As happens when many a major enterprise bites the dust, the closure of Maui’s Hawaiian Commercial &Sugar Co., the last sugar plantation in the state, did more than end many livelihoods and a venerable way of island life. It also created some tangential ripples. That includes the loss of treasured artistic subject matter that’s grounded in real life.
The lively site of the HC&S Puunene Sugar Mill, with its billowing smokestacks and sprawling multilevel buildings, teams of workers, fleets of trucks and flocks of chickens, has been a favorite “paint out” subject for Maui Plein Air Invitational painters since 2006, when the annual outdoor painting gathering began. When they arrived for the late-February invitational on the heels of Alexander &Baldwin’s announcement that operations would cease by year’s end, a dozen participants signed up to do farewell portraits of the mill.
“I am sad to see that it’s closing,” said Randy Sexton, a painter from the San Francisco Bay Area who has participated in every Maui invitational and painted the mill every year except for a couple of times when it was too windy.
Painting in plein air — from the French term for outdoors, “in full air” — came into its own with the advent of the Impressionists in the 19th century. The plein-air artists in the Maui event commit to completing a painting in one typically half-day session at an outdoor site, capturing the natural light, mood and action of a particular day, time and place.
In pursuit of capturing “a slice of Maui life and (to) chronicle our times,” which is how Lois Reiswig, president of the Maui Arts League, described the event’s goals, the artists paint and draw at various sites, such as Lahaina Harbor, Kapalua Bay and Hanakaoo Beach Park, during the eight-day event, which culminates with awards and a public viewing.
The Puunene mill has proved a perennial favorite subject because “it’s just amazing,” said Sexton, whose oil painting this year, “Sugar Mill Palette,” features two workers with a forklift and is made with slablike brush strokes that convey a palpably bright sunlight, clean blue sky and rough industrial surfaces on a massive scale.
“It’s such a landmark on the island that represents so much history,” Sexton said.
The mill is also beautiful, with the contrasting colors of the green buildings and red-and-white smokestacks, said Southern California artist Debra Huse, who has painted different views of it over the years. It’s a challenge “to get all that in, with a lot to tackle.”
This time her composition took shape as “standing just outside the gate, I spotted those big gears close-up in the foreground.” Homing in on a section of the mill, her study in light and shadows approaches a Cubist sensibility, softened by the presence of workers and chickens.
Although it was Sunday, “I could see two men moving stuff around, and a rooster came right out, put one foot back and struck a pose,” Huse remembered with a laugh. “He did it a couple of times, like, ‘Uh-huh, I’m hot.’”
The close-up view made this visit even more special for Ronaldo Macedo, a Lahaina resident and co-founder of the invitational, who from the start had organized paint-outs at HC&S as well as the Pioneer mill in Lahaina, before the latter was dismantled.
For years, Macedo said, he had painted a favorite view of the Puunene mill from the highway, unable to get permission to approach closer. This year the mill management granted access.
His panoramic landscape “So What’s Next?” won the event’s Maui Prime Fine Foods sponsor award. It depicts most of the mill — with its many windows, roofs, tanks, chimneys, poles and cherry-red cane trucks — in its setting of earth, trees, mountains and a big sky into which white smoke from a mill stack rises, blending with the clouds.
Because the mill wasn’t operating on Sunday, he added the smoke, Macedo confessed, along with groups of workers in the foreground. “I love putting people in my paintings, to kind of create a little bit of a story and another area to work on shadows and lights, shapes and colors.”
As he painted a last look at what is still a working concern, Macedo said, he imagined the mill filled with people and machinery moving. The paintings will help people understand the place and its meaning while it still stands, and long after it’s gone.
