The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly
The Sketchbook Issue
Summer 2024
For this Summer issue of the Maine Arts Journal, we invited our contributors to share pages from past and present sketchbooks, excited to discover the many purposes for this uncensored private space. We are grateful for their willingness to let MAJ’s readers peek into their creative process and become privy to their visual thinking.
From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Véronique Plesch, Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), with the help of Colby interns Sofia 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 Summer 2024 cover (Philip Barter, sketchbook page, [photo: Carl Little]).
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Summer 2024: The Sketchbook Issue
For this Summer issue of the Maine Arts Journal, we invited our contributors to share pages from past and present sketchbooks, excited to discover the many purposes for this uncensored private space. We are grateful for their willingness to let MAJ’s readers peek into...
Carl Little – Philip Barter: Sketches
On 23 April 2024, painter Philip Barter died peacefully at his home in Franklin, Maine. After suffering a heart attack, Barter returned home to hospice care. Lying in the living room of his remarkable house, surrounded by his art, he requested some favorite tunes by...
John Moore
The sketchbook pages are from sketchbooks that I have been using since shortly after graduate school for preparing compositions, or to access subjects for painting that I did not have directly in front of me. That initial intent became more broad as drawing expanded...
Stuart Kestenbaum: Writing Life
When I stack my journals on my desk, they make two columns, each eighteen inches tall. That makes one yard of notebooks—a record of my adult writing life. Stacked this way, they have a presence somewhere in between a minimalist sculpture and a game of Jenga about to...
Sara Stites
For years, my creative journey has been chronicled in notebooks filled with the bold strokes of markers. I have begun to project and paint these images onto my paintings as a way to include the meanderings of my mind and hand. However, several years ago an unexpected...
France Hilbert
My sketchbook serves to explore ideas and functions as a dynamic space for experimentation and processing my thoughts. It allows me to work without constraints, relieving expectations. Its intent is to be risky, adventurous, unruled, and unrestrained. It offers a...
Reed McLean – The Poplar Tree
Drawing a tree is the most fantastic cliché, and the common poplar is the most fantastic of trees. They have a mercurial pulse in their wild sap that drives them to extremes, to sacrifice limbs to storms, and die young and mutilated, having lived well. Compare the...
Ingrid Ellison
Intro It is late afternoon and the sun lands in a slant across my desk. The scarred wood is pitted with a history of paint and ink. Minding the shadows I arrange some treasures I might want to draw: a scrap of patterned fabric, a pearl and rhinestone hat pin, a few...
Claire Millikin – Time’s Sketchbook: Three Images from Joyce Tenneson’s Flower Portraits
We don’t usually think of photography as a medium that is sketched. Yes, some photographers draw or sketch their ideas for tableau images before creating the photographs that fulfill these sketches. But the medium itself resists sketching; rather, it encodes...
Carl Little – Rob Finn: Thoughts on Sketching and Trees
Just as athletes stretch their muscles before exercising, artists limber up their eyes, brains, and hands by sketching. —Rob Finn Raised in the Mid-Atlantic, Germany, and New England, Rob Finn traces his earliest interest in art to two high school painting, drawing,...
Véronique Plesch – Sketchbook Musings
Why do we take photos when we travel if not to remember the sights? This is what sketchbooks have afforded for a long time, just like Albrecht Dürer when he first traveled from Nuremberg to Venice in 1494–95 and captured in a watercolor the city of Trento and its...
James Brasfield – Poetry
These two poems are sections from a longer poem titled “To Spring,” in which the poet really sketches the whole panoply of the seasons so they unscroll before our eyes. These poems remind me of the clear vision and unfolding depth of Chinese poetry, and of those...
Bruce Pratt – Poetry
In these two poems Bruce Pratt gives us the feel of how noticing, how paying attention to specific details can lead to a sudden shift of awareness. In “Gunmetal Grey” the sketch turns to insight. Those snow devils, Orion hunting, the plummeting temperatures, the...
