The 12-foot tide recedes quickly from the inlets and estuaries of Deer Isle, one of the 2,000 islands along Maine's rugged Atlantic coast. For a few hours, the rocky point at Sand Beach will be exposed. As Duncan Martin approaches the point on an August afternoon, he studies the boulders and shimmering tide pools, taking in the pristine scene. He carries a fresh white canvas and his portable easel in one hand, and, in the other, a knapsack full of the tools of the painter's trade—oil paints, brushes, sketch pads, pencils.

"A musician might make music sound the way this water looks," he says, gesturing at the ocean. "A musician uses notes, and the relationships between the notes and rhythm, to put together a piece of music that has a certain quality about it. With a painting, you're using paint, the surface, color, line, form, shape, and the organization of all that, to glimpse something, some little glimpse of truth. It begins to float and sing and fly. You can't utter it in words."

As a painter, Duncan is not interested in creating technically sleek representations of physical objects or landscapes. He seeks to understand some essential truth about his subject that is not necessarily apparent in its physical details. He then works in a very focused way to convey this essential element through his painting.

The summer sun is bright, creating a dazzling shimmer on the water that's almost too bright to look at directly. Duncan pulls a sketchbook from his bag and stands on a massive flat rock, sketching in graphite. He's sketched and painted here countless times and knows the place well.

"I find that I do many paintings in a particular place. I tend to do a series and really pursue it. I try to experience what is happening right now, today, during these few hours. Each painting brings out a different aspect. Maybe today I'm interested in how the light is sparkling on the surface and what's involved with that. I always want to push things farther than I have before."

Sand Beach is on a spectacular rocky point at the southern tip of Deer Isle, on the eastern edge of Penobscot Bay. Duncan is one of many artists who have come here over the past hundred years to contemplate and experience its beauty. He first came as an art student in the mid'70s, and has returned ever since. His family owns a home just up the hill from the waterfront in Stonington, a tiny coastal village named for the rose-tinted granite quarried here.

"I like being on location and experiencing it, you know, as close to the water as possible, with the sky moving," Duncan says, climbing down onto the sand. He walks forward and back across the point, looking over several large boulders to a sprucecovered island 500 feet offshore. Then he stands back.

"When I'm involved with a place, I'm trying to understand the spirit of it. Hopefully the substance of my painting is imbibing and expressing the spirit. This moves the painting beyond the material and lifts it up. It's like prayer. Prayer's effectiveness doesn't come from the particular words you use; it's revelation."

Eventually, he drops his knapsack in the sand and unfolds his easel. He positions his canvas, cleaning old paint off the clips before clamping them down on the frame of the white canvas. He raises the canvas to chest level and resets the easel.

"It's a matter of inspiration," Duncan says, "but you have to be ready. If I stay in the house too long or don't get out on location, there is nothing. But if I get here, things happen."

Being prepared to paint is fundamental to Duncan. Striving to be more rigorous in his own discipline, he advises his students to get out and paint often—not just to think about painting, but to actually be in front of the canvas on location and to begin the process. This not only hones their perception and receptivity, but also gives them experience with the tools and materials.

"When I was single and had more time, I tried to be pretty disciplined about painting. Now that I'm married, with kids and responsibilities, I have to be even more so. It requires discipline to focus your thought and to not think of anything else, but to open your thought to inspiration. I find that if it doesn't come while I'm sitting there with a brush in my hand, it comes when I start to put something down and start working through it. It's the same thing with prayer. If you set aside a time and you are there, you are ready for the inspiration when it comes.

"The elements of discipline and spontaneity are both as essential in art as in life. It's like Principle and Love; Principle being law and discipline, and Love being spontaneity. This spontaneity is Life expressing itself in endlessly original ways. And we need the balance of those two."

Duncan readjusts the easel and scrapes some two-day-old oil paint from his palette. "Sometimes I use a whole handful of brushes," he says, tossing 24 brushes and four palette knives into a tray on his easel. "Sometimes," he says, "I use just one brush for the whole painting. Sometimes it's all knives.

"It's getting hard to close up the easel," he laughts as he squeezes new paint onto the palette in the same eight places he has used hundreds of times before. The palette is an inch thick in places with hardened paint.

A ledge of exposed rock about 100 feet from shore captures his interest, and he studies its relationship to the water and sky.

"This may look like rocks and water and sky, but there's something else going on here beneath those details. I want to find some way of expressing that. It's the truth, the discernment of truth, that interests me. It's an intuitive process. As a painter, I try to see what is really true about what I paint, not just what appears to be true.

"This is where the study of Christian Science has helped me immeasurably, because a constantly expanding view of all existence as wholly spiritual lifts my focus from manipulating matter to amplifying my spiritual perspective. But as Mrs. Eddy said, 'This understanding is not intellectual, ... it is the reality of all things brought to light'" (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 505). Duncan explains more specifically, "If rocks represent 'solid and grand ideas'" (p. 511), then that's what I want to understand and experience. What I'm looking for has more to do with the unseen. And this has been talked about a lot in art, making the invisible visible, or the unseen obvious to people."

In a cloud formation, for example, Duncan sees qualities of flow, abundance, activity, light, life, movement. These qualities have spiritual significance that he works to understand more fully through his painting.

Like a golfer sizing up a golf shot, Duncan looks at the ledge, steps backward, walks to the side to get a different view, stops, looks again, adjusts his baseball cap, and returns to his easel. Reorienting the easel, he looks again at the water, ledge, and sky, then lifts some paint with his brush, and moves the brush to the canvas. His initial brushstrokes are fast and bold—almost a scribble—in royal blue and bright yellow, nothing resembling the rocky ledge. The white canvas in quickly and confidently changed.

