Winslow Homer spent the last third of his life on the rocks, literally, at the seaside enclave of Prouts Neck, Maine, where he watched the clouds shift and darken and the daily assault of the waves on the shore. More importantly, he painted it, working for more than two decades in a two-story studio he erected in 1883 on a plot of land owned by his family.

Coastal Maine’s rugged beauty had attracted renowned artists before Homer, but never to the point where they committed to living alongside the seascape. “With Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, you basically have tourists with paintbrushes," says Thomas Denenberg, chief curator at the Portland Museum of Art. "Homer's the guy that stayed.” (The museum’s “Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place,” a 28-work show devoted to the artist, runs through September 6.) Then, after Homer, a certain idea — not entirely inaccurate — of the aloof and outdoorsy Maine artist took root.

Homer was a well-respected artist by the time he moved to Prouts Neck, and the marine dramas he painted there only added to his standing among aficionados in Boston, New York, and beyond. Of course, Homer had gone to Maine to get away from all of them. To dissuade potential visitors, he posted a sign on his property warning of snakes and mice; when that didn’t work, he was known to frighten them off with a shotgun.

Perhaps inevitably, Homer — who had no students, no apprentices, and few artist friends — became known as a hermit. But he was no misanthrope at Prouts Neck. He socialized with the locals, and even gave a painting lesson to a group of amateurs from Portland. His two-story studio was a mere 100 feet from his family’s house, and Prouts Neck then was a much livelier spot than the buttoned-up summer community it is today.

Now based just north in Portland, the Maine art scene Homer helped create suffers from a similar misconception: admired for its quaint remove, it's not in fact quite as far off the Main Line as it’s made out to be.

Few people know this better than energetic gallerist Andres Versoza. Sitting in his one-room space on Exchange Street on a slow Tuesday morning, he explained how the state’s aging generation of “back-to-the-landers” is now making room for a diverse group of younger artists — and a livelier Portland. In November, Versoza’s Aucocisco Galleries will show paintings by the sought-after Iraqi artist Ahmed Alsoudani alongside works by one of Alsoudani’s professors at the Maine College of Art, Gail Spaien.

"Now there are more artists, and more galleries, and a lot more people sensitive to what art means in their lives,” according to Versoza. And even if Maine has yet to produce another Andrew Wyeth, the revitalization of its largest city has created fertile ground for nurturing talent.

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art and the Portland museum, which changed the face of that city's downtown when it opened in a new building in 1983, now host biennials on alternating years. Since being elected in 2006 on a “creative economy” platform, city councilman (and part-time painter) David Marshall has changed state tax code to help regenerate half-abandoned Congress Street as a corridor of galleries and artist studios. Last fall, Roxanne Quimby, co-founder of the eco-friendly skincare company Burt's Bees, bought a building in the so-called Arts District that she plans to use for an artist-residency program.

Now that an increasing number of the Maine College of Art’s dorms are downtown, more students than ever are trudging through Monument Square in paint-splattered jeans. At this point, it would be odd for a downtown eatery or coffee shop not to have local art on its walls. You can peruse still-lifes by a former Episcopal priest while you’re in line for the bathroom at Starbucks; at Sonny’s, a roomy Nueva Latina restaurant a door down from Aucocisco, owner Jay Villani says he hopes his restaurant ventures — including Local 188, another art-crowd hangout — will one day allow him to go back to being a steel sculptor.

If there’s a missing piece in Portland’s art equation, it is collectors willing to prop the whole thing up. Galleries come and go — even well-connected Versoza is on his fourth. But that’s less of an obstacle in this city, with its high quality of life, than it might be elsewhere. “Most people here work on things because they’re excited about ideas, not because they want to make a lot of money,” says Nat May, executive director of Space Gallery. “If you’re going to struggle as an artist, Maine is a pretty neat place to be struggling.”

A bearded 30-something in a plaid shirt and jeans, May would hardly look out of place in Williamsburg. One of his alternative art space’s main missions is to stir the wider creative world into the emerging Portland scene. “We try to be community-friendly, but we don’t make curatorial choices based on who’s around,” says May, who hails from nearby Cape Elizabeth and makes scouting trips to New York every two or three months.

With considerable support from the Warhol Foundation, Space recently landed Swoon, the Brooklyn-based street artist, for a group installation. This month, Korean artist Seokmee Noh has a window installation at Space that coincides with her show next door at June Fitzpatrick Gallery, which shares an old department store building with MECA and an art-supply store. And while most of the talent the gallery shows is on the lesser-known end of emerging, it has a good track record of being prescient. May recalls a VampireWeekend show at Space a few years back, when the band was still so under-the-radar that only 100 to 150 people showed up.

A 30-minute drive south, meanwhile, Prouts Neck has priced out the art pilgrims who rented cottages there in the early 20th century. But the Portland Museum of Art’s recent purchase of Homer’s studio — which it plans to restore and open for group tours in fall 2012 — may yet bring them back. Until then, the best a visitor can hope for is a thorn-obstructed view of the artist's workspace from the public walking path that runs along the shore.

Nonetheless, that is where Homer often stood, drawing inspiration from “a landscape and situation,” Bruce Robinson writes in his 1990 study, Reckoning with Winslow Homer, “that enabled him to condense his vision of the world into its elemental qualities: a margin of land, a distant scrim of air, and the boiling sea between.”That much, at least, hasn’t changed.