Cover 7 MAJ Fall25(1) (1) copy 3

Maine Arts Journal Fall 2025 cover (Kitty Wales, Mining in Pachuca, hand-colored etching on paper, 15 x 12 in).

The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly

Original Art and News from Maine’s Community of Visual Artists

 

Fall 2025: Thinking Through Making

In this issue of the Maine Arts Journal, contributors share their work and thoughts on the theme of Thinking Through Making. In this exploration of the creative process, the artists welcome us not only into their studios, but also their minds, as they address the many ways in which making is a form of thinking. They evoke action and contemplation, intuitive spontaneity and thoughtful reflection, idea and medium.

 

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.

Join our local arts community and make space for the work of local artists in Maine.

The MAJ is dependent on Union of Maine Visual Artists membership dues. Become a member of UMVA today! Not only will you be supporting local artists, but you’ll also learn about new works, local exhibitions, gallery shows, and community artist news, and find local artists online and near you. Don’t miss an issue of MAJ. Subscribe to Maine’s only quarterly arts magazine—it’s free!

Featured work from The Spring 2025 Issue of the Maine Arts Journal

Kitty Wales: Thinking Through Making

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...

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Jonathan Mess

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...

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Cig Harvey – How to Make a Picture

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...

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Ed Epping

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...

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David Wilson – Looking for an Opening

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...

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Stuart Kestenbaum – Following the Words

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...

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Véronique Plesch – Making, Thinking, Learning

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....

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Carl Little – The Trask at Hand

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...

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Stuart Kestenbaum: Poetry

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...

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Linda Aldrich: Poetry

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...

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James Brasfield – Poetry

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...

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Susan Cook – Poetry

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...

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Shaelin Shields – Teaching for Artistic Behavior

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...

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Susie Warren Hanley – Spindleworks

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,...

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Carl Little – Nancy Davidson: The Joy of Critters

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,...

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Linda Jay Burley – Mom and Me

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...

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ARRT! Update – Fall 2025

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....

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LumenARRT! Update – Fall 2025

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...

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Joanne Tarlin – UMVA President Update

Joanne Tarlin – UMVA President Update

UMVA Highlights from the Executive Board of Directors Your executive Board of Directors met this spring and summer to continue organizing the business of operating our organization. They have assisted the Project Leaders with grant applications and management for many...

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Tony Owen – The Truth Is Out There

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...

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Collective Courage Statement

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....

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