John Currin is best known for painting women, and he has spent his summer on Mount Desert Island, Maine, doing just that: laying the groundwork for a new series of portraits of female subjects whose smiles are stretched by lines of anxiety, whose eyes blaze with to-do lists. He based the faces on models from Sears catalogs and stock photos, but calls the type a “Redbook Juggler,” after the supermarket glossy that advises women on how to cook, shop and dress. While Currin’s exaggerated compositions blow his figures up to kewpie-doll proportions or deflate them into a jumble of jutting elbows and toothy smiles, he renders each inch of flesh in laborious, glowing brushwork that has earned him comparisons to Dutch masters. He was, in fact, exhibited alongside the celebrated Golden Age Dutch painter Cornelis van Haarlem, at the Frans Hals Museum in the Netherlands in 2011, just two decades after his first solo show at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in 1992 (where his provocative portraits of bold older women elicited accusations of sexism but nevertheless sold out). Currin’s works still draw that criticism on occasion, but not much that he depicts emerges solely from his own imagination. His subjects wash in from the flotsam of American life — kitschy souvenirs and cringey ads, screenshots and centerfolds — and it’s by polishing this lowbrow commerical imagery with a high-art sheen that he manages to make obvious what others might be happy to ignore about our culture.

Currin’s summer studio emerged from a similar process. From the outside, the wooden, Swiss-chalet-style lodge with twin peaked roofs and a wraparound porch is a replica in miniature of the midcentury lake house down the hill that Currin and the artist Rachel Feinstein bought in 2015. Currin built the studio in 2016 and has worked here every summer since (for the rest of the year he is based in New York). Inside, it is spare and white, a reworked, glossy, art-world version of the main house.

Currin and Feinstein first came to Mount Desert Island — a large outcropping of rock that has drawn lobster boats and wealthy vacationers since the Gilded Age — in 1996, as guests of the Acadia Summer Arts Program. Later, they got engaged on a hike here, and it’s where their children — now 10, 14 and 16 — go to camp. When the couple bought their house overlooking Long Pond directly from its original owner, they also purchased everything that was inside: the Knoll dining set, the space-agey Wendell Lovett hearth, the hand-embroidered pillows and dog-eared sci-fi novels. “For people who have to make aesthetic decisions every day,” says Feinstein, the idea of redecorating is “exhausting.”