In Rochester, New York, a 75-year-old American minimalist painter, Austin Fraser, is creating a new series of paintings as he remembers the details of his life and of the lives of those individuals who have affected him -- his peculiar mother, a young Canadian soldier and china painter, a nurse from World War I, the well-known American painter Rockwell Kent, and a waitress who lives in the wilderness mining settlement of Silver Islet, Ontario, and who became Austin's model and mistress.

Spanning more than seven decades, from the turn of the century until the mid-70s, the story takes place in upstate New York, on the north shores of both Lake Ontario and Lake Superior, in France during the First World War, and in New York City during the '20s and '30s.