Maine Arts Journal Fall 2016 by Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA)

MAINE ARTS JOURNAL UMVA QUARTERLY

MONSTERS FALL 2016

Maine Arts Journal

DAVID ESTEY

Maine Arts Journal

David Estey, Political Dialogue (detail), acrylic on panel, 27x53, 2013

DAVID ESTEY

MAINE ARTS JOURNAL Union of Maine Visual Artists QUARTERLY FALL 2016

MONSTERS

Front Cover Kenny Cole, The Surface to Air Octopolitics of Uncle Billy’s Exploded Viewpoints, gouache on paper, 24x18, 2012

VISUAL ESSAYS 15

Alan Magee

Natasha Mayers

Gil Corral

James Quigley

Inside front cover: David Estey, Political Dialogue

Back Cover The Blanchard Weather Report by Todd Watts

FEATURES AND ESSAYS 8

From the Belly of the Beast by Jeffrey Ackerman Fred Lynch’s Bible by Edgar Allen Beem

Poetry: Dragon, by Marita O’Neill Introduction by Betsy Sholl

MONSTERS: Election Season 2016 Stephen Koharian Michael Lewis Cheryl Lichwell Dan Mills Jim Fangboner Suzanna Lasker Anne Strout Todd Watts William Hessian Brian Reeves David Estey Toni Jo Coppa Scott Minzy Kristen Malin Robert Riemann Bill Paarlberg David Berrang

MONSTERS!: UMVA / CTN Gallery Exhibit Preview Curated by Jessica McCarthy

Working Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Parade and All Hands On Banner Project by Ellen Babcock

Art Education: Local is International by Dan Kany

Insight/Incite Narratives on Art Education: Art Department and Publication Studio by Shawn Brewer and Lindsay W Book

MEMBER SUBMISSIONS 7

Richard Wilson

Emmaline Birtolo

Mark Barnette

Ann Tracy

74 75

Mary Becker Weiss

Jay York

Jim Kelly

UMVA IN THIS ISSUE 6

Welcome From the Editors

Whitefield Parade Independence Day

Artists Rapid Response Team Quarterly Report

UMVA Chapter Report L/A Chapter

UMVA Chapter Report Portland Area Chapter

Call for Submissions for Winter 2017 MAJ Issue Lines of Thought

Maine Arts Journal

FROM THE EDITORS:

WELCOME TO THIS MONSTER-THEMED ISSUE OF MAJ Halloween is coming and we are in the thick of the election season. Monsters are afoot. Monsters are standing front and center. They are lurking at the peripheries. They are always amongst us. We welcome many, laugh at some and fear others. They are our creators, destroyers, protectors, tormentors and toys. The masks of leaders can disguise beasts, though beasts can be true messengers. They stand at our boundaries, express our dualities, haunt our dreams, feed our anxieties, embody our insecurities, desires and deformities. Monsters are our dragons both good and bad, our demons new and old, our covert deviants, our morbid fascinations, our myths, politics, religions -- both real and imagined. Monsters can be hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, meltdowns, incoming comets. They are viruses, ticks, cancers, disease, plagues. They can be ideas: hidebound radicalisms, ideologies, dogmas. They can be our deadly sins: avarice, bigotry or cruelty. For artists, monsters can be our muses. Sometimes, they are part of us. Sometimes, they are us. From the well-intentioned sophistication of our exploits in genetics can come life saving food growable in desolate places or extinctions and dangerous mutations. The good can go bad. Medicines become poison. Defensive tools become weapons. Light can become darkness. Art plays an important role in helping us see, be strong enough to ask the tough questions, and move us to act. Art helps us reflect on who we are, where we are going, and what we are doing as members of society, captains of culture, curators of a planet. Art can be the moral vessel we sail to challenge selfish institutions. Art can help us turn our shapeless fears into poignant questions. Art opens our hearts to courage and compassion, and it slips into peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s souls to change them. Monsters can be our spirit guides, our familiars, our totems. Fear, after all, can bring us together for the right reasons. It can help us find the heroic in ourselves. It can be humbling, and with humility, we can more easily laugh at ourselves. Monsters remind us that we are both the good guys and the bad guys. We thank all the artists who submitted their art on this theme. Jeff Ackerman Alan Crichton Dan Kany Natasha Mayers Nora Tryon

