summer work, moving around the city working out of wooden tool boxes I had made in Maine was a challenge….especially squeezing into a crowded subway.

One day I went to Tunnel Supply on Canal Street and bought my first “soft-side” canvas tool bag (a better way to carry tools around the city), which was just a large internal cavity holding all the tools in a horizontal pile up.

To access a tool, one had to dig through the pile up or dump it out to get the needed tool, then put it all back into the pile up…again. An exercise of frustration and aggravation….just to get a needed hand tool!

Still, I was fitting in my art making while living and working in the city and had started large scale linier charcoal drawings. In 1984, they were selected to be in a group show at the Drawing Center on Wooster Street in lower Manhattan.

I moved out of the city in the early 90’s, still supporting myself as a carpenter. After trying multiple soft-side tool bags on the market and frustrated with their design, I made a primitive prototype that oriented all the tools vertically in vertically tiered pockets. This was a much better solution to store and access tools.

I got it patented and secured manufacturing in China where most tool bags were made. After 3 trips to China to design the first model bag, the model XL was launched at a residential remodeling and house building trade show in Providence, RI. I called it the Veto Pro Pac tool bag, and in 2003 it took off. Today, Veto has worldwide distribution with sales across the globe, which has enabled me to live my life drawing and sculpting.

On the long 16-hour flights from JFK to Shanghai, I started black ink roller point pen and Wite-Out drawings. These drawings were a way to record ideas for sculpture I was thinking about. And a way, in the peace and quiet of the flight, to put down these ideas in handheld sketch books that I could reference once I was back state side and able to make the pieces.

My first studio in Norwalk was a workbench under a tree that as it got dark, I’d pick up and throw a tarp over the power tools on the bench while coiling cords to button up for the night.

Eventually, as I could afford it, I had a studio built on the property in Norwalk. I had also bought a house and barn in Nova Scotia and turned the barn into a studio. Now, I had sheltered spaces to get back to the artwork.

My work now is an assimilation and synthesis of all these lived experiences: living and working in Maine and my relationships with the craftsmen, carpenters, and laborers there, my close relationship with Cliff Westerman, and all the while drawing and sculpting as time and other resources in my life permitted.

Both the Nova Scotia Maritime and the Atlantic Maine landscapes, from the outer rock-bound islands to the rock-solid personalities that inhabit these coastal regions, provide rich experiences to feed into, filter out, and draw on as my work evolves.

Roger Brouard
November 2025