The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly
The Portrait and Beyond
Fall 2024
For this fall issue, we invited our contributors to tell us not only how they approach the figure and the role it plays in their work, but also to reflect upon the idea of portraiture. We hoped to read how the genre (including self-portraiture and portraits of places) might be deployed in an expansive manner beyond a traditional and literal conception.
From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Véronique Plesch, Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), with the help of Colby interns Sofìa Escobar Amaya and Audrey Loo.
The Union of Maine Visual Artists is proud to produce the Maine Arts Journal, with generous contributions from the Rabkin Foundation, Judith Glickman Lauder, Kent Gordon, and other donors. The MAJ helps us promote and advocate for the visual arts, artists, and all arts supporters. Learn more and become a UMVA member here. The MAJ is dependent on UMVA membership dues.
Maine Arts Journal Fall 2024 cover (Felice Boucher, Mind’s Eye, digital photograph.
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Fall 2024: The Portrait and Beyond
For this fall issue, we invited our contributors to tell us not only how they approach the figure and the role it plays in their work, but also to reflect upon the idea of portraiture. We hoped to read how the genre (including self-portraiture and portraits of places)...
Edgar Allen Beem – Felice Boucher: Performing Portraits
In Paper Whites, a dark, thinly-clad woman poses, face in profile, holding an extirpated narcissus, roots in her lap, leaves splayed across her torso, blossom at her breastbone. In Mrs. McGregor, the same striking woman stands in a white-on-white environment dangling...
Chris Crosman – Phyllis Mills Wyeth (1940–2019): Portraits and Homages by Jamie Wyeth
Phyllis Wyeth and Jamie Wyeth had been married for over fifty years when Phyllis died in 2019. During the preceding half century and more Wyeth painted her portrait continuously. But, she is also present in many indirect portraits—homages, really, to his partner,...
Stephen Petroff – Carlo’s Portraits
It is difficult for me to determine whether satisfaction can be measured in this world. Ecstasy and misery leave a strong impression in the memory, while pale satisfaction is as easy to forget as any minor disappointment. There is a painting by Carlo Pittore, based on...
Martha Miller – Some Thoughts on Teaching Portraiture
A few months after graduating from the Maine College of Art & Design (MECA) in May of 2006, I started teaching Mixed-Media Portraiture (MMP) through their Continuing Studies Department. I was asked to teach this course based on the popularity of my senior thesis...
Lynn Karlin – Still Lives: Stories in Profile
Still Lives: Stories in Profile documents the rarely seen side view of a person capturing the moment when a personality and a story emerge in its simplest form. There's a distinct dignity, as well as a mystery, that I try to bring to my subjects through light,...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Looking At You Looking At Me
I’ve only had my portrait painted once. It was done in the fall of 2013 by Jon Imber, a summer resident of the town of Stonington on Deer Isle. Jon first came to the Island in the 1970s and had a stellar reputation as an artist—his work was in the collection of the...
Robin Brooks – Purple Coats, Purses, and People—My Non-Traditional Portraits
Feminist artists sought to create a dialogue between the viewer and the artwork through the inclusion of women's perspective. Art was not merely an object for aesthetic admiration but could also incite the viewer to question the social and political landscape, and...
Dan Dowd
I first remember seeing the rusty brown wool coat from a distance. The high school art teacher, Mrs. Weed, would sit in the choir loft of the Catholic church where I was an altar boy. I could see her from my seat on the altar, usually to the left of the priest if you...
Carl Little – Judy Taylor: The Direct Gaze
Judy Taylor’s first portrait subject was her grandfather on his Nebraska farm, painted when she was twelve years old. Later in life, Taylor studied portraiture with artists at the New York Academy of Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League,...
Ruth Sylmor
The 2023 photographs presented in this issue of the Maine Arts Journal are my photographic response to stumbling upon a portrait stenciled on a Parisian yellow mailbox. Walking casually on the Île Saint-Louis, I spotted and immediately recognized the work of French...
Betsy Sholl – Portraiture in Words
What do we look for in portraits? Some semblances of ourselves—a mood, an attitude, a stance we recognize? There's the arrogance of Richard Avedon’s George Wallace, the unspeakable complexity of his Chet Baker. Do we want to see the complexity of our own humanity...
