We hope you will explore, read and enjoy all the many essays. Share the issue with friends and family, consider submitting your work, subscribing (it’s free), and joining the Union of Maine Visual Artists. Please let us know if you have any comments or concerns about this issue or ideas for future publications. All feedback is valuable to us.
This issue includes a collaboration between the Maine Arts Journal and the L.C. Bates Museum, sharing the theme of Marks and Tracks and expanding the dialogue.
—From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Véronique Plesch, Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), with the help of Colby interns Mads McDonough and Caroline Scarola.
Please click on cover image to go to the Introduction to the current issue.
Alan Bray and Todd Watts – Marks and Tracks, A Conversation
TW: I don’t believe that I have ever approached making an artwork consciously considering the marks I would make or the tracks I would leave. Does any artist? I have heard people say about a particular painting that the artist made “good marks.” To me, “marks”...
Lisa Kellner
My understanding of place comes from the intricacies of every nook and cranny I discover there. Instead of a panoramic perspective, I delve into the details, get up close, and investigate beneath the surface. I see the land as an accumulation of forms and strata...
Nancy Manter
I grew up in Veazie, Maine, a place where extreme weather and a myriad of geological variations are ever-present. My artwork has been influenced by this landscape for more than forty years. Like many Mainers, my parents shared a daily, and what at times felt hourly,...
Christine Higgins
The materials with which I work—fiber, paper, and ink—satisfy my tactile needs and allow an unlimited range of color and light and expression. My subjects reflect abstraction in the natural world. Living in rural environs in Maine has heightened my awareness of the...
Jeff Epstein
Most of my paintings are a direct response to something I’ve seen. I must be aware of what I’m looking for, as my choices are fairly consistent: the common and the everyday in a context that renders them interesting or oddly beautiful. I’m not interested in painting a...
Véronique Plesch – Marks, Past and Present: A Conversation with Bradley Borthwick
On 14 May 2021, I met with my colleague Bradley Borthwick, one of the artists invited to participate in the L.C. Bates 2021 summer exhibition, for which he expressly created a marble relief. Borthwick’s practice transcends genres as it melds materials such as stone,...
Carl Little – Records of Existence: “Marks and Tracks” at the L.C. Bates Museum
“If you look closely / you can trace / the tracks of my tears,” sang Smokey Robinson and the Miracles back in 1965. If you look closely at the work of the 33 artists in Marks and Tracks, the L.C. Bates Museum’s 2021 summer exhibition, you can what Colby College art...
Véronique Plesch – Marks on the Vulnerable Body
For Marks and Tracks, the 2021 L.C. Bates Summer Exhibition, Natasha Mayers contributed three paintings, close-ups of faceless masculine torsos inscribed with tattoos and displaying military insignia. Tattoos, White Vest, shows a figure with an assortment of black...
Robert Katz – Silent Witness: The Resonance of Artifacts
During the year of America’s bicentennial celebrations, I lived in a small, pale green house on the plains of southeastern Montana, about 60 miles south of the Yellowstone River. Just down the road from my house were the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservations....
Tony and Pat Owen – From the Archives: Summer 2021
When we first moved to Ireland (15 years ago), Pat and I did a great deal of exploration. This mostly had to do with history, ancient history. We bought topographical maps and sought out everything from old burial grounds to prehistoric sites. We were intrigued by...
Carl Little – Poetry
We can think of marks and tracks as remnants, visual echoes from distant times, or we can think of them as our own ways of responding to our current situation in various shapes and forms. But there are other, daily, incidental marks—the indentation left by our...
Gary Lawless – Poetry
Gary Lawless has traveled widely and often traces his journey through marks and tracks, through a history of icons and stones. How does culture move through space and time, from ancient Turkey and Greece, and on to us, if not by leaving texts in various scripts, and...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Marks
“Make a simple gesture and follow it.” That’s what dancer and potter Paulus Berensohn told me years ago when I took a one-day workshop with him. I was an aspiring potter, drawn to clay as both material and metaphor. I loved Paulus’s bowls made of pinched clay. They...