We're pleased to have received a record number of submissions and a diversity of responses to the Monster theme. Thank you for taking part. Special thanks to Jessica McCarthy for curating the exciting exhibit at CTN gallery in Portland, opening October 7. Please share the Fall Journal with other artists, friends, and family, and go see the Monsters! Exhibit. In order to keep publishing this journal freely to the arts community and mounting art exhibits, we're dependent on Union of Maine Visual Artists membership dues (sliding scale). If you haven't already, we hope you'll join the UMVA and encourage fellow artists to join. (go to umvaonline.org). We hope readers will be inspired to come up with their own visual essays, interviews and other ideas on future journal themes. (see submission guidelines for the next theme, "Lines of Thought")

FROM THE EDITORS

Maine Arts Journal

Richard Wilson, Night on Bald Mountain, Gouache on board, 24" x 27", 1962, Jay York Photo

RICHARD WILSON

Maine Arts Journal

From the Belly of the Beast: Political Art and Propaganda by Jeffrey Ackerman

In Antoni Gaudi’s church, Sagrada Familia, lining the elaborately carved walls of the Rosary chapel, serpent-like monsters support an intricate vaulting. This imagery of grotesques and demons is well within the Gothic and Romanesque decorative traditions, but there is also an inconspicuous intrusion of the modern era. One demon is handing an Orsini bomb to a terrorist. The demon-monsters in Gaudi’s motif, like their Romanesque models, represent temptations; the monsters of the imagination that lure the human heart to transgress and commit acts of evil. To Gaudi’s contemporaries, this terrorist would refer to the anarchists that were rocking Barcelona, and much of Europe, at the turn of the last century. To us the message may seem universal but to a contemporary of Gaudi, especially a partisan, this might appear to be propaganda. The Church was in fact bombed by anarchists in 1936, but the stone terrorist survived.

Terrorist from La Sagrada Familia, architect: Antoni Gaudi, circa 1899

If there is a distinction between political art and propaganda, they are certainly bound together in a knot that is often difficult to untangle. Political art is usually well regarded yet few people claim to have sympathy for propaganda. Works tend to be described as propaganda when the viewer disagrees with the politics. Blatant propaganda is often ignored, or unnoticed, by the extreme partisan who sympathizes with the message. The most highly regarded political art, Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s Disasters of War, had their propaganda component, anti-Franco and anti-Napoleon, but the human emotion of the message operates at a universal level and these works manage to outlive their political moment. Picasso turned the brutality of modern war into idealized symbols with no reference to Spanish Fascism, and Goya depicted war’s brutality as an equal opportunity observer, removing insignias from uniforms and highlighting vicious acts common to soldier and peasant, mob and ruler. We tend to view political art as a challenge to power, but Goya’s famous execution scene, Third of May, 1808, was painted in 1814, long after the villains of the drama, the occupying French army, had left town. It was commissioned by the reactionary Spanish king, then restored to power. The soldier executioners are again without insignia, and are reduced to an almost singular entity—the inhuman machinery of war. In the companion piece, Second of May, 1808, we lose our sympathy for the revolting peasants as they are shown to be another kind of inhuman monster—the mob. Goya does not present us with cardboard villains to boo at or unblemished heroes to cheer. It is the honesty and truth of the sentiments portrayed that distinguish such art Francisco Goya, The Second of May, 1808, oil on canvas, 1814, from what we commonly consider propaganda, Museo del Prado and they also distinguish art from kitsch.

