The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly
Original Art and News from Maine’s Community of Visual Artists
Fall 2025: Thinking Through Making
From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Véronique Plesch, and Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), with the help of Colby interns Sofía Escobar Amaya and Cynthia Li.
For the issue’s contents, scroll down.
A journal devoted to the work of contemporary Maine visual artists, digital artists, and photographers, writers and their work.
The Union of Maine Visual Artists is proud to produce the Maine Arts Journal, with generous contributions from the Rabkin Foundation, Kent Gordon, and other donors. The MAJ helps us promote and advocate for the visual arts, artists, and all arts supporters.
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Featured work from The Spring 2025 Issue of the Maine Arts Journal
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Fall 2025: Thinking Through Making
This issue offers an exploration of the creative process, with our contributors welcoming us not only into their studios, but also their minds, as they address the many ways in which making is a form of thinking. For Jeff Woodbury, artmaking is “a journey of...
Jeff Woodbury – Learning from Making Art: Insights from Jeff Woodbury’s Practice
I don’t have a signature style. My journey as an artist has been to explore the world, particularly, its systems, rhythms, and patterns, and to ask myself questions. I often start a series of works by asking myself, “What if?” and then set out to figure out how to...
Kitty Wales: Thinking Through Making
Thinking through making happens in my studio at each step-by-step stage. An eventual working-out occurs as I puzzle through each part of building up three-dimensional forms. The work moves forward or backward when I am at the edges of not-knowing and continues to...
Jonathan Mess
When given the opportunity to reflect on my creative process, specifically thinking through making, I naturally turned to my creative partner. Beyond being my wife, Kate is an artist who knows me inside and out, who believes in me. I’m lucky to be able to dig into...
Cig Harvey – How to Make a Picture
How to Make a Picture Begin the ceremony by placing the camera over your head, red strap slashing half an X through your body. You are now a member of the Order of the Eye. Stand to attention. Remember, the camera is a Ouija board. The camera is a closet. The camera...
Ed Epping
Consider the power of a simple straight stitch embroidered 100,000 times in a vintage canvas cot cover. Each stitch is unique unto itself, but when collected and assembled in the shape of a reclining figure, each stitch undergoes a drastic transformation in its...
David Wilson – Looking for an Opening
My workday in the studio often begins by sweeping the floor and tidying up. If inspiration comes slowly, around the third cup of tea, it is likely to have been a fleeting glimpse of something in a painting that was not apparent yesterday or has been hidden for a...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Following the Words
When I was in elementary school our workbooks were called Think and Do. I think my education would have been a better fit for me if the books had been Do and Think, since I’ve discovered that I learn best through direct engagement with materials. I’ve always been...
Claire Millikin – The World Itself: A Conversation with Collage Artist Jeri Theriault
CM: An accomplished poet, you’ve also long been committed to the practice of making visual art, primarily collage. It fascinates me that you bridge these disciplines—poetry and visual collage. When did you begin the practice of creating visual art and how does that...
Véronique Plesch – Making, Thinking, Learning
Decisions, Decisions I like to tell my students that our task as art historians is to retrace the artist’s decisions. Take still life, a genre that grants painters a great deal of agency, starting with the choice of the objects to be depicted and their arrangement....
Carl Little – The Trask at Hand
This past January, in conjunction with the exhibition Orbits in Lord Hall at the University of Maine, professor and writer Hollie Adams invited a group of poets to respond to the work of the artists in the show, Tom Jessen, Isabelle Maschal O’Donnell, and Ian Trask. I...
Stuart Kestenbaum: Poetry
I love the way almost every line in Stu Kestenbaum’s "Song of Ascents" suggests something about the nature of artistic process. Don’t we, when it’s going well, feel like we’re on a peak? But there’s that rickety aluminum ladder, and the times it feels like we’re...
Linda Aldrich: Poetry
In Linda Aldrich’s poem, we watch an acting class practicing ensemble work. The process being enacted through Stanislavski’s teaching can pertain to any art and maybe life in general: to love art in ourselves, not ourselves in art, to eschew the star system. The...
James Brasfield – Poetry
So many elements in James Brasfield’s poem "The Cypresses" speak to process, including memory, attentive observation, and mentorship. There are father and son at different stages of life sharing a particular fleeting moment that will become a different memory for each...
Susan Cook – Poetry
Susan Cook’s sonnet is a more abstract and general approach to process, and it suggests something about the nature of endings. How do we know something is finished? How do we end a piece of writing? Or know a painting is complete? What do we have to give up of...
Shaelin Shields – Teaching for Artistic Behavior
New Ideas Through Play As a choice-based high school art educator, my approach aligns with the Teaching for Artistic Behaviors philosophy that the child is the artist, the classroom is their studio, and the teacher acts as a facilitator of learning. Engaging my...
UMVA Showcase – Fall 2025: Dan Dowd, Timothy Crawford Wilson, Shanna McNair
Dan Dowd My work is very much driven by the materials that I collect from my local transfer station. A salvaged wool blanket or a rubber truck tire inner tube or rubber boot can begin the thought process about what I can transform it into. I am also sensitive to...
UMVA Showcase – Fall 2025: Amy Bellezza, Kharris Brill, Don Peterson, Anna Dibble
Amy Bellezza In my still-life photography with the bed coil, I find myself moving in rhythm between action and contemplation. There is a pulse to the process: moments of arranging, lighting, and framing, followed by pauses to reflect and simply look. The coil itself...
Susie Warren Hanley – Spindleworks
What is Spindleworks? Spindleworks is a community of makers where artists of all abilities are valued and inspired to do their best work. Artists are guided to find their creative voice, and express themselves in mediums such as drawing and painting, photography,...
Carl Little – Nancy Davidson: The Joy of Critters
Over the past sixty-some odd years, Nancy Davidson has been a constant champion of art and artists, primarily in Maine and Florida, as a gallerist and curator. As Mirlea Saks wrote in her tribute to Davidson in the spring 2028 issue of the Maine Arts Journal,...
David Little – Aging Artists: Challenges in Living and Legacy
All we have to decide is what to do with the time given to us —Gandalf to Frodo in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Getting old is not for sissies. —Bette Davis The Challenges Facing Artists as They Become Elderly Are Real In his introduction to the topic of “Aging...
Linda Jay Burley – Mom and Me
My mother died twenty years ago, but for me, she is a constant presence. As her only child, not only did I inherit her artworks, her correspondence, and all her other possessions, I also became the repository of her artistic reputation and extensive body of work. At...
ARRT! Update – Fall 2025
ARRT! (The Artists’ Rapid Response Team!) works with progressive groups and organizations throughout Maine, providing images that can help to distill and clarify their important messages about issues that matter to people in Maine and the world beyond our borders....
LumenARRT! Update – Fall 2025
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...
Tony Owen – The Truth Is Out There
Now I realize that the above title echoes in the minds of those who followed The X Files as it does mine (I own the complete series on DVD), but truth is a malleable, ever-changing concept. It's like memory. Why is it that when we recall something from the past, an...
MAJ Theme and Call for Submissions – Winter 2026: Words and Images
Words and images communicate in different ways. Their association can yield myriad types of relationships: they can collaborate in harmonious ways, enter in exploratory dialogues, or even disagree and clash. After all, a visual and a verbal discourse are fundamentally...
Collective Courage Statement
Cultural Freedom Demands Collective Courage: A Nation-Wide Statement of Values and Principles for the Field of Arts and Culture Arts and culture bring people together. They spark joy, foster belonging, enrich communities, and help us imagine new possibilities....