A Painter Who Farms

Seated in a tattered chair in his weather-beaten barn-turned-studio, Allen shrugs and says, “For every time I think they’re buying [a painting] because I’m just a great artist, I know in fact that they’re buying it because it reminds them of this place.” Of course, by "they," he's referring to his clientele, which includes the musician Carly Simon, who credits Allen as the inspiration for one of her songs. Perhaps the most appealing quality Allen has, and what drew us to him as a subject of our next documentary, is how humble he is despite his popularity and the fact that the rich folks who summer on his little "meadow by the sea" consider this modest painter and farmer to be "island royalty." As he paints on a private beach, access to which his family has sold over the years to make ends meet at the farm, Allen becomes suddenly self conscious about his rhapsodizing: “It sounds deep, maybe it doesn’t, but it isn’t. Understand that. I’m not a deep thinker. I’m a blue collar kind of guy. I just like what I see, and I try to paint it. It’s about that simple.”

Being the skeptics we are, we expected through our many weeks of filming that we would happen upon a skeleton or two in that dusty, hundreds of years-old barn. But as everyone who knows him well has told us, with Allen, what you see is what you get. This painter and farmer is summed up by his life-long best friend, the fisherman Chris Murphy, who, in answering our question, "What are three words that describe Allen," said, "Kind is one of them. And you know what? I think I'll use that two more times, and leave it there."