JEFFREY ACKERMAN

Maine Arts Journal It is this profusion of false sentiments that is the dominant feature of propaganda and kitsch. Politicians kissing babies, farmers loading a hay truck, muscled laborers, Olympic athletes, all in slow motion and smiling; these are all images common to propaganda kitsch. The phrase “for the sake of our children” can introduce the most vile political ideas as well as the best ones. Kitsch has a shelf life that is easy to spot in retrospect, but much tougher to see in contemporary work using the visual language of the times. The murals of Thomas Hart Benton look to our eyes now like billboard advertisements for the New Deal era, full of sentimental populism. A recent show at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum featured his great mural, America Today, painted for the lobby of an insurance office building. The exhibition presented the mural alongside works that influenced Benton (e.g., Tintoretto) and works he influenced (such as Jackson Pollack’s Passiphae). The mural has several passages of truly great painting. Benton had chops, but his stylizations are clearly past their sell-by date. Thomas Hart Benton, America Today, (detail), oil on canvas, 1931, Metropolitan Museum of Art

But what seems obvious to any viewer about Benton can be much harder to detect in work closer to us in both time and cultural attitude. We no longer share Benton’s optimism about America or his idealized attitude toward the common folk, which to his credit includes the common businessman and secretary, as well as the manual laborer and farmers (he was no Bolshevik)—it is a democratic slice of the whole work force. Artists like Benton do not set out to make propaganda but merely channel the sentiments of their day, often quite innocently. Benton is still a great painter and deserves to be looked at, but the dated aspects of his work do compromise the pleasure we take in its finer accomplishments. That is not to say we need to purge our museums, in fact the dated qualities shed light on contemporary cultural biases. The decade of the 1960’s, now half a century in the past, is under reevaluation in our historical perspective. The landmark movements of the 60’s, pop and minimalism, exemplify a sentiment that is more evident as it wanes in the culture, and many of these works may someday look as dated as Benton is now beginning to look to us. Though the artists of these movements mostly leaned left politically, or as in the case of Warhol, wished to be seen that way, they shared with the broad culture a sense of American exceptionalism and had attitudes that were fed by American global hegemony. Warhol’s public persona was apolitical, but in the 80’s he palled around with some powerful figures connected to Reagan as well as the Shah of Iran, lived in a luxurious townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and admitted to an aversion to paying taxes. Pop is typically represented as a critique of consumer culture but its ambivalence toward its subject reveals celebration as often as grievance. It is capitalist realism, by effect and even, arguably, by design.

Thomas Hart Benton, America Today, (detail) oil on canvas, 1931, Metropolitan Museum of Art

JEFFREY ACKERMAN

Maine Arts Journal Minimalism seems to be without the kind of content that can be read as a political sentiment, but it was easily adapted to decorate the architectural symbols of American power, the sleek glass office building. This corporate jewelry exemplified the Spartan tastes of the new global ruling class. It showed they were fiscally prudent and would not spend fortunes on sumptuous luxury, yet they would spend fortunes on these signifiers of Zen simplicity. Sculptors like Richard Serra represent the power of American industry almost literally, in great slabs of steel, a grand scale trophy for the victors of World War II. How might future generations view this work? Will Warhol’s icons be as effective when Marilyn and Jackie O are as remote to audiences as Mary Pickford and Mary Todd Lincoln are to us? When global climate issues are a palpable reality will Serra’s works appear to be worth the bang for the energy buck? Future art audiences will be exposed to generations of great artists, long dead and re-discovered, and many yet to be born. Might they want to replace the Serra colossi, in the energy-hogging, climate controlled museum atriums, with a hundred or so great works on a more modest scale? In the nineteen-sixties, the era of huge, cheap artist-lofts, the American economy was about 40 percent of global GDP; it is now about 20 percent. We have exported our art-on-steroids aesthetic to other economic superpowers, and our own propaganda is now reflected back on us. Enter the Chinese model. This may come as news to some, but an artist like Ai Weiwei, the Chinese art superstar, represents the new look of Chinese propaganda. His fame rests on his status as a dissident, yet might a Chinese dissident be likely to disappear completely from sight, to be tortured and killed, unseen and unreported. While under house arrest Ai was visited by artist Sean Scully, a friend and former teacher of Ai. Scully reported after the visit, that his house arrest was bogus and they went out to eat in a fancy restaurant. Ai’s house/prison is a huge art complex. Ai’s political art that “infuriated” the government was a protest of shoddy school construction causing the deaths of schoolchildren in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (this was due to local corruption; Beijing had nothing to do with it). In the modern era, the whole world is guilty of local corruption and shoddy construction. Now Ai has his passport back to travel to Europe and protest about Syrian refugees, raising no objections from the Chinese government. What power is he even taking to task? I do not know if Ai Weiwei is completely complicit in his propaganda. Certainly, we should wonder—who bankrolls his expensive installations? Or, is he used the way Voice of America used jazz music, without his complicity? But this is far more sophisticated culture politics than the kitschy social realism of the Mao era. It is a perfectly calibrated message to Chinese citizens and the world, that China does not tolerate dissent and criticism, but removes the focus from any human rights abuses toward dissenters. The other message is that China, a rising economic power, also has a world-class artist. This subtle propaganda is the most unnerving. Ai Weiwei learned this form of public relations in his years in New York, in the 1980’s, under the tutelage of artists like Warhol. He has crafted a public image of himself as a brave dissident fighting the powerful. He appears to be losing the battle but making a good show of it, giving them hell; and because they tolerate him, they are not so bad. But there is no battle; it is a sham skirmish.

