Unbeknownst to both of us, I played a small part in the development of painter John Bonner’s career. Back in March 1991, Bonner saw an article I wrote about noted Boston cityscape painter George Nick in Yankee and, struck by the aesthetic similarity to his own paintings, he wrote Nick a letter. Nick, an influential […]
Twice in recent months I have been privileged to provide introductory remarks before the public showing of videos about Maine artists I know well – painters Dahlov Ipcar and Alan Magee. The short documentary-style profiles are two of nine in the on-going Maine Masters series sponsored by the Union of Maine Visual Artists. If you […]
The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center is welcoming spring to southern Vermont with five new exhibitions (all through July 11) featuring the works of 18 contemporary artists. They present a lively mix of artists from the region and from away that continues the Brattleboro MAC’s commitment to seasonal shows with wide visual appeal. Occupying the […]
Any juried group exhibition is bound to be something of an eclectic grab bag. That’s just the nature of the beast. But the I-95 Triennial at the University of Maine Museum of Art (in downtown Bangor, not on the Orono campus, April 23 to June 12) is shaping up to be even more eclectic than […]
Tula Telfair is a New York artist who teaches painting at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and exhibits her large, panoramic landscapes at the Forum Gallery, a bastion of figurative and super-realist painters. To be taken seriously as a contemporary artist while painting firmly in the landscape tradition is no easy feat. The late Neil Welliver […]
Garry Mitchell lives about five miles from me in North Yarmouth, Maine, yet for some reason I have never gotten around to taking him or his wife, writer Debra Spark, up on invitations to visit his studio. I have, however, admired Mitchell’s work from afar. I have seen it online, here in town at a […]
Back in 1990, I selected an image of “Rising Cairn” by sculptor Celeste Roberge for the cover of my book Maine Art Now because it perfectly embodied the point I wanted to make with the book – that Maine art was no longer just romantic landscapes and seascapes by artists from away attracted to the […]
Roni Horn is an androgynous artist. She wears horn-rimmed glasses and keeps her hair cropped short. She has said that her name is her destiny. Just as her name and her appearance defy easy gender identity, her art defies easy categorization. Though she majored in sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA “75) […]
I’ve been hearing good things about what Fr. Iain MacLellan has been doing at the Chapel Art Center at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, so I was not all that surprised when two of Maine’s best painters turned up in the current three-artist show there. Mirare (through March 20) features geometric abstractions by […]
The most intriguing object in the Objects of Wonder: Four Centuries of Still Life from the Norton Museum of Art at the Portland Museum of Art (through June 6) is not a still life painting at all. It is a sculpture entitled “Grouper,” the skeleton of a fish rendered in linden wood by Fumio Yoshimura, […]
Watercolor is such a delicate medium, wonderful at transmitting a sense of light on the one hand, easily destroyed by exposure to light on the other, that very few artists create major works in watercolor anymore. Many watercolor paintings spend most of their time in file drawers or, when on display, veiled by cloth covers […]
In the 1970s, when I first began paying attention to contemporary art, Pat Steir was one of an emerging cohort of artists that included, among others, Elizabeth Murray, Joan Snyder, Jennifer Bartlett and Judy Pfaff. Forty years later, Steir is a long established presence on the New York and international art scene, an accomplished artist […]
