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 […]
Anadama Bread Winter was the worst. The farm windows iced inside, wind howled down off the upper field; through the gauze curtains it kissed our foreheads, noses buried in featherbed crazy-quilts. Wooden spindle framed our heads. It was too cold for ceiling mice. We always had to pee just before dawn. When the […]
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 […]
Saturday night I gave a speech to the Hillsborough, New Hampshire, Chamber of Commerce. It was their annual awards evening, where a business of the year and citizen of the year would be recognized, and generally a time when all the members could gather and sit at long tables in the American Legion Hall, have […]
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 […]
I once read in a guidebook: “Of all the natural regions of the United States, New England is the smallest, the most compact and convenient to get around in, the most homogeneous… ” For four decades now, I’ve lived and worked in New England, the land from which America evolved. There are few nooks and […]
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 […]
Editors Note: This week we have a special treat. Along with two poems by Elizabeth Potter, we also have the paintings that inspired them. It’s rare that we get to feature this kind of collaboration, so I hope you enjoy it.Fog Bank An apparition moves when the sea desires company. Restless with lapping at rock, […]
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 […]
Choosing the best chocolate shops in New England was a tough job – but someone had to do it. We know it’s more than a bit hackneyed to say, but choosing the best chocolate shops in New England was a tough job and someone did have to do it: An embarrassment of riches indeed. From the […]
$139.99 price of a swinging “plow-proof” mailbox made by MainelyMetals of Pittston, Maine 35 mph or greater wind speed, with snow visibility less than a quarter-mile for at least three hours: official National Weather Service definition of blizzard 83 pounds per square foot: snow-bearing capacity requirement for roofs in coastal Maine (New Jersey roof requirement: […]