And as musician and poet, Leonard Cohen once said; “Everybody knows the war is over, Everybody knows, the good guys lost.” JEFFREY ACKERMAN

Maine Arts Journal

Fred Lynch’s Bible A record of 42 years of creation By Edgar Allen Beem When Frederick Lynch died on July 3 at the age of 80, the Maine art world lost an artist’s artist and many of us lost a dear friend. Fred and I had been friends since the 1970s, so I had the privilege of seeing his work evolving over the course of some 40 years. The careful, thoughtful and methodical way in which he pursued his vision from figuration through abstraction and back again was an inspiration to many. As a writer, my entire life’s work would fit on a flashdrive the size of a Bic lighter, but an artist’s oeuvre takes up considerably more space in the world. Fred was greatly concerned during his final illness about leaving a burden of paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures and notebooks for his wife Janice and his stepdaughter Alyssa. So he devoted a lot of his time to organizing his work and to familiarizing his family with his “bible” – the ledger book in which he recorded every major work of art he created from 1974 until 2015. I thumbed through Fred Lynch’s bible a few days after his death when I went to Saco to help Janice and Alyssa prepare Fred’s obituary. When Maine Arts Journal asked me to write something about Fred, the first thing I thought of was Fred’s bible, so I asked permission to read through it more carefully. It is a wonderfully human document and very much like the man himself – focused, consistent and no-nonsense. Fred Lynch’s bible is an intimate, hand-made, shorthand record of his life’s work. It takes the form of a hardcover government-issue log book, possibly from Fred’s service in the U.S. Army between 1955 and 1957. The spine is broken and taped and the cover reads “Record 7530-222-3524 Federal Supply Service (GPO).” Apparently it was once an interesting shade of pale lime green, but 50 years on it has lost its color entirely, fading,as so many things do, to a colorless grey with a few ink and paint stains. Fred was left-handed which may explain the fact that his bible begins at the back of the book. Or it may just have been that he started the record book with a timeline – quickly abandoned – and an address book of his dealers and collectors. In any event, this informal catalogue raisonné begins on the last page and makes progress toward the present with six to 10 individual works recorded on a page. In most cases, the entry begins with a brief description and then includes title, price if sold, and size, but oddly enough not the medium. Each work of art is recorded with a small pen or pencil drawing in the beginning. As time and technology change, Fred used images from photo contact sheets and then thumbnail digital images to keep track of his creations. In 2009, when I wrote a catalogue essay for Fred’s Form & Counterform exhibition at the Farnsworth Art Museum, I noted that there were 1,295 entries in his bible. He seems to have stopped the sequence of numbering later that same year, at 1,436, after which he simply numbered individual works within series. The earliest entry in the log book is Suitscape, a blue and tan landscape composed of fabric patterns. It was shown at the Talent Tree Gallery in Augusta in November of 1974. In some cases, Fred recorded who purchased or was given a painting, but mostly he noted which gallery sold it: over the years, Frost Gully, Barridoff, Thomas Veilleux and Dean Velentgas in Maine, McGowan Fine Art in Concord, New Hampshire, and Allport, Genovese/Sullivan and Miller Yezerski in Boston.

FRED LYNCH

Maine Arts Journal As I thumbed through the book I came across a Fred Lynch painting I had completely forgotten about or, perhaps, blocked from my memory. Road Suit depicted a reclining couple in what Fred described as Etruscan reds, blues, tans and orange. It was shown at Barridoff in 1977 and there is note beside it, “Sold, Ed Beem.” I own close to a dozen works by Fred in a variety of mediums, but I do not own Road Suit. When I mentioned the painting to my lovely wife Carolyn, she reminded me that another artist friend of ours had taken it in trade for one of his own watercolors, not a deal I wanted to make but I couldn’t seem to figure out how to say no. Our friend then took Road Suit back to Fred, told him I didn’t like it and traded it for something he liked better. Fred forgave us both. What first attracted me to Fred Lynch’s art in the mid-1970s were colorful figure paintings that used fabric and shirt patterns to evoke a sense of playful society, odd since Fred was such a private man. His early work reminded me of the erotic figures of Richard Lindner, a German-American painter who worked somewhat in a Pop Art manner, though he rejected the label just as Fred did.

“Mostly done in the transparent watercolor medium,” Fred wrote on his website, “these paintings reflect an interest in the kinds of clothing prevalent in the 70’s and 80’s that seemed to signal a breakout from the customs and mores of preceding decades. Pattern, for its own sake as well as for its ability to present a variety of facades, was the main motivation for these paintings.” During the 1970s and 1980s, Fred worked his way through figuration and socialized landscapes to paintings with complex illusionary space based on figure and landscape and then to cutout and constructed paintings of the same colorful, patterned aesthetic. In his bible there are a few pages of newspaper and magazine clippings that served as source material for some of his paintings. Around 1990 there was major shift in Fred’s work, one in which fabric prints and shirt striping went from decorative element to the subject itself. The pure stripe paintings of the early 1990s are among my favorite Lynch works. He had reduced the content of his art to formal elements and the stripe paintings are gorgeous chromatic explorations of form.

FRED LYNCH

Maine Arts Journal In the bible, Fred was able to record 30 to 40 stripe paintings per page, simply noting without a schematic just the number of the painting, the color scheme and the sequence of horizontal stripes. For instance, this entry from 1991: “831 – 10/11 red blueish white, Donated, Farnsworth.” The geometry and structure of art and nature dominated Fred’s art of the 1990s and early 21st century. His formal series, each documented in the ledger book, included the deiforms, counterforms and segments that led up to his long-running Division paintings of 2001-2009. In these exceedingly complex abstractions, Fred lost himself in intricate branching patterns that were at once based in nature and mathematics. To me, they always seemed like a semi-scientific investigation of aesthetic form, a search for Platonic ideals in thousands of Y-shaped glyphs animated by color. Where the Division paintings led was a surprise to many of us. The Divided Man series that began in the winter of 2014-15 would bring Fred Lynch full circle, closing the loop of his life’s work by merging geometry and humanity. His last paintings evoke the human form but seemingly at a molecular level, outlines of male figures contained within complex networks of marks like gene maps and mosaics.

Fred Lynch, Collected Drawings

Fred, dying of cancer, must have felt these paintings in the very marrow of his bones. “These ‘Divided Man’ paintings,” he wrote, “attempt to assimilate characteristics of both abstract and representational elements. The organic or cellular nature of forms, the subtle resemblance to more subjective, personal content and the obvious Fred Lynch, Divided Man Drawing #12, Ink on Somerset Paper metaphorical possibilities have emerged in this new work because of changes in my own medical history. This has renewed my interest in the figure and how it might reflect on my current condition. Suffice it to say, that to initially divide a formal visual ground for aesthetic pleasure or purpose and then turn around and draw on these elements for a more intimate means of expression and introspection, is to generate something of a full artistic circle. The figurative depictions, many of them autobiographical, help satisfy an always present urge to combine my art and my life.”

FRED LYNCH

Maine Arts Journal Fred prepared his Divided Man paintings for an exhibition at Miller Yezerski Gallery in Boston that he did not live to see. He died five days before it opened. Along with his Divided Man gouaches, Fred also created a series he called Collected Drawings in which he cut up his drawing notebooks and composed groupings of them such that his art seems to be talking to itself. There will no doubt be a great exhibition of these framed drawing groups, close to 300 in all, in the unknowable future. There should also be an exhibition of Fred’s early watercolors: They are as fresh and vibrant as the days in the 1970s and 1980s when they were painted. Fred Lynch’s last works, however, are a series of pen and ink drawings he did in his final days. The very last thing he created is a drawing of the silhouette of a man in repose, his body and the ground beneath him composed of a filigree of foliage forms as though he is returning to the earth. This dark, dense drawing is not recorded in Fred Lynch’s bible. It is recorded in his soul.

(Edgar Allen Beem is a freelance writer and art critic who lives in Brunswick. He has written about the cultural life of Maine since 1978.) Fred Lynch, Divided Man 32 (Earthly only), oil on canvas, 68 x 48 inches

FRED LYNCH

Maine Arts Journal

ALAN MAGEE

Maine Arts Journal

ALAN MAGEE

Maine Arts Journal

ALAN MAGEE

Maine Arts Journal

ALAN MAGEE

Maine Arts Journal

Natasha Mayers, Roulette, or Everybody Knows the Game Is Rigged, acrylic, 14 x 11, 2015

NATASHA MAYERS

Maine Arts Journal

Natasha Mayers, Hooded Figures/Red Target, 30x24, 2016 Natasha Mayers, Dictator, 24 x 18, 2016

NATASHA MAYERS

Natasha Mayers, Dark Hoods, 20x16, 2015 Natasha Mayers, Brotherhood, 12x9, 2014 20

Maine Arts Journal

Natasha Mayers Weapons Dealer 18 x24 2014

Natasha Mayers, Two Figures With Masks, 24x18, 2016

Natasha Mayers, Blue Uniform, 20x16, 2016

NATASHA MAYERS

Maine Arts Journal

Natasha Mayers, Secret Society/Cabal, 18x18, 2014

NATASHA MAYERS

top; Natasha Mayers, Crime Syndicate, 13x16, 2014 botttom: Natasha Mayers, Peaks, 16x20, 2016

Maine Arts Journal

Natasha Mayers, Arrowheads and Carnival, 16x20, 2015

NATASHA MAYERS

Maine Arts Journal

EL PASO This is an older body of work that is an exploration of borders, lines drawn in the sand and the foggy view of "us" and â&#x20AC;&#x153;them." This topic is so vast and complex, a few words written here seems almost futile, but here goes a fingertip poke at the gargantuan vapor. It is a recollection of thoughts and images growing up in a Southwestern border town. I was born in the United States but my cultural heritage/DNA/tribe/cultural influence spans a geography that predates the border. I happened to be born out of the womb a few miles on this side of the border rather than on that side of the border. Reflecting on this happenstance is a mind-bending abstraction. I like my country, and I am grateful for plopping out in this particular spot on this vey large planet. Of course I don't know any other experience, but I do feel fortunate to have been born in this country where most make the effort as a people to be free and just and good.

Gil Corral, El Payso, oil on canvas, 24in x 24in

GIL CORRAL

Maine Arts Journal

Gil Corral, So Simple Then, oil on panel, 30in x 40in.

We have declarations, charters, articles, laws and great documents written as testament to what we as a country represent. I particularly love the poem, "The New Colossus" inscribed on the plaque of the pedestal where the Statue of Liberty stands. It partially reads: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" I was moved to paint these images after the mass immigration raid in New Bedford Mass, 2007. It was a terrible, sloppy event. Families were swiftly torn apart, children's parents never returned home from work one day....oh well. Like so many other stories, this one was quickly swept under the rug. So that is that. Gil Corral, Magic Onion Balloon, oil on canvas, 36in x 48in.

GIL CORRAL

Maine Arts Journal Almost ten years later, there is a larger looming threat facing our Nation with the upcoming election. There will be so much more of this and that. There are manipulative words used to sow divisiveness, as though the citizenry easily buys into the fickleness of the definition of a spewed word rather than the display of actual behavior. There is so much made of us and them -- and on some level, especially egoic, I suppose there is. There is no utopia or ideal, only different interpretations of what that shining city upon the hill looks like - this leading to different means to a fictitious end. Strive on.