Susan Cook – Poetry
In this poem Susan Cook explores a sort of sketch of self, a mind trying to come into awareness. Suddenly the metaphor of a plant in a jar transforms the experience into a kind of vision or awareness of how the world (or our own consciousness) offers care to us,...
Tony Owen: A Certain Intimacy
For those who have lived with someone for a long period of time, you already know that there is precious little to keep secreted away from each other. There is little we need to hide. There is not much we haven't already made known to each other over the breakfast...
Argy Nestor – Sketching in Schools
I've had the privilege of visiting countless pre-kindergarten through grade twelve art classrooms across Maine and beyond, and the magic that unfolds within them transcends demographics and backgrounds. The ways in which teachers incorporate sketching and sketchbooks...
Edgar Allen Beem – Katherine Porter (1941–2024): A Tribute
Katherine Porter was always on the move. Her restlessness defined her as a person and as an artist. Long associated with Maine, she moved around the country constantly and her brilliant abstract paintings crackled with the nervous energy that drove her. Porter died on...
UMVA Showcase Summer 2024 – Matt Blackwell, Daryne Rockett, Rebecca Poole-Heyne, Peggy Johnson
Matt Blackwell I love to draw over old notes in my pocket sketchbook. The ground of lists is so welcoming to my process of figuring things out. A little wash of coffee or spit gives me a nice middle ground of color to push deeper with pens, or a touch of gesso, or...
UMVA Showcase Summer 2024 – Joe Hemes, Robin Brooks, Amy Peters Wood
Joe Hemes Brainstorming with sketchbooks, drawing, and thinking, is the brain-hand connection that works so well for me as an artist. Sketches are the feedback loop to my brain’s imagination run wild, the reality check for a better, more evolved idea. My early morning...
UMVA Showcase Summer 2024 – Véronique Plesch, Mark Nelson, Nikki Millonzi
Véronique Plesch – Sketching Memories I am no artist. Often people who don’t really know what being an art historian entails and perhaps further confused by the fact that I teach in an Art department, ask me if I make art. Although I did study studio art a long time...
UMVA Showcase Summer 2024 – Elizabeth Awalt, Kathryn Shagas, Laura Dunn
Elizabeth Awalt The Dive Book Sketches are from a series of underwater sketchbooks. I scuba dive in coral reef environments in the Caribbean and draw underwater to record the reef and fish I am observing. Why sketch instead of photograph when I’m scuba diving? I draw...
UMVA Showcase Summer 2024 – Nancy Marstaller, Brita Holmquist, Liz Moberg
Nancy Marstaller I have many art journals, mostly a mix of travel records and sketches, poetry, collage, responses to what someone said, or some event in the world. I like to carry a small one with me when we hike or travel. In my studio, I use journals as places to...
UMVA Showcase Summer 2024 – Raquel Miller, Judy Labrasca, Sebastian Masters, Bruce Bulger
Raquel Miller A sketchbook as record, as vessel, as extension of brain, heart, hand, self. A sketchbook as friend. Sketchbook as diary, as devotion. A sketchbook as lens, as window, as mirror. A sketchbook as honesty. A sketchbook to soothe fear, to dream, to indulge,...
David Estey – How to Promote Your Work: Before, During, and After Exhibits
Besides a lifetime of artmaking, I had a thirty-one-year career in communications: writing news releases, doing radio and TV interviews, answering media inquiries, designing posters and pamphlets, producing newsletters and PSAs. I’ve done most of my own art promotion....
David Estey – Unprecedented UMVA Membership Meeting
Nearly fifty UMVA members met by Zoom and exchanged ideas with the leadership on 17 April. They ratified the board of directors and discussed a wide range of topics: The vision, mission, strategic management plan, and chapter relations. Nine foundational goals, with...
David Estey – Andrea Holland, New UMVA Treasurer
Andrea Holland, accounting manager for Lyman Morse Boatbuilding, Inc., has been named the new treasurer and bookkeeper for the Union of Maine Visual Artists. John Patrick Mullen, UMVA treasurer for the previous four months during a difficult transition, stepped down...
David Estey – Emily Sabino: New UMVA Board Member
Emily Sