Maine Arts Journal Winter 2025 cover (Katarina Weslien, i forgot to remember, installation, Center for Maine Contemporary Art [photo: Dave Clough]).
The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly
Original Art and News from Maine’s Community of Visual Artists
Winter 2025: Stuck!
In this issue we asked permission to be let into the intimacy of our contributors’ studios and minds, hoping for “the remarkable privilege to see work that’s in process, unfinished, and unsatisfactory” and, in so doing, “to benefit from [their] experience.” Clearly this theme struck a chord—if not a raw nerve—as being stuck is part and parcel of any creative endeavor.
From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Véronique Plesch, and Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), with the help of Colby interns Sofía Escobar Amaya, Cynthia Li, and Audrey Loo.
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, Judith Glickman Lauder, 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 Winter 2025 Issue of the Maine Arts Journal
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Winter 2025: Stuck!
In our theme description and call for submissions, we reproduced a photograph in which we see Joan Mitchell in her Parisian studio. The artist sits on the floor, surrounded by unstretched canvases bearing the webs of her distinctive colorful gestural skeins. She looks...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Stuck!
I know that this is a meta moment: getting stuck writing an essay on the theme of being stuck when writing. The truth is, stuck is the start of all my writing. Poised at the shore before diving in. And it’s the rocky shore of the coast in Maine, where even on the...
Marjorie Moore: A New Order
Stuck is a weird word, is there a word unstuck? We are asked to tell the reader what we do as artists when the practice seems to be in stasis or limbo. What are the steps we take to undo the condition? This past year I found myself in a mixture of grief and loss. I...
Lin Lisberger – STUCK!
For forty-five years I have been making sculpture (in series) and keeping an occasional journal. Reading over my current journal of the past several years I was surprised to see how often I have been stuck! As any artist will tell you, this is not an uncommon...
Abbeth Russell In Conversation With Eva Goetz
Abbeth Russell and I have been friends for a number of years. She shows her work in galleries and on the streets of Portland on First Fridays, and has toured the country many times with her art and music. I asked Abbeth about her strategies for releasing stuckness or...
Katarina Weslien – Circle of Clarity
I Asked to write about what I considered failure in the studio, I readily agreed, understanding that failure is integral to any studio practice. As I searched for Natasha's initial email, however, I realized she had asked me to write about being stuck in the studio....
Marty Pottenger
Part I: Unstucking Early spring. 1996. 9 p.m. I’d been alone, working in my apartment for days, in the thick of "stuck." City Water Tunnel #3 is the performance project I’d been working on for the last three years, a solo performance where I play sixteen characters,...
Maury Colton – Stuck
There is a curiosity in the verb stuck: the irony of activity not being active. In my world of painting, stuck can apply to finding a way around: how to get the paint to perform in concert with the idea in my head, translated through my hand. This is a technical...
Jan Owen – Stuck
Oh, STUCK!—I dread you. “Stuck” sounds frozen but when stuck, I flail, thinking maybe this will work, no, maybe that . . . or worse, maybe I’ll never have a good idea again. I need hope like Charles Dickens that “something will turn up.” I read poetry, make notes of...
Carl Little – Terry Havey Hilt’s Private Cache
Terry Havey Hilt has worked almost exclusively in watercolor since she was a kid. Hilt remembers at age twelve painting little lighthouses on seashells for Ed Foster, a self-taught watercolor painter from Machias, who sold them for a quarter apiece. She also recalls...
Edgar Allen Beem – Stuck in the Russian Revolution: Serge Rossolowsky
For over forty years, from 1976 to 2020, I spun my literary wheels in the sticky mud of Russian history as I tried to complete a novel I felt I was destined to write. It was the story of an elderly Russian émigré artist living out the final year of his life in a...
Véronique Plesch – Where to Go from Here?
Lost on Life’s Path We’ve all been there, but nobody said it better than Dante: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.” (“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / ché...
Chris Crosman – Museums and Other Women: A Life (With Pictures)
Stuck? Yes, you could say that. I still vividly remember seeing Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat, which I first encountered at the National Gallery of Art, a few days after arriving at our new home on the outskirts of Washington, DC. It was on an impromptu...
Dawn Potter – Poetry
In “1066” Dawn Potter gives us a different version of being stuck. It’s cultural, political, environmental. There is the Norman Conquest, there is some kind of blight taking the produce of the land and its people. It seems there is plague as well. The speaker takes us...
Marita O’Neill – Poetry
Marita O’Neill’s poems address the experience of being stuck in different ways. First, she imagines the feeling of a trumpet who knows the “yes” and “sloe gin fizz” of music, but is now untouched in its “suitcase” and longing for touch, for breath to lift it into...
Carl Little – Poetry
The great Polish poet Czesław Miłosz was asked once how he could write of beauty and maintain hope after living through two world wars and Stalinism. His answer was that he had known happiness in childhood, and if we have ever been happy in our lives, then we know...
Claire Millikin – Life Forms: Facing the Anthropocene
As the Anthropocene (the era shaped by human activity) roars forward with increasing global climate and social crises, a small group of nonbinary and women artists in coastal Maine is creating art that speaks between and across life forms, leveraging art to address...
UMVA Showcase – Winter 2025: Sandy Olson, Jean Wiecha, Anne-Marie Nolin, Argy Nestor
Sandy Olson – Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot Central to an art practice is the need to undo certainties, thinking you’ll do a picture of the entire universe but you end up with a coffee pot. —William Kentridge Yesterday these words of William Kentridge’s showed up in...
Carl Little – Richard Brown Lethem’s Poems and Fragments
In 2020, painter Richard Brown Lethem moved from Bath, Maine, to Claremont, California, to be near his son, writer Jonathan Lethem. “Reaching ninety, it feels like time to kind of wrap things up in a sense, and take care of odds and ends,” Lethem Sr. told a reporter...
Carl Little – Review of Lucy Lippard’s Stuff
Among the most important art writers of the last fifty years, Lucy Lippard contributed to the discourse—and activism—around many of the major movements, from feminist and conceptual to eco, indigenous, and multicultural art. In Stuff: Instead of a Memoir (New Village...
David Estey – UMVA Has Been Remade
After stepping down as UMVA President, I have mixed feelings of pride in what we have achieved together, appreciation for the friendship and support of a great board of directors and so many artists I’ve met through email, Zooms, and in-person meetings, and relief...
ARRT! Update – Winter 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 – Winter 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...
UMVA Midcoast Update – Dark Skies Exhibition
January Exhibit to Raise Awareness of the Beauty of the Natural World Waterfall Arts in collaboration with Dark Sky Maine and the Union of Maine Visual Artists presents Dark Skies, a juried art exhibit opening 17 January and continuing to 28 February at Waterfall...
MAJ Theme and Call for Submissions – Spring 2025: In Times Like These
As artists we are inherently communicators, we are attuned to our inner truths and to what is happening in the world, able to ponder these external events, and share the fruit of our reflection. We find ourselves in a time of upheaval on all levels, from the global...