Monhegan Light House 

Dan Graziano painted Monhegan Light House using oil on panel. The image presents a modest building in the American vernacular style, but it does so with striking formal simplicity, which might make us ask questions about what exactly it represents. Light Houses in this period became powerful symbols in American visual culture. We can see them in folk art, advertisements, and fine art. They represent not just physical safety, but also broader ideas about national identity, such as a rugged individualism and mastery over the natural world. Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, has long been a popular place for American artists, and there is a developed institutional history of art in the region. But Graziano’s image, in its stripped-down form, seems to challenge the more conventional narrative paintings that we often see associated with the location. To learn more, we might research the artist’s biography, his relationship to this specific region, and his place in a network of contemporary landscape painters.