MAINE THROUGH A FLAWED CRYSTAL

JEAN, keen-eyed William Thon is an outdoor man with a devoted indoor following. Thon (rhymes with gone) lives in a fishing village on the coast of Maine, paints Maine's rocks, trees and seas subjectively and with intimate under standing; nature forms the architecture of his world. Thon's luxurious frame house, which he has built with his own hands, is like one room in the vast, roughhewn, sky-ceilinged mansion of his surroundings. His self-appointed task is to translate those surroundings into a few square feet of painted canvas--to bring the outdoors indoors and hang it on a wall.

Thon's worldly success over the past few years has been phenomenal. His last two one-man shows practically sold out (at $500 to $2,000 per painting), and he is now represented in eight important museums. To open an exhibition of Thon's latest paintings this week, Manhattan's Midtown Galleries had to borrow back twelve pictures it had already sold.

Among them are Sea Birds (from the Metropolitan Museum) and Light in Autumn (opposite). Both have the flawed-crystal complexity, the hint of cubism applied to open air, that has become his trademark. Thon builds each composition on a lattice of smudgy rectangles, laid in partly with putty knives, and laces his sharp, delicate outlines well into the lattice. An extraordinary yet unobtrusive richness of texture results. More important, Thon's technique stretches and modifies the vision of the viewer. In his pictures, air has peculiar sparkle and density, and the things it seems to enclose look fragile to the point of evanescence.

The psychological effect Thon admittedly strives for is a consciousness of time's enveloping quality. On an art fellowship in Italy in 1947, he was particularly impressed by the film that great age casts over many Italian buildings. He came home with a headful of half-digested Italian subjects and one driving idea: that the film of time could be incorporated in pictures. He handled it more convincingly in Maine than he had in Italy. "The rocks of Maine," Thon observes, "go back millions of years. There's a bone structure to the coast that comes through especially in the fall and winter. When the summer foliage is down, the rocks come up again."

A pharmacist's son, Thon was born 48 years ago in Manhattan. He left school at the end of the eighth grade, lived by a variety of odd jobs while teaching himself to paint. Success came very slowly, and Thon's star did not really rise until after his World War II stint on a subchaser and his sojourn in Italy.

"There are cycles of popularity," Thon says matter-of-factly. "If mine starts falling off again, though, I can always go out and become a fisherman or a carpenter--there's plenty to do."

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