Through Rivers and Time: Heidi Daub’s Layered, Lyrical Maine
On Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula, Heidi Daub weaves motherhood, memory, and movement into paintings that feel like poems—and poems that feel like home.
The River Remembers
When Heidi Daub talks about painting, she doesn’t start with brushes or oils or technique. She starts with her body. “It’s not mind-body,” she corrects gently. “It’s all one.”
Her earliest creative training wasn’t in a studio. It was in the gym—four-hour gymnastics practices, preceded by an hour of dance, the kind that wires into your muscle memory and never really lets go. “There’s a groove athletes talk about,” she says, “and I know that groove.” It lives in her paintings now. In the arcs and flows and layered motion of her brushwork. In the way her newest collection, In the Time of Turning, seems to move across the wall like a river current, or a body in mid-routine.
Heidi lives and works in Blue Hill, Maine, a quiet place on the state’s coast that doesn’t need to shout to be heard. She’s been there since 1984, raising three daughters, building homes with her husband, and making art that speaks with that same calm strength.
But the current that pulls through her work runs much deeper than location.
A Childhood at the Confluence
Heidi grew up in Binghamton, New York, near the meeting of the Chenango and Susquehanna rivers. It's where she first noticed the world—not just as a child observing it, but as someone of it.
“I remember being three,” she says, “on my mother’s hip, outside our apartment. There was light filtering through the trees, the sound of a creek nearby… and this awareness hit me. That I was part of it. Not separate.”
It’s the kind of moment most of us forget by the time we hit preschool. Heidi never did. That early, visceral recognition of belonging to something larger—land, water, air—still guides her art today.
Even now, when she returns to Binghamton, it feels like more than a visit. It feels like tapping into something ancient. Especially when she stands at the edge of the river. “The Susquehanna,” she says, “is one of the oldest rivers in the world.” She says this with awe, as if the water holds stories not just from her own family, but from millennia of human movement.
“I started journaling in art school—and I’ve never stopped. Grocery lists, sketches, lines for paintings. It’s all in there.”
Music, Movement, and Motherhood
To understand Heidi’s creative life, you can’t separate painting from poetry or poetry from music. They aren’t different expressions. They’re facets of the same thing.
In college at Montserrat, she was painting, yes—but also playing guitar, singing, scribbling lyrics and journal entries in a sketchbook that quickly became her everything-book. “I still carry one,” she laughs. “Though now I keep groceries in a separate notebook.”
She’s played fiddle at contra dances, written and recorded songs, and still makes music with her husband, an instrumental music teacher, and their children. Their family band is real—and not just in the “we all play music” sense. They’ve literally played gigs together. “We had a retirement party for my husband,” she tells me, “and our kids got up with their instruments. No prompting. Just jumped right in.”
It’s not surprising. Her daughters are all musicians. One teaches voice at Bowdoin. Another plays steel drum and trumpet. Her youngest is a gifted violinist. The grandchildren? Still too young for formal lessons. But they’ve got rhythm—and toy banjos.
Painting Through Time
In the Time of Turning, Heidi’s newest collection of paintings and poetry, wasn’t born from an artistic prompt. It was born from lived experience.
During the pandemic years, her father grew ill. Heidi returned to Binghamton, this time not as the daughter being cared for, but as the caregiver. At the same time, her daughters were becoming mothers. The arc of life couldn’t have been clearer—birth and death braided together in real time.
“I found myself thinking about confluence again,” she says. “Not just of rivers, but of generations.” That concept—the overlapping of timelines, the way past and future meet in the present—forms the emotional backbone of In the Time of Turning.
The paintings are lyrical without being soft, layered without being heavy. They suggest movement not just across a canvas, but through a life. It’s work that feels both intimate and universal.
“It was my first real awareness of being of the world. Not just in it.”
No Academic Jargon, Please
Ask Heidi about “themes” or “formal exploration,” and she’ll answer you—but only after translating your question back into plain English.
Her work is emotional. But not in a capital-E “Expressionist” sense. It’s emotional because she feels things deeply and because she’s made peace with that. “Sometimes to a fault,” she admits. “I can get pulled into too many causes. I care a lot.”
That caring shows up in the texture of her paintings, in the way she talks about nature, or the miracle of growing a child inside your body, or the simplicity of working with stone. (“We built a granite house once,” she mentions offhand, like it’s no big deal.)
But even when talking about her deep connection to the natural world, she avoids turning it into mysticism. Her description of inspiration is matter-of-fact: “There’s a stilling that happens. And then something urges me to render what I’ve felt. That urgency? That’s what I paint from.”
Blue Hill, Forever
Maine didn’t just happen to Heidi. She chose it—more than once.
She and her husband considered moving to Portland when she was still in school. “Back in 1980, Portland was rough around the edges, but vibrant,” she says. “In retrospect, it would’ve been a good time to move there.” They didn’t. Instead, they explored Halifax, settled briefly in Vermont and New Hampshire, and eventually found their way back to the coast.
It was the light that sealed the deal. “There’s something about the light here,” she says. “And the evergreen forests. And the water.”
They’ve lived on the Blue Hill Peninsula ever since—raising kids, renovating homes, building stone walls, and making music together. It’s not a storybook life. It’s real. Which is better.
“The painting’s been constant. The writing’s been constant. I just have to do it. It’s how I process the world.”
Beyond the Canvas
It’s easy to view Heidi’s life and work as intertwined. But she doesn’t romanticize that overlap. She knows it comes with tension—motherhood vs. studio time, caregiving vs. creative space, teaching vs. tending to your own inner voice.
Still, she wouldn’t trade it.
Her artistic life has never been about prestige or ego. She’s exhibited widely, yes. She’s published three compilations of paintings and poetry. Her work is in collections across New England and beyond. But that’s not what drives her.
She’s still that kid on her mother’s hip, astonished by the light.
Visit the Portland Art Gallery
You don’t look at Heidi Daub’s work so much as enter it. It moves like memory—pulling you into places you’ve known, people you’ve loved, moments that passed too quickly. It doesn’t explain. It resonates.
And if you’re quiet enough, it might show you something you’d forgotten.
Visit the Portland Art Gallery to see more of Heidi Daub’s work.
This article was adapted from an interview with Heidi Daub, originally conducted by Dr. Lisa Belisle for Radio Maine. You can watch the full conversation at this link.