Maine Boat & Home Show Unveils its 2025 Poster

In a sure sign that summer is on the way, producers of the Maine Boat & Home Show, held on the waterfront in Rockland, August 8-10, have selected the painting “Coming and Going” by Rockport plein air artist Stephen Florimbi for the 2025 show poster.

The colorful Maine harbor scene was created especially for the show. Florimbi, whose career has also included working as a timber-frame carpenter and wooden boatbuilder, was general manager at Rockport Marine but left that position in 2022 to concentrate entirely on his artwork.

Florimbi said he drew from his experience and love of boats to present a rich array of classic designs—from the peapod in the foreground to the Huckins cruiser gliding across the canvas in “Coming and Going.”

“I spent a good part of last summer painting harbor scenes and portraits of lobsterboats. When the call came to design the show poster, I already had the scene painted in my head. It was fun to gather some of my favorite vessels onto one canvas,” Florimbi said.

“Stephen’s paintings are eye-catching and really demonstrate a sense of place,” said Ted Ruegg, publisher of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors magazine, which organizes the show. “This year’s gathering in Harbor Park in Rockland is shaping up to be a good one, and we’re pleased to have an artist like Stephen be a part of it. His background with boats and woodworking is reflected in his work, which you will see in this year’s poster.”

Held annually on the second weekend in August on the waterfront in Rockland, the Maine Boat & Home Show attracts thousands of discerning attendees from across the country and around the world. The three-day event is also Maine’s only in-the-water boat show. As always, the popular festival will feature boats displayed in the water and on land, plus music, art, food, furniture, and fun.

Florimbi said he plans to attend the show, and his painting, “Coming and Going,” will be on display and available for purchase. “I’m excited to be part of the show,” Florimbi said. “I look forward to being there painting and meeting fellow boat and art lovers.”

Florimbi was born in Philadelphia and moved to Madrid, Spain, when he was 6. It was there that his lifelong interest in art began. Returning to the States, his family lived in Massachusetts and later New Jersey, where he attended a small high school that lacked an art department. It wasn’t until he arrived at the University of New Hampshire in the mid 1980s that his formal art education began. There, he majored in resource economics, but he also pursued all the art courses he could, training in oils and drawing with professors Craig Hood and Grant Drumheller. They encouraged him to develop his own expressive style.

During college, Florimbi also worked with various contractors, building timber frame structures in the Seacoast area, and took courses and became involved with projects in the university’s forestry department. You can see evidence of the latter in the forest landscapes he would go on to paint years later.

After school, Florimbi decided to turn his woodworking skills in a new direction by building a boat in his backyard. His original notion was to construct a Barnegat Bay sneak box, but when one of his mentors, N.H. boatbuilder Bud McIntosh, said he would be challenged to build such a boat himself, Florimbi recalculated and settled on a skiff instead.

That experience eventually led him to the Apprenticeshop in Rockport, where he ended up staying for two years in the early 1990s. Once settled in Maine, he continued working on boats, built a handful of timber-frame houses himself, and eventually ended up at Rockport Marine, a yard that’s at the top of its game, building high-end yachts of wood and wood composite construction.

During those years, he continued to paint, but he said as he took on more and more managerial roles, it left him with less time to work on his art. After leaving his boatbuilding career, he set up as an artist-in-residence back at the Apprenticeshop, where he painted three days a week for six months.

A visit to his website offers a gallery of his plein air landscape and boat and boat-building paintings. According to the site, his work has been exhibited in Maine, Connecticut, New York City and Singapore. He was recently awarded honorable mention at the Ogunquit, Perkins Cove Plein Air Festival, and last year, he took part in the Hurricane Island Convergence: Art Meets Science project. This summer he’s been invited to paint at the Cape Elizabeth Plein Air event.

During a visit to his two-story studio, which he built behind his Rockport home—a workshop on the first floor, his paintings upstairs—a few of his recent projects were on display. This past winter, he spent five weeks touring the Southwest and California, painting striking desert, mountain, and beach landscapes. And this spring his curiosity has taken him to Portland, where he’s set up his easel on street corners to paint a very different environment with his distinctive brush strokes. Pointing to the painting of a dense forest hanging on a wall, he said the trees can be more forgiving than the angular buildings, vehicles and pedestrians he’s trying to capture in his cityscapes.

After years of running boatyards, surrounded by employees and customers, the life of a painter can be sometimes solitary, he said. Which is one of the attractions of the city, where all day long he sees people and they see him. “I’m always looking for ways to engage with more people.”