A dusty lane leads to Carolyn Egeli’s Georgian farmhouse in Valley Lee, Md. Horses hover in the shade of tall trees in a field by the road. A portly black lab sleeps on the cool brick at the foot of the front porch step, his catnap interrupted by my arrival.

Egeli is waiting for me on the porch swing, outfitted in a crisp white oxford shirt and just-so faded jeans. With her cropped blond hair holding the mid-morning’s light, she’s beautiful and comfortable here. The St. Mary’s County home is where Egeli was raised and where she has nurtured her talent as one of the region’s most gifted painters.
Taught by her father, Bjorn Egeli, an elegant Norwegian immigrant and world-renowned portrait and marine painter (he died in 1984), Egeli has been painting since age seventeen. She attended Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia and in the summers would study with her father in his studio, a barn located near the family home on the east side of the farm. Here he taught her the foundations in the principals of art and where she developed her own graceful style of painting. “Dad had an infinite amount of tact in terms of saving my ego,” says Egeli. “He’d talk about the good things in my painting and then he’d critique it. That gave me independence and sound advice. I learned from him that a painting had to have enough truth in it to carry the day.”

After college, Egeli traveled around the South for several years establishing her reputation as a commissioned portrait painter. She returned home at age twenty-seven when her parents gave her twenty-one acres on the west side of the farm to build a home. Egeli hired her brother, Bjorn James, to design and build the 4,000-square-foot house where she lives with the youngest of her three children and husband Alan Dillingham, an economics professor at St. Mary’s College.
Antiques and art tactfully dominate the décor of the two-story home. As you walk through the front door, the den opens to the right where gilded frames set against muted gold walls hold paintings done by Egeli, her father, friends, students, and her four siblings, all of whom are also well-known painters living in Maryland’s Chesapeake region. Egeli mentions that, next to the Peales, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portrait painters from Queen Anne’s County, it has been said that hers is the largest painting family in the state.

Next to the kitchen and the adjoining sunroom is Egeli’s in-home studio. Classical music warms the room, which is soothed with natural light from the large windows. The smell of oil paint and linseed oil is the perfume of her craft. Her latest projects exist in various stages of completion, leaning against bookshelves, fixed to easels, and mounted on the walls. Her affection for the Chesapeake naturally pervades her landscapes and marines, echoes of her childhood on the water. There’s a marsh scene at St. John’s Creek, a schooner’s bow pushing through a Bay swell, sailboats at a dock on St. Mary’s River, a crabber in a skiff on Herring Creek passing a massive felled tree limb.
“Lately, I’ve had to work harder on doing the landscapes,” Egeli says, “because the land is so quickly being developed. Often when I paint a landscape it’s to call attention to the beauty that needs to be saved. Since I’ve lived here all my life, I fully understand how much has been lost in a short period of time.”

Works on canvas aren’t her only passion. Egeli is also a student of ballet and the piano, the object of her release after a long day in the studio. Teaching art is another of her creative outlets. Keenly aware of the importance of imparting the same tools that were given to her, Egeli has mentored many individual students and for many years has taught art classes in her home. It’s all done in the name of growth-for both her and the next generation of painters. “As I get older, I’m finding that I’m enjoying my work probably more than I ever have in my life. My ability to appreciate has grown, and that’s the reason I paint. I have become more sensitive to beauty after spending a lifetime looking for it and trying to express it.”