For 18 years, Bevin Engman, an artist on the faculty of Colby College in Waterville, Maine, primarily painted still-lifes. For most of that time, she painted books. Books – open, closed, stacked, shelved, scattered, arranged in an architecture all their own – provided the armature over which she applied paint. There was a formal, academic […]
The Portland Museum of Art is kicking off the New Year with a major rock show. Backstage Pass: Rock Camp; Roll Photography (January 22 through March 22) is an exhibition of some 200 photographs of rock and jazz musicians, all borrowed from the collection of a Maine summer resident who wishes to remain anonymous. What […]
Jon Imber spends part of the year in the city and part of the year in a small coastal village, and his art reflects this movement. Imber moves between abstraction and representation about as easily and seamlessly as any painter I know. Jon Imber burst on the Boston art scene in the late 1970s after […]
Alice Spencer has been an important member of the Portland, Maine, arts community for 30 years. In addition to being a fine painter and printmaker, she is a co-founder of the Peregrine Press printmaking collaborative, a former member of the Maine College of Art board of directors, and chair of the City of Portland Public […]
When a New England artist attracts attention it usually starts locally and spreads regionally. If the artist is fortunate and talented enough, that attention sometimes leads to great visibility around the country. One of the New England artists getting a lot of attention at the moment is Kirsten Reynolds of Newmarket, New Hampshire. A Virginia […]
The history of art has long legitimized the practice of apprentices, assistants, and technicians helping to create the works of master artists, preparing and stretching canvases, applying preliminary coats of paint, working under the master’s direction. A great many prints are made by master printers from artists’ paintings and drawings. Large-scale sculpture is often fabricated […]
[feature slug=”the-popcorn-myth”] Faculty art shows at colleges and universities all over the universe tend to be wonderfully democratic yet wildly incoherent free-for-alls lacking any cohesive idea or theme. For that very reason, I stopped reviewing them decades ago. It’s just not possible to say anything meaningful about a show of random works by a bunch […]
Art conservators have many of the same hi-tech sensing and imaging technologies available to them that medical and military personnel do — x-ray diffraction and fluorescence, infrared spectroscopy, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, optical scanning, ultrasound, x-ray tomography, etc. Initially employed in the service of detecting cracks and damage and material properties useful in conserving works […]
A photograph is essentially a split second in time captured on film or digitally, a record of what light revealed for the instant the shutter was open. Most of the time when you’re looking at a photograph, you are seeing something like 1/125th of a second captured from the eternal present as it passes before […]
Dennis Pinette is among my favorite contemporary Maine painters. In fact, he is among my favorite all-time Maine painters. Born in Belfast, where he now lives and works, Pinette is a native Maine artist who looks beyond the picturesque to the more piquant, poignant, and pungent aspects of the Maine reality. Though he still primarily […]
The North Pole is melting. Whether you embrace the scientific consensus that global warming is a man-made phenomenon or want to believe that it’s just a natural phenomenon, the Arctic ice cap is demonstrably melting away, leaving polar bears stranded miles from the seals they hunt to live. The melting ice will eventually lead to […]
There is a strain of contemporary art that has to do with investigations of the artistic imagination as applied to social history and natural history. Perhaps the best known example of the former is Matthew Barney, who creates his own hallucinatory world out of bits and pieces of social fabric. The best known of the […]
