On Sunday, while the rest of the region was watching the deluge or was waiting for fire department volunteers to pump out their basement, I had a lovely phone chat with Lonny Sisson.

For those of you who don’t remember, or don’t know Laurence “Lonny” Sisson, he is an artist, a painter who moved here in the early 1950s. He lived and worked in a home on Bay Street for more than 20 years and had a summer cottage on the Salt Pond where his nearest neighbor was Rachel Carson, famed marine biologist, conservationist and author.

“She would write about the tidal pools and I would paint ’em,” he said.

Many believe he is the finest artist who ever came out of Boothbay. Some of his customers think so too, and have paid as much as $40,000 for his finely detailed oils of tidal pools and the canyons of the desert southwest. But he admits he has given away as many paintings as he has sold and laughs when he remembers a time when he even broke up some of his paintings to feed a fire to help his children cook down maple sap to make maple syrup.

When he is asked to describe his “style,” he hesitates. “I just try to come up with a great painting,” he said. “My work is sort of surreal semi-abstract impressionism. I don’t know what the hell it is. I don’t intentionally paint in any style. I just paint my way.”

If you want to see his work, just look at the huge mural he did in the lobby of the Boothbay Region YMCA; another hangs on the wall ringing the building’s running/walking track.

The Frost Gully Gallery in Thomaston is currently showing his paintings. The show will run through Friday, June 22. If you want one of his works, gallery owner Tom Crotty will be glad to wrap one up for you, but bring your checkbook – the big checkbook.

Lonny now lives in Albuquerque, N.M., and is getting up in years. On April 27, he turned 84. Yet he still works every day, spending up to seven hours standing in his studio. Now, he says, his once passable golf game stinks. He admits he has cancer, which he says he ignores and still feels fine. In an age when smoking is frowned upon, he puffs on his pipe and celebrates the end of the working day with a glass of scotch.

Recently, he asked Southport photographer Bob Mitchell to come fly out to Albuquerque to photograph his work. Mitchell also videotaped a long interview with the artist. An edited version of the interview is scheduled to be played on the Channel 7, the community television channel.

Sisson came to Boothbay in the early 1950s after he got out of the army and art school. For eating money, he worked at the Goudy & Stevens Shipyard in East Boothbay. They were building minesweepers for the U.S. Navy and employed nearly 400 men to help with that task. “I was an artist and could read blueprints, and Jim Stevens (a part owner) took pity on me, and gave me a job,” he said.

There were not many artists living in Boothbay at the time, and the Barrett family invited him to use their property as his private painting location. That cove, which he named “Silver Cove,” has been the subject of many of his works. At each low tide, the cove seemed to reveal something new to him. Sometimes there would be driftwood, other times seaweed, sometimes it was pebbles, pebbles and more pebbles.

To pick up extra cash, he was invited by Dave and Marion Dash, to give painting lessons on their tour boat. They made him a deal and agreed to split the passenger’s ticket price with him. At the end of the cruise they would auction off the watercolor. He would make maybe $25 to $30 for the painting. In the evening, he would pick up an additional $8 playing the piano on Squirrel Island. Total extra money for Saturday’s efforts might be $50 to $60. “That was big money,” he said.

Not only did he work in the local economy, he was involved with the community, too. Sisson, the late Bud Logan and others helped organize and build the current YMCA facility.

In addition, he and the Dashes helped begin the 50-year tradition of Windjammer Days. The official version is that this is the 50th year. But Sisson says it is really 51 years old. Here is his version of how the festival began.

“Dave Dash was friends with Boyd Guild, (the owner and skipper of the schooner Victory Chimes). He said we ought to get three or four of the other schooners in here. He asked me to help convince the Chamber of Commerce to back the project, but when we proposed the idea, they looked at us like we were from Mars. They said if you guys want to do it, go ahead, and we did,” he said.

“The first year we had four or five of them in. At that time, I had a program on WCSH-TV (Channel 6) with Cliff Reynolds. I got him to come up and cover it. The television coverage of the event made a big difference, and then the chamber got in on it,” he said.

Since moving away and settling out west, Sisson has continued to paint the Maine coast, in addition to the spectacular canyons of the southwest. Although the New Mexico desert and the tidal pools of Boothbay are thousands of miles apart, in Sisson’s mind they are linked through pebbles.

“When I first came out (West) I had never seen anything like it. Then I found the pebbles,” he said. “I looked at the pebbles and realized the sea once covered the desert. The difference is in the color and the light. It is so brilliant out here. Everything thing is like a rainbow compared to the mist and fog of the Maine coast.”

For 20 years, Sisson says he was immersed in the Boothbay community. Now, he says he no longer feels up to traveling, but still feels connected to his old friends and places through the Boothbay Register, which he reads each week. He says he still has fond memories of those pals who have passed on, like Dr. Russ Griffin and Phil Cook.

“It is the greatest community in the country. Life was different (then) but it is still very special in Boothbay Harbor. Give my love to the whole gang,” he said.

Sisson is a serious painter with a serious national reputation, but that doesn’t prevent him from exhibiting a playful side, especially when he spots a piano. It doesn’t take much prodding to get him to sit down and play and sing his favorite tunes, including – with great gusto – a goofy novelty tune made famous by bandleader Ozzie Nelson in the 1930s called “I am looking for a guy who plays alto and baritone, and doubles on clarinet and wears a size 37 suit.”