The vast majority of artists are never able to make a living from their art, and the fate of even those who do is typically to slip into obscurity after death. If they were any good at all, their work may enjoy a second life on the antique and auction market 50, 75, 100 years […]
Edgar Allen Beem
When I drove down to the Elizabeth Moss Gallery in the Falmouth, Maine, Shopping Center, the show I expected to see was not there. I was expecting photographs and all I found were paintings and picture frames. Turns out A Picture’s Worth, the photo show I was looking for, was hung in temporary space less […]
Living
Combat Paper in Burlington
The efficacy of art as a form of political protest is questionable at best. There is just something too precious and removed about art galleries and museums, a cultural context that tends to neutralize the desired message. The utility of art as a form of expression for those conflicted about the experience of war, however, […]
Yankee
Nicole Duennebier is NEW/NOW
Remember the name, Nicole Duennebier. Back in 1990, I published a book entitled Maine Art Now, a survey of contemporary art in Maine in the form of reviews, essays, and profiles. A decade later, in February of 2000, I wrote an article in Maine Times updating the book with profiles of nine artists who emerged […]
Shepard Fairey is suddenly everywhere – in the news, on walls, buildings and bridges, in museums, and, yes, in court. Fairey, 38, is the 1992 Rhode Island School of Design grad best known for his ubiquitous Obama Hope posters, but he has emerged in recent years as the new Andy Warhol, a most public artist […]
Yankee
Art as Invention and Play
Last week, in reporting on the Boston Art Awards, I noted that “When the market is bad and the money is gone, the pressure is off and artists can make art for all the right reasons – to discover what’s meaningful to them, to express what it means to be human.” I can think of […]
New England
College Art Museums: Top 5 in New England
We asked critic Edgar Allen Beem, author of Yankee’s art blog, “Just Looking,” to name the five best college art museums in New England. After “weeks of soul searching” (and omitting the obvious giants, such as Harvard and Yale), he made his choices. Bowdoin College Museum of Art Brunswick, ME This McKim, Mead & White […]
Yankee
Boston Art Awards and Beyond
Almost one year ago, in my March 6, 2008 posting, I called your attention to Greg Cook and his indispensable website, New England Journal of Aesthetic Research. NEJAR is probably the best regional art site in the country, so I was flattered when Cook invited me to submit nominations and to vote on the just-released […]
Yankee
Ubart at USM
To honor and celebrate the forty-year creative career of artist, educator, and collector Juris Ubans, who is retiring from the University of Southern Maine faculty in August, the University of Southern Maine Art Gallery has mounted a sumptuous exhibition that fills the little gallery on the Gorham campus (through February 15) not just with art […]
Dorothy Eisner (1906-1984) was a thoroughly modernist painter who worked her way through most of the artistic trends of the 20th century from the Ashcan School and Social Realism to Abstract Expressionism. Her mature work, however, took the form of a rather Matisse-like application of painterly expressionism, very loose, free, and colorful, to paintings of […]
Yankee
The Ghost of Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth is dead. He reportedly passed away peacefully in his sleep at the great age of 91. Had this been summer, he probably would have drifted away in Port Clyde, Maine, but, as it is winter, his final resting place was Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the little hamlet where he was born in 1917. America’s […]
Yankee
As Others See Us
A figurative painting tends to be a representation of an unidentified person, a generalized image of the human form, often that of a model. A portrait is a likeness of a particular individual, an attempt in part to capture or conjure his/her being. Since the advent of photography, portrait painting has slowly been relegated to […]