Marcie Jan Bronstein – Marks and Tracks of Love and Loss
These paintings are part of a larger series I’ve been working on to try to come to terms with loss after loss of so many people who were important and dear to me. I had a lot of false starts, searching for a way to make images that might evoke the complexity of...
Alan Crichton – Words for the Wonderful Joe Ascrizzi, 5.4.21
For several years, I’ve been thinking, “I can write—I have to write something about Joe!” I put it off and put it off because it seemed such a final thing to do in honor of a guy who was always and ever so vital. Maybe I’d never even have to try, because surely Joe...
Alan Crichton – Fifteen Artists from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
Skowhegan School Artists, Maine Jewish Museum, 13 May–25 June 2021 Artist Juliet Karelsen has curated Skowhegan School Artists, 15 individuals, including herself, who attended or taught at the Skowhegan summer residency from 1949 to 2019. That’s 70 years of...
Gianne Conard – Mid Coast Salon: Art Matters
From the paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux to Kenny Cole’s 2019 series on the death of Jamal Khashoggi, artists have portrayed the world around them. While the medium, the focus, and the formal approach may differ, the need for personal expression remains—and it...
Meghan Quigley Graham and Louis-Pierre Lachapelle – Collaboration in COVID Times: School, Museum, and Community Partnerships
In a year full of unknowns, collaboration found ways to thrive with the Portland Museum of Art (PMA), Portland High School (PHS), and ARRT! (Artists’ Rapid Response Team). The PMA began the Portland Public Schools Partnerships (PPS/PMA Partnerships) in 2019 to connect...
Members’ Showcase: Nancy Bixler, André Benoit, Joanne Tarlin, Elaine McMichael
Nancy Bixler Exclusion Zone embodies a synthesis of natural history and human interference. Layers and textures of movement/stillness emerge from beneath smooth surfaces, revealing a palimpsest of collective and individual memory. Visible and invisible evidence of...
Members’ Showcase: Maury Colton, Karen Adrienne, Diane Dahlke, Lesley MacVane
Maury Colton Though I never consciously thought of this group of works thematically as Marks and Tracks, paintings can assume different characters at different times—a type of evolution of interpretation. This particular series evolved from a combination of two...
ARRT! Summer 2021 Update
As a project of the UMVA, ARRT! creates images for progressive non-profits throughout the state. ARRT! provides a visual voice for groups that need assistance getting their messages out. Much of ARRT!’s work consists of large original hand-painted banners, but new...
LumenARRT! – Summer 2021 Update
LumenARRT! is a project of the Artists Rapid Response Team (ARRT!). We work through the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA), a members’ organization that advocates for artists and furthers the work of progressive non-profits in the state of Maine. Our video...
Maine Masters – Natasha Mayers: An Un-Still Life
The Maine Masters documentary short film, Natasha Mayers: An Un-Still Life, released in 2021, reached new audiences across the globe this month. After winning the Vermont PBS Award for Best Documentary at the 2021 Made Here Film Festival, filmmakers Anita Clearfield...
UMVA Portland Chapter Update: Summer 2021
UMVA Portland continues to post its monthly gallery exhibitions online. The June show is an Open Member one including work from 22 UMVA members. It is already online, curated by Amy Bellezza. You can see this June show and all the earlier 2021 exhibitions by visiting...
Invitation and Theme – Fall 2021: Freedom & Captivity
The Maine Arts Journal is partnering with Freedom & Captivity, a statewide, collaborative, public humanities initiative that enlists the power of art to envision an alternative abolitionist future in Maine. We invite all artists and makers to contribute to this...
Freedom & Captivity – A Public Humanities Initiative for an Abolitionist Future in Maine
Fall 2021 Two primary issues of our contemporary era are mass incarceration and mass displacement. The U.S. currently incarcerates 2.2 million people, a 500 percent increase from a half-century ago, at an annual cost of nearly $100 billion. The number of immigrants in...