‘Marsh in May’ is an original fine art oil painting by Alison C. Dibble. It is painted on a canvas 24 x 30 inches, and is in a wood-look frame with gold ornamentation. The Marsh is a large one in Frankfort, Maine, where the Penobscot River is tidal (below Bangor) and large expanses of mud flats can be seen at low tide. This is the North Marsh River, at the confluence with the Penobscot River. This immense marsh is habitat for fishes, birds, insects and plants.

I painted into the picture a beautiful sailboat, a gaff ketch, ‘Angelique’, which is in the Maine windjammer fleet out of Camden, Maine. It seems unlikely that the captain of Angelique would navigate the boat into a narrow channel in the marsh with all sails flying. But with an artist’s sensibility can override practicalities, and I thought those tanbark sails would be a striking foil against the brilliant green of the fast-growing saltmarsh vegetation. Artists move things around in their world on a whim, and capture them as they wish for obscure reasons. That’s part of the fun of art.