Loon Lake, Me.


ONE sunny morning last month the artist William Wegman led me into the woods surrounding his lakeside retreat here, along with his Weimaraners, Bobbin, Candy and Flo. “This is one of my favorite paths,” he said, as he passed an old garage. “It’s filled with haunted little things.”


His route led to a junked 1950s Buick and an even older pickup truck and sedan, which looked as if they’d been gathering leaves and rust since the Hoover administration. After noting that the Buick was his “favorite relic,” Mr. Wegman reminisced about the time he had walked miles into the wilderness, only to discover an abandoned couch.


This disjuncture between nature and the man-made is something Mr. Wegman, 68, prizes about the area, and his own wry humor is the hallmark of his work, which is so diverse that it should be hard to characterize. But to the wider world, he is known as the guy who makes large, colorful photographs of dogs dressed as things like fashion models and fairy tale characters. Though he has produced many different sorts of dog-free artworks in many different styles throughout his long and successful career, including paintings, drawings and collages (as seen in his 2006 Brooklyn Museum retrospective), the art world knows him as a dog photographer too. Even his much-admired conceptual videos and photographs of the 1970s often feature his first Weimaraner, Man Ray.


But now the show “William Wegman: Hello Nature,” through Oct. 21 at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Me., aims to shine light on a less obvious aspect of Mr. Wegman’s oeuvre. Its ostensible focus is his attachment to the western mountains of Maine, where he has summered for over 30 years. Yet the true thread running through it is Mr. Wegman’s lifelong fascination with nature itself, and his affection for the many ways it has been revered, romanticized and interfered with by human beings.


“Growing up in rural Massachusetts before anyone I knew had a television set, I spent most of my time in the woods,” Mr. Wegman writes in the show catalog. “The earliest painting I remember making was of a duck and a rock with a question mark.”


The oldest work on display is a deadpan photographic diptych from 1971, in which Mr. Wegman and a woman mimic fishing and ice-skating in his studio. The latest is one of his so-called postcard paintings from this year, in which one or more tourist postcards blossom into a fantastical oil-painted scene. (In this case a picturesque lake becomes a flooded house.)


In between come photographs of dogs, costumed or blending into the landscape; totemic alphabets made from photographs of plants and leaves; and all manner of paintings, drawings and collages. The museum is also screening Mr. Wegman’s short film, “The Hardly Boys in Hardly Gold” (1995), a detective saga based on the Hardy Boys and shot in and around Loon Lake, in which dogs play all the roles.


The show has been in the works since 2009, when Kevin Salatino, until recently the museum’s director, moved here from Los Angeles. (He now directs the art collections at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif.) Mr. Wegman’s Los Angeles dealer, Marc Selwyn, mentioned that the artist spent summers here and suggested the two collaborate on a show.


Mr. Salatino’s plan was to exhibit the early conceptual work. But when he and Diana K. Tuite, a curator at the museum, began visiting Mr. Wegman at his studio in Chelsea, the idea of a “nature-centric” show emerged, Mr. Salatino said. “I realized that this was an aspect of the work that had never really been thought through thematically before,” he added. “But it weaves its way through everything, even the early conceptual work.”


Inevitably the show also became autobiographical, and the catalog is essentially an artist’s book. Part field guide, part memoir, it’s filled with Mr. Wegman’s youthful artwork and family photographs, as well as an essay about his early aesthetic tastes, back when he was making watercolors of his dog in the woods, painting American Indian alphabets using pigment extracted from berries, and admiring the sensuous brushwork in the Breck Girl ads.


“So many people would be inclined to suppress the naïveté of their worldview,” Ms. Tuite said. “But in Bill’s case he wears it so proudly, almost so much so that it is kind of a conceptual move in and of itself.”


In person Mr. Wegman, who seems kindly and dryly humorous at once, also affects a certain degree of naïveté. For one so famous he’s surprisingly self-effacing, quick to compliment others and to claim he doesn’t know much about anything. He also loves reminiscing about his childhood. In an interview in his studio, as the dogs snored on a couch, he talked about his first trip to Maine in 1958. Then 14, he had driven up from East Longmeadow, the small Massachusetts quarry town where he grew up, with slightly older boys to fish in the Rangeley Lakes. “It took really a long time to get up here,” he recalled. “Then we hit a rock.” They were rescued by the proprietor of a lake club, who put them up in one of his log cabins for a week while the car was being fixed. “It was a very memorable trip,” Mr. Wegman said.