DESTINATION: MIDCOAST & DOWNEAST MAINE

DESTINATION MIDCOAST & DOWNEAST MAINE

MIDCOAST & DOWNEAST MAINE

DESTINATION MIDCOAST & DOWNEAST MAINE

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he coast of Maine has long been known as one of the most beautiful and inspiring places in America. It is a place where the power of nature is in full view. We can see the ocean chiseling its stony blocks in real time, crashing, surging, ebbing and carving the coastline. Maine’s trees are like its people: tough, practical, durable and weathered. While we tend to talk about the majesty of nature and point to the sublime canvases of the Hudson River School when we talk about the American landscape, the seed that survived in fact came from that craggy Maine pine. Modernism came to American art in no small part through Maine painting, humble but muscled by labor, skill and bold literalism. Homer, Hartley, Marin, Hopper, Bellows and so many others were drawn by this ethic to leave behind, or at least for periods of time, the cultured halls of New York to put themselves in contact with a place where nature was given its due respect.

Anne Heywood, The Red Wharf, 2016, pastel, 20 x 16".

Fans of American modernism throughout the world are familiar with names like Stonington, Rockland, But as the artists settled, they grew roots and Port Clyde, Deer Isle, Bar Harbor, Camden, Maine’s art culture also grew and flourished.

Belfast, Boothbay, Castine and Monhegan. They And while it has always been a place of artists have seen our islands, our coasts, our working rather than venues, that balance has shifted ports, our rivers and (you can thank, or blame, somewhat, not because of the artists, but largely Hopper) even our lighthouses. because of the audience. Maine played an overMaine was a place to get away from the sized role in the development of the history of machinations of cultural commercialism. It was American art, so of course people have wanted not only the beauty of Downeast that drew to come and see it for themselves. And as they the artists to draw the landscape; it was the began to come, and return, in ever-larger numvery lack of cultural structures and the societal bers, Maine’s art venues began to blossom: gamesmanship of the burgeoning art world. museums, commercial galleries, non-profits,

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kunsthalles, art school exhibition halls and non-profit spaces.

And as the audiences grew, the venues naturally began to appear farther from the urban centers and closer to the original sources of the art.

With the opening of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art’s new Toshiko Mori building in downtown Rockland, the landscape of the Maine art scene changed.

While it is no longer surprising news that Rockland is Maine’s leading gallery town, it had been associated with more traditional art such as landscape painting, high focus realism and fine craft. And while Rockland features much of the best craft, jewelry and traditional painting in the state, it is also now a clear center for Maine’s strong and growing contemporary art scene.

CMCA’s excellent new building will win international awards, but it will also reward visitors who go for the exhibitions. Ogunquit artist Jonathan Borofsky, for example, is an international superstar, but he has never exhibited in Maine.

His headlining the CMCA’s main space for the inaugural show—with Rollin Leonard and Alex Katz in the other galleries—and installing a major sculpture in the CMCA’s courtyard is only the beginning.

Carver Hill Gallery, now in its tenth season, reminds us that contemporary art venues in Maine can maintain the local adherence to craftsmanship and finish while presenting unexpectedly broader visions. With an eye to quirky intelligence, the gallery regularly curates challenging shows that include regional as well as gallery artists, taking on not only technical

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MIDCOAST & DOWNEAST MAINE subjects, but also conceptually complex topics like the role of surrealism in contemporary photography. Carver Hill’s roster includes not only Maine painters and photographers, but also leading artists from as far away as Los Angeles, Italy, Argentina, Cuba and the Czech Republic.

Yvette Torres Fine Art was one of the galleries displaced by the CMCA’s new building, but the gallery is thriving in its current Main Street location. Torres features a blend of active, contemporary Maine painters and major label artists like Josef Albers, Joseph Fiore, Nancy Freeman, William Keinbusch and Philip Guston with particular expertise in the artists of Black Mountain College. The gallery’s summer season will be highlighted by what looks to be an exceptional show by Morrill painter, and Brooklyn College

professor emeritus, Samuel Gelber.

While fine art galleries and museums lead the venues in Rockland, fine craft is also well represented. For example, Michael Good Gallery, which features jewelry, pottery, wood and accessories, has been a bright spot on Main Street for many years. More recent is the small space, but huge presence, of Barbara Michelena’s Craft Gallery. Craft features clay, jewelry, fiber and works in various media by many of the region’s leading artists, and it has become one of the most prestigious fine craft venues in New England.

While Rockland is swelling with facilities like new hotels and restaurants to accommodate the expanding audiences, the region still maintains its hands-on ethic. Through the Rockland-

based Coastal Maine Art Workshops, visitors can join locals for plein air painting workshops with leading Maine and national painters. You can head out into the field to do watercolors with Maine artist Mel Stabin or West Coast painter Mike Bailey, pastels with Doug House or even plein air oils with one of Maine’s hottest rising stars, Colin Page. Or you can join University of Maine professor Dee Peppe and Coastal Maine Photo Tours for an instructional photographic workshop in the field. Maine, after all, has a surprisingly rich and unsung history of photography ranging from resident photographers like Berenice Abbott, Eliot Porter and William Wegman to schools like the Maine Media Workshops whose faculty includes scores of America’s most important photogra-

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phers. Tapping into that history, Peppe offers a variety of workshops in various in situ settings in Belfast, Rockland and Pemaquid Point.

One of Rockland’s most exciting new additions is 250 Main, a 26-room boutique hotel that has dedicated its architecturally sleek and hip aesthetic of industrial modernism and reclaimed materials to art, and in particular, art of the local galleries. For example, I have always liked Rose Umerlik’s paintings at Carver Hill Gallery, particularly in its largely hidden (but better) upstairs space. Yet, seeing one of her large canvases over the fireplace in the grand gathering space was a clarion call that 250 Main is an impressive venue for art.

Just a few minutes from Rockland is 26 Split Rock Cove, an artist’s retreat offering work-

shops in art making and writing. On a threeacre picturesque setting, the South Thomaston facility, which partners with the CMCA, also features rentable studio and apartment space for artists and writers in search of a peaceful environment.

Heading north towards Rockland on Route 1 is Waldoboro, a quaint little town in which many leading Maine artists quietly work. The Heywood Gallery is the current occupant of the historic 1830s “Governors’ Mansion” in the heart of Waldoboro Village (past occupants include “two governors, one U.S. Senator, and a famous woman educator”). The gallery features realist painter Anne Heywood’s landscapes, still lifes and plein air studies, many of which depict Waldoboro and nearby Damariscotta Lake.

Turtle Gallery Fine Art, Sculpture & Contemporary Crafts Rt 15, Deer Isle, Maine 207 348.9977

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Right: Coastal Morning, oil by Adele Ursone; exhibit: Aug 7 Ð 27, 2016

Yvette Torres

Fine Art 464 Main Street Rockland, Maine 207-332-4014

Dedicated to the Exhibition of Exceptional Contemporary Artists July: Samuel Gelber, The Pre- Columbian Quartet August: The Late Work of Robert LaHotan

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MIDCOAST & DOWNEAST MAINE Instead of just painting, sculpture and prints, Maine is now more of a place of painting, photography and contemporary art. It is therefore not so surprising that Tillman Crane Photography has become a leading gallery in Camden, a town with a storied art tradition just north of Rockland. Crane is a large format photographer whose platinum prints reveal not only his eye for composition, but also his masterful touch as a printer.

Crane and Heywood are hardly alone in opening their studios as galleries. While Maine has scores of traditional galleries, it is dotted with studio venues, like J.T. Gibson’s studio in the idyllic town of Morrill. Gibson is a bronze sculptor, but he also makes intimately scaled vessels and heads the high-end metal tile firm

Metaphor Bronze. Gibson has created installations for leading architects such as Maya Lin and he shows in major galleries in New York and Santa Fe. In Maine, the Corey Daniels Gallery in Wells represents him.

Among the many notable area artists is digital painter Petrea Noyes, who keeps a coastal studio in Lincolnville. Like most Maine artists, however, her studio is not open to the public.

Instead, her work, which has followed a long evolution from oils to painterly digital handling, can be seen at River Arts in Damariscotta or at Betts Gallery in Belfast.

The drive from Belfast to Deer Isle takes you further Downeast through some of the most picturesque places in Maine. While these areas are more about working waterfronts than fancy

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MIDCOAST & DOWNEAST MAINE civilization, they are long familiar to artists.

Blue Hill has several worthy galleries including Cynthia Winings Gallery, a rising statewide star for contemporary art. Winings shows modernism-minded painterly landscapes, but her roster features excellent abstract painters such as Richard Brown Lethem, Diane Bowie Zaitlin, Buzz Masters, Daniel Anselmi and new gallery artist Tom Flanagan.

Down Route 15 on Deer Isle is Turtle Gallery, which, because of its historic relationship to the nearby internationally renowned Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and its founders, has long been one of the strongest venues for fine crafts in the Northeast. With scores of represented artists, the gallery, which comprises an updated 1876 barn, the

Centennial House Gallery and a large outdoor sculpture garden, also has a particularly strong roster of artists who work in print, drawing and paper media.

On the ocean side tip of Deer Isle is Jill Hoy Gallery in the storied art town of Stonington.

Hoy is the widow of the late and well-known painter Jon Imber, but Hoy is a very different artist. Her bright landscapes are bold and bursting with unrestrained color. Her studio gallery is hardly alone in the working waterfront town, but Hoy’s highly energized landscapes stand out even in Stonington’s surprisingly bustling art scene.

