An Ode to our Heritage: Frank Handlen Sculpts Our Forebears of the Coast Statue

By Shelley Wigglesworth

105-year-old Frank Handlen is an accomplished, well-known, and well-respected marine artist. In addition to pen and ink drawings, sketches and oil paintings of the sea, coastline, and coastal life, Handlen is also a sculptor and the man who created the “Our Forebears of the Coast” bronze statue on Kennebunkport’s River Green.

Frank Handlen was born September 26, 1916, in Brooklyn, New York and was raised in Caldwell, New Jersey. In a 2016 interview by Wm. Duke Harrington, Handlen was asked about how he became interested in art as a child. He said “I just had that tendency when I was very young. And when you have that in you, it doesn’t leave you and eventually you must do something about it, and then you find you just have to keep at it.”

Handlen moved to Biddeford Pool in the 1930’s, to be closer to the subject matter he favored, and later he settled in Kennebunkport. As a young man, he worked in Bernie Warner's shipyard on the Kennebunk River, painted houses, and did other jobs. During World War II, Handlen was 25, married with two children and therefore was not drafted. He contributed to the war effort on the home front by helping assemble machine guns.

In the 1970’s Handlen designed and built a 40-foot, 16-ton, cement hulled topsail schooner, the Saltwind, using tools that he crafted himself, in his backyard in Kennebunkport. In 1975 the Saltwind was launched from the old Reid’s boatyard, into the Kennebunk. It was the first topsail schooner to have been built around and launched in the Kennebunk River since the mid-1800s. It remained moored in the Kennebunk River behind Handlen’s home, until just a few years ago.

In 1994, Handlen was commissioned to create the bronze statue, Our Forebears of the Coast, which stands on the Kennebunkport River Green, adjacent to Ganny’s Garden, both Kennebunkport Conservation Trust properties. The statue was made possible by the monetary gift from Catherine and John Rinaldi in memory of Fred J. Rinaldi, John’s father, and Catherine’s late husband. Work on the statue began in the Captain Lord Mansion Carriage House, with the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust agreeing to provide placement of the monument at the Village Green in front of the Captain Lord Mansion once completed.

In a recorded lecture Handlen presented about the process of creating the statue, he said he had a vision for the statue in mind, which he explained was based on his “long held empathy for the arduous and often abbreviated lives of our coastal fisher people of two centuries ago.” He added “Even without exact knowledge of their lives, one ought to sense that fortitude had to have been their defining characteristic.” Because of this, Handlen said a heroic size statue was necessary “to best convey their anonymous, yet formative historical role.”

The design Handlen had in mind would depict a fisherman and his wife and would be 9’ tall. All preliminary work from sketches, to plans, to model execution was completed by Handlen in the Carriage House. He began with a three foot model which he invented a design system for that allowed him to enlarge the model to his desired height of 9’ before being transported to Jack Langford of Porter, Maine. Once in Porter, Langford completed the final casting, welding, chasing, and coloring. When it was finished, the formidable bronze work of art was transported back to Kennebunkport for a dedication and unveiling on the Village Green in August of 1995, less than two years after Handlen first spoke of the idea for the project. Handlen said Our Forebears of the Coast statue remains one of his proudest artistic accomplishments.