By Jennifer Murtz
Contributor

Hazard Durfee, 85, lets his painting do his talking. Born of a genetic Yankee conversational reserve, Durfee prefers simple answers to complex questions. "I like to paint the sky," he says in response to an observers view of several paintings of expansive landscapes each dominated by a slightly different sky.

No great bursts of excitement for Hazard Durfee.

He restricts his enthusiasm to his paintings of Italian court yards, Moroccan villages, and the seaside life of places as diverse as Tiverton, Rhode Island and Tangiers. He has had plenty of time to contemplate the sky and the land. An artist since childhood, Durfee has enjoyed over five decades of professional success ranging from exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum in New York to shows at the Virginia Lynch Gallery just minutes from his magnificent early New England farm estate overlooking the Sakonet River.

"Rhode Island is in my soul," Durfee offers in yet another brief explanation of why he has lived since the late 1940s in the Tiverton home where he was born in 1915. "I don't know that I would be happy in Italy or Morocco or New York. I feel I don't belong there, I belong here."

His Rhode Island surroundings bear his mark. Like the famous artist Monet, one of his inspirations, Durfee has surrounded himself with natural beauty. From the front yard of his eighteenth century, frequently expanded salt box, he sees a climbing forest that reaches to a wide sky, with only the occasional house and an unfortunate television transmitting tower to mar the view. "I don't even see it anymore," he says of the modern intrusion. "I look right through it."

To the sky, no doubt But not just that. On all sides of the farm house, which he has filled with family furniture, mementos and his paintings, he has made lush gardens, which he still tends. Some of them rest in the shadows of magnificent beach trees over 130 years old. With a natural "canvas" before him, Durfee has painted slices of the grounds' life in colorful paintings of the gardens or close treatments of individual flowers.

So much of his work seems light years away from the abstract expressionism that first took hold of him shortly after World War II, when he moved to New York and attracted the attention of galleries, museums and Life magazine, among others.

A 1940 graduate of Yale University's art School, Durfee received what he calls "totally academic" training there, but he felt "unprepared for the real world." That sentiment led to a habit of traveling to pursue his art, when he won a post-graduate fellowship to roam about Mexico and paint. The war interrupted his pursuit in 1941. He served as a U.S. Army "camouflage engineer" in Italy and North Africa until 1945. That experience added fuel to his wanderlust, and in the 1950s, after some early success in New York he returned to Italy and began to find his true form.

"Italy was a revelation for me," he said. "Before that, in New York, you felt compelled to work with the trend of abstraction. It was inevitable that I do that. The thing is even my abstract work was based in nature. Some of the abstract work was valid, but it was labored. I was young and trying to figure it all out. It wasn't until I went to Italy, that I really saw what I wanted to paint. I was terribly impressed with the art in Italy. The museums were a revelation to me."

With its colorful villages, big cities, spectacular churches and cathedrals, and museums filled with the world's great art, Italy turned Durfee around. "I saw all this, and I wanted to paint what I saw," he recalled. "The Italians wondered why you would paint scenes. Paint ideas, they would say." Durfees ideas were in the landscapes and scenes he painted.

A market scene with crated fish, fruit and vegetables along a narrow street, villages with enormous mountains rising up into the sky, stone buildings moving up steep hills against a sky swirling with clouds.

Always the sky. Always, but each one different. Cloudless blue here. The slightest wisp of clouds there. Ominous clouds in yet another depiction. It's as if his eyes couldn't take everything in, or the painting's frame couldn't contain everything.

After his first sojourn to Rome, Italy in the 50s, Durfee expanded his travels to include Morroco and other venues so that he has alternated painting his home and the wider world, finding similarities and differences that intrigue him.

Sharp and spry at 85, he continues to travel and to paint big scenes, whether or not they are of a local fisherman casting a net into the Sakonnet or a simple cow covered by an impossibly blue sky in an expansive field. From his meticulously neat and organized barn studio next to his house, Durfee continues to pursue his vision and his ideas. As he looks out the studio windows, nature breaths with the season in neat rows of trees lining a roadway or the wild growth of an adjacent woodland. At home in Rhode Island or traveling in Italy, scenes speak to him and he converts them to his own vision of color, light and structure. In his symphony of paint, under the sky's great canopy, Hazard Durfee yearns for quiet harmony, and he often finds it.