Cover 4 MAJ Fall24 (1) copy 2

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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.

Edgar Allen Beem – Felice Boucher: Performing Portraits

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...

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Stephen Petroff – Carlo’s Portraits

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...

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Martha Miller – Some Thoughts on Teaching Portraiture

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...

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Lynn Karlin – Still Lives: Stories in Profile

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,...

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Stuart Kestenbaum – Looking At You Looking At Me

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...

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Dan Dowd

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...

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Carl Little – Judy Taylor: The Direct Gaze

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,...

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Ruth Sylmor

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...

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Betsy Sholl – Portraiture in Words

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...

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Véronique Plesch – Who’s There?

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...

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Jennie Driscoll, Art Educator

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...

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David Estey – Studio Visits

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...

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Science and Magic Come Together in UMVA Portland Exhibit

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...

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David Estey – How to Think About Curating

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...

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MAJ Theme and Call for Submissions – Winter 2025: Stuck!

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...

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