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'I want to keep painting'

June Lovelace Griffin ’36

By Bates College

September 24^th, 2015

At age 101, June Lovelace Griffin ’36 is one of the college’s oldest alumni, and she still lives in her own home near the Bates campus. Although she wrote travel stories for newspapers and magazines for years, her passion has always been her painting.

“My paintings say that I’ve been every place. I’ve done everything. And I’m interested in everything,” Griffin says.

Mostly self-taught (as a child she got a few lessons after winning a “paint the dog” contest), she used oils for much of her life, but now prefers easier-to-use acrylics. Griffin’s style is painterly, her still-life compositions and seascapes influenced by impressionism and by her many years of traveling around the world.

The Bates College Museum of Art has two of her works, and curator Bill Low admires Griffin for how her painting has evolved to include “more adventurous and abstract collage and mixed-media works.” In one collage, bits of mica from nearby Mount Apatite make the painted blueberries shimmer with color.

She paints nearly every day, though the winter months are a challenge. Painters need light, and the short days do her no good.

“My painting room doesn’t get sun until 4 in the afternoon. That’s useless to me. I’d like it by 10 or 11 in the morning. So I’m experimenting with lamps. I want to keep painting.”

Keeping up

“I try to be smart enough to keep up with what is going on. I want to know what the news is. I watch it at 6:30 every day. I don’t want to get stupid.”

'I AM PROUD OF BATES'

“Every place I’ve every gone, Bates has prestige. It is well, well-respected. Everybody feels that way.”

The Right Stuff

“Somebody might say that to find my picture when I’m not talking is difficult.”

Color her optimistic

“I like blue and green and those lovely colors. I think they are optimistic. If you are going to make any foliage, you have to have blue for flowers and green for leaves.”

'YOU CAN't STOP GETTING OLD'

“I didn’t look too bad in my 90s, then all of a sudden I didn’t look good. There’s nothing you can do. You just have to get old.”

What you see

“Every painting is me. Anything you get from my painting, good, bad, or indifferent, it’s me.”

Q&A

“I talked your ear off. But you asked me. You started it!”

As we Part...

“Take my hand, and say goodbye.”

Footnotes

Bates Communications writer Jay Burns and photographer Phyllis Graber Jensen visited June Lovelace Griffin ’36 on Sept. 18. 2015, at her home on Delcliffe Lane in Lewiston, Maine.

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FootNotes

Bates Communications writer Jay Burns and photographer Phyllis Graber Jensen visited June Lovelace Griffin ’36 on Sept. 18. 2015, at her home on Delcliffe Lane in Lewiston, Maine.