"There are times when I'm warmed up and ready to go, and there's activity and some quality in the sky, and I come out and don't hesitate—I just have that sharpness of focus. Then I don't even notice the time as I work. I just work straight through, and it's full and total experience, a wonderful experience," Duncan says.

Gradually this painting comes to life. Eventually the water, wind, and sunlight emerge on the canvas, recognizable and alive, in relation to the mass and shadow of the ledge.

A week before this August afternoon, Duncan says, he started a painting at Sand Beach Point that was not taking shape. It was dead, and he felt no inspiration to bring it to life. It was the third or fourth in a successful series, and he was discouraged. Finally he sat down and prayed.

"I realized I needed to respect my relationship to God. If things were not going well right away, I didn't need to disregard that relationship or be angry. I needed to live up to that relationship and live with it, especially in the painting," he explains.

"I thought about my relationship with God, the one creator, being where the vitality and energy and light and vision come from. I needed to paint there—and work through to that and trust the process. I sat for a while and listened quietly, and then got up and began working through it. I knew I needed to trust that intuition and inspiration, and stay with it.

"The result," he adds, "was that the painting last week went to a whole different level.

"Of all the things I've done this summer, it's the most promising, and it's taken me farther toward the truth than I've ever been. It's opened up something, just that moment of pausing and acknowledging my relationship to God. I realized clearly through this that I'm not an individual working separately from God, or an independent creator."

Duncan recalls a time when he was feeling blocked creatively. He was producing competent, but uninspired, paintings. He wanted his work to be less intellectual, more inspired. So he spoke with a teacher of Christian Science. Through that conversation and his own prayer, he saw that he could rely on God to direct his work, right down to each brushstroke.

So he put this new insight to the test and did a painting on that basis. He prayed before he began to paint, and made a conscious effort to let God direct the entire enterprise.

"The result was unlike anything I'd ever done or seen before. It was almost unrecognizable it was so fresh and original. I keep going back to that, yielding my own personal decisions to the divine Mind. It reminded me of a poem I had read about a sculptor who had caught an angel vision. So I called the painting 'Angel Vision' (poem quoted in Mary Baker Eddy, The People's Idea of God, p. 7). I still have it."

Because spiritual receptivity is so central to Duncan's painting, he has worked on developing his ability to focus and listen for inspiration. To do that, he says, "I have to be still." This stillness—or settling of thought—is a form of prayer that he says is inspired by the Bible verse, "Be still, and know that I am God" (Ps. 46:10).

"It's that quieting of thought that enables me to hear or listen, and be in tune. Sometimes I vigorously deny that I am uninspired, that I am unable, that I am separate from God. It's a matter of acknowledging God's presence.

"The most inspired aspect is when something very fresh appears in thought. It's the light that breaks through things, or at least lifts you up a little bit higher and a little bit higher."

Duncan says that he prays all the time, trying to discern—and do—God's will. It takes humility, he says, to question what you're doing and wait for God's direction. "I ask God if I should continue this or do something else, but the answer keeps coming back clearly: This is where I belong, this is the form I need to be working in."

The sun, still bright, dips lower in the sky as Duncan works. His adjustments become smaller, more controlled, more detailed. The long, bold strokes of early afternoon are now replaced with much smaller ones. He continues to observe, to compare the scene to the painting. But his visual assessments are punctuated with tiny finishing touches using both ends of a brush.

"Someone told me recently," he says, "that you know when a painting is finished because you have nothing else to do to it. But that, too, requires listening and discernment."

The incoming tide is slowly devouring the point and will soon force Duncan to pack up and leave. He winds down with a few last strokes and touches, and cleans the paint out of his brushes. He closes up his kit as he has done thousands of times, gathers up his easel and knapsack, and makes his way back up the rocky shoreline and through the woods to his car. With today's painting completed, he feels the three-and-a-half hours have been well spent.

"The experience of listening and expressing is the important thing. The painting stands as a record of the experience," he says.

Duncan aspires to honesty and originality. "Since painting is the objectification of our thought, the purer and clearer our thought becomes, and the more proficient we are with the medium, the more lucid and clear the expression is going to be, and the more original, fresh, vital, spontaneous, and inventive will be the result.

"There is room for everybody to have their own distinctive expression. It's already there within us, that distinctness, that Soul-filled expression. It's just a matter of peeling away the layers of mortal thinking—of fear or lack of energy or lack of insight or lack of money or whatever will keep you from getting down to that thing that is distinctively yours. Rather than repeating or echoing what has already been said, put it down in your own individual style, which, after all, is what is interesting."

Never able to just settle in a comfortable place and churn out a bunch of paintings, Duncan says, "It's tempting to think that might have been better for me financially." But something drives him to go farther and farther each time. He has the courage and vision to stay true to his own gift—a gift recognized and appreciated by galleries and art collectors.

"Often people think of artists as struggling or not very good business people, but that is based on the mistaken notion that we don't all include the qualities necessary," he explains.

"The fact is that we all do include qualities such as intelligence, attention to detail, practicality. And there is no imbalance. Now I have my challenges, and I have to work it out every day, but this is one of my true convictions, and I feel like this is the lesson to be learned.

"It's like stepping out on the water and not worrying about whether you're going to fall through. Because if you don't take the step, you're still standing on the shore. When Jesus walked on the water, he understood he would be cared for, and he just stepped."

Back at his studio, Duncan places the still-wet canvas alongside several other recent paintings, and views it critically, considering the balance of its composition and color. He's happy with it, but he's already learning from it and contemplating what he might do differently next time to express more fully the spiritual nature and goodness of God's creation.