Véronique Plesch – Who’s There?
Wandering through a museum and coming upon a portrait can be like meeting old friends. I took this photo in October 2014, while visiting the Museum of Modern Art with a group of students. This double portrait by Oskar Kokoschka (who happened to be a friend of my...
Claire Millikin – Portrait of Maine 2024: Indigo Arts Alliance’s Deconstructing the Boundaries: The Land Fights Back and the Abbe Museum’s Dawnland Festival of Arts and Ideas
Feminist art historian Shearer West points to the capacious definition of a “portrait” noting that a “portrait” emerges “on a continuum between the specificity of likeness and the generality of type . . . showing specific and distinctive aspects . . . as well as the...
Jane Herbert and Jean Noon – Portrait of a Community: Passamaquoddy ARRT! Residency June 2024
Background Last year members of ARRT! (Artists’ Rapid Response Team) had their first retreat in ten years at Smithereens Farm in Pembroke, just west of Passamaquoddy Pleasant Point Reservation and Eastport. ARRT! painted a banner for the farm that illustrates some of...
Jennie Driscoll, Art Educator
As an art educator teaching primarily photography classes, I find that the most interesting works my high school students create are the ones where I get to learn more about them: their individual personalities and the things that motivate them in life. I often see a...
Carl Little and Alan Crichton – Two Reviews of Haystack at Liberty by Alana VanDerwerker
Haystack: Portrait of a Fledgling Craft School by Carl Little While in the past crafts were necessary for practical survival, now and for the future they will be just as necessary for preserving sanity and achieving some kind of salvation. —Francis Merritt When...
Tony Owen – A Myth Unto Itself (A Portrait of the Village)
There is a myth associated with the village we live in (Annascaul) and, like many Irish myths, it has to do with bloodshed and getting the upper hand when all seems lost, or perhaps finding it's more important that if you die, you die with honor, because that goes a...
Maine Masters
Image at top: Robert Shetterly, Americans Who Tell the Truth.
UMVA Members’ Showcase: Carol Sloane, Lee Chisholm, and Joseph Stapleton
Carol Sloane These paintings are part of an ongoing series of portraits of people with their beloved pets. I call this body of work Domestic Partners. This study began with one friend who always sat in the same seat at her favorite window near her begonia, with her...
David Estey – Studio Visits
Fort Andross Mill, Brunswick Imagine informal visits with five prominent artists within their prolific work spaces in a cavernous old Maine mill. That’s what some forty members and guests got to do on 13 August, in the second round of a series I arranged as a UMVA...
Ann Tracy and Richard Kane – UMVA 2024 Carlo Pittore Costume Ball and Art Auction: A Big Success
Carlo Pittore brought us all together again (posthumously) as the fiftieth year of the UMVA turned. Vice president. Joanne Tarlin’s member survey last year told the board that at the very top of the list of members’ hopes and desires was renewed camaraderie. The Gala...
Science and Magic Come Together in UMVA Portland Exhibit
Magic, Myth, Machine, & Matter was the title of the 6–29 September UMVA exhibition at the Oak Street Lofts Gallery, 72 Oak St., Portland, Maine, featuring UMVA members Eva Rose Goetz, Gregg Harper, William Hessian, and Abbeth Russell. The exhibition themes were...
David Estey – How to Think About Curating
This is the last installment of a four-part series on how to exhibit, prepare, and promote your work, and now how to think about curators judging it. If you’ve ever entered a juried competition, you know the elation of being accepted and the disappointment of not...
Edgar Allen Beem – Estate Taxes and Percent for Art: The UMVA and the Law
Back in 1979, the Maine state legislature passed a pair of landmark art bills that the Union of Maine Visual Artists was instrumental in proposing. “An Act to Encourage the Maine State Museum Commission to Acquire Works of Art Beneficial to the State” was the vaguely...
MAJ Theme and Call for Submissions – Winter 2025: Stuck!
Being “stuck” is something all artists encounter at one point or another—it might even be a constant experience. So how do you figure out a way out of a creative dead-end or start when artist’s block besets you? This issue will offer an opportunity for our...