Gil Corral, Tumbleweed, oil on canvas, 30in x 40in Gil Corral, Motor Oil For Suntan Oil, oil and bondo on canvas, 30in x 40in.

So much talk about this "wall" to keep "themâ&#x20AC;? out. Keep "that" out. El Cucuy is taking our jobs, raping our women, just making our lives miserable. Once "we" keep "them" out, "we" will be great again, all fixed. A beautiful gated community! GIL CORRAL

Maine Arts Journal

Gil Corral, Allegory Of Machismo, Displaced, oil on canvas, 30in x 40in.

I am not a fearful citizen living in this country, I am not afraid. I am more recently, however, concerned. Although aware of the complexity, I am not fearful of "them" (out there), but am growing in concern about what it could be like to be Walled In with a hateful, privileged, vocal minority that somehow garnered power between these four lines. Monsters.

Gil Corral, Canutillo, oil on canvas, 30in x 40in. Gil Corral, Loteria, oil on canvas, 30in x 40in.

GIL CORRAL

Maine Arts Journal

POETRY FEATURE Marita O’Neill We have monsters within and without. Myths are full of our projections. Here is a monster--maybe we have created--but now it turns and shows us the monsters of greed within ourselves. Betsy Sholl

Dragon So you come seeking my gold, my goblets and torques? Step closer to my heat, touch my feathers metallic, my drinking cups tumbled, my flagons jumbled and glimmering, my mail-shirts, my howe heaps of buckle and brazen. Come lick the bones and suck the marrow molten of the skeletons left behind. Your eyes prowl, fondle my trove, gluttonous for just one burnished sheath, gem laden and silver-smithed for a Celtic king. You blame my legless firetongue, my yellowed wrath and slithering logic for my glut and hoard, but I know a fellow snake when I see one. You tell me, I love you, dear viper, ophidian of my dreams, hoping I’ll lift a blood-veined nail from my piles resplendent, my filigreed harrows, giant-garnered and gleaming, hoping I’ll say, O I’m flattered, I falter, worthy human, my diminutive drop. But I know you’ve hidden your gem-studded swords, your long-bows and fangs. So come closer, blithering biped, to my sword hilts and swag, my plethora and pillage, listen to my tongue fire-cloven and whet as I tell you: I am dawn-scorcher, home-burner, ash-maker and it is mine, mine, mine.

MARITA O’NEILL

Maine Arts Journal

MONSTERS:

ELECTION SEASON 2016 We asked some artists to create or submit a piece for this election season special section with this invitation written by Alan Crichton: We’d like to see some truly unsettling images that challenge status quos and quids. That leave the viewer awakened as if from a bad dream, with acid stomach, an eye that won’t uncross. We’d like viewers and artists to throw down the mess. The brutal mess where we currently live. Little or no light-hearted “little bad monsters” to titter about while eating, but all out insane nightmares that churn your gorge. That may make you choke. That is where we are today! Let us see it! We would also like to see a spread devoted to election art. Typically, this might be in the satirical cartoon mode, but political art could also be savage in another way - a subterfuge of conventional expectations, with “monsters” in the guise of Uncle Sam, perhaps with snaking striped Plastic Man arms, whose fingers make hackneyed, hypocritical mudras of peace. Like headless monsters in black suits and ties, faceless beasts who could care less about the lives they crush. Real, live monsters who live in Augusta, Washington, Albany, Hackensack. And just down the road...Political monsters in the mode of Goya, Daumier, Grosz, Beckmann, that are not only satirical but chilling in their reality. Though Godzilla and the Black Lagoon and the Blob and the Game of Thrones or the Hogwarts dragons are totally fair game for our Monsters issue, our initial thought was not so much the frisson of Halloween as the real bloodthirst threat of 9/11 or Bashir Al Assad, ISIS, or Vlad Putin, DJTrump, Ted Cruz, the neo-nazis, the random shooters, the NRA. Our real down-to-earth, daily threats to existence. Political, social, religious… Stephen Koharian, Megalomania, oil, 48x36