La Nef Drexler Chocolate Bar

“Isle La Nef” was the name given to Monhegan Island in 1605 by the explorer Samuel de Champlain.

La Nef Chocolate was founded on Monhegan Island, Maine by Mandy and Dylan Metrano in the summer of 2018. Both are artists and came to chocolatiering wanting to unite many creative interests into a business that could sustain them both creatively and financially, year-round. As appreciators of art in many forms, they knew from the start that art and artists would be at the center of their business. They collaborate with visual artists to create their package designs, hoping La Nef customers will discover new artists to support and collect.

La Nef is committed to conservation, sustainability and community building. They use biodegradable and recyclable packaging, source high quality ingredients, and deal in direct trade for fair treatment of farmers. La Nef supports artists and non-profits that are doing work that they believe in through partnerships and collaborations.

Lynne Mapp Drexler lived the last 16 years of her life on Monhegan Island, ME with her husband, the painter John Hultberg. Drexler was born in Virginia in 1928. In the late 1950s, after attending the College of William and Mary in Virginia, she immersed herself in Abstract Expressionism, studying with Hans Hofmann. In her early works Drexler focused on color and composition, eventually reconciling her two interests—landscape and abstraction—in her late work of the 1980s and ‘90s.
But it was in the 1950s that she set her foundation—a synthesis of Post-Impressionist landscape painting and post-war painterly abstraction. Her vibrant surfaces are both complex and painterly but with a flatness akin to something found in the background of a Gustav Klimt work.