Ellsworth is the gate to Mount Desert Island and points further Downeast, and that puts Courthouse Gallery Fine Art in a well-

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Left: Terry Hilt, The Bubbles watercolor, 16 x 22 inches (Bubble Mountains of Acadia)

sited place indeed. The booming gallery features some of the state’s most active painters and an excellent roster of sculptors. Housed in a pair of 1830 Greek revival buildings, the gallery features more than 4500 square feet of exhibition space in addition to a uniquely appealing lawn for sculpture and nestled in the V-shaped intersection between Bucksport Road and West Main.

North of Mount Desert Island on the doorstep of the Schoodic Peninsula (my favorite coastal spot in Maine and now with a new-thisyear campground on the point) is Littlefield Gallery in Winter Harbor. The gallery features a strong range of Maine painting including Joseph Haroutunian’s brushy rhythms, Roy Germon’s bold and savvy-marked landscapes

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MIDCOAST & DOWNEAST MAINE and the crisply detailed and (among many others) the imaginatively poetic sky paintings of Lori Tremblay. Littlefield also exhibits strong sculpture by artists such as Mark Herrington and Hugh Lassen both inside the gallery and on the grounds.

One of Maine’s most picturesque and painted places is Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island. The Gallery at Somes Sound is celebrating Acadia’s centennial by featuring interpretations by gallery artists of land and seascape paintings by important American artists such as Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole and Fitz Henry Lane who long ago painted Acadia. Even the gallery’s noted furniture artists like Judy Kensley McKie and David Lamb will be creating work specifically to celebrate

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and support the Friends of Acadia.

Similar in feel to Mount Desert Island’s Bar Harbor is Boothbay, one of Midcoast Maine’s most accessible, picturesque and art-loving towns. Located in the village of Trevett, just off Route 27 on the way into Boothbay, is Mathias Fine Art. The gallery features works by sophisticated Maine modernists such as John Lorence, Brigitte Keller, Michael Culver and Brenda Bettinson. The gallery also shows the equine sculptures of M. Holland Bartsch and photographs by noted filmmaker Paul Feyling.

While the entire Maine coast is idyllically picturesque and seemingly every inch of it has been painted many times by the leading names of American art history, probably the most storied artist retreat is Monhegan Island. Located

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MIDCOAST & DOWNEAST MAINE 12 miles off the coast and accessible only by ferry, the island’s craggy cliffs and stands of spruce are as well known as the simple but easily identifiable houses that have all been painted so many times, in so many ways, by so many worthy artists. While it is a place of locals, the island’s reality is art. Some, like painter, printmaker and book artist Kate Cheney Chappell, have studios on the island that they open periodically or by chance. Chappell, who is active with the Portland-based fine print collaborative Peregrine Press, opens her space to the public on Tuesdays each August.

Brothers David and Steven Aimone have been taking photographs on Monhegan for years. Last year they renovated Steven’s Monhegan home Carina House on the main

street of the village to turn the ground floor into a studio and gallery. The house, which has served many uses over the years, including as a space for the highly sought-after Monhegan Artists Residency, will now function as the Aimone’s studio and gallery of photography.

Perched on Lighthouse Hill, the zenith of the island, is the Monhegan Museum. This best-sited museum in Maine includes both an art gallery and an extensive historical museum situated in the former lighthouse keeper’s quarters. In keeping with the tradition of exploring Monhegan themes and artists, this year’s exhibition in the gallery on the viewcommanding site of the 1824 lighthouse station is titled “Islandia: Lawrence Goldsmith’s Monhegan.” The view alone makes it a wor-

thy destination, but for anyone interested in the history of the island as a historical art retreat, a visit will be well rewarded.

Exploring the seemingly innumerable art nooks of Midcoast and Downeast makes for one of the best art experiences in America. It is possible to see works by a great number of Maine artists from around the state in many, oftenunexpected places. Just down the street from my own home, for example, will be the 47th annual Cumberland Craft Show on August 11–14, a huge outdoor craft show organized by United Maine Craftsmen, a group founded in 1969. With the demonstrations and fair food (as in maple syrup and cotton candy), it’s always fun and all of the craftwork and fine art is Maine-made.

—Daniel Kany

America Martin, Works on Paper, July 2016, 2nd level

338 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841 207.594.7745 • carverhillgallery.com

The Acadia Centennial Collection: July 9 - October 31 “History and the evolution of art in Acadia is an important piece of the Centennial Celebration” ... A group of artists represented by The Gallery at Somes Sound will create their interpretation of land and seascape paintings by well known American Artists, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole and Fitz Henry Lane.

Eline Barclay, “Last Light From Cadillac”, 24 x 48, oil on linen.

(Interpretation of Frederic Church’s painting, “Sunset, Bar Harbor”)

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1112 Main Street Somesville, ME 04660 207.244.1165 www.galleryatsomessound.com

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