Afterword

The point of greatest interest is the place where land and water meet.Ralph Waldo Emerson11Kenneth White, On the Atlantic Edge: A Geopoetics Project (Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2006), 25.As Coastal Works so amply illustrates, we have never been so conscious of shores as we are today. Artists and writers were the first to colonize coasts in the nineteenth century, drawing in their wake the urban elites of Europe and America, followed by the middle and, ultimately, the working classes. Edges are where you will find artists, and, because islands are all edges, they fetch up there in great numbers. On Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, America’s most famous artist colony, painters jostle to set up their easels on the headlands made famous by three generations of Wyeths, Rockwell Kent, George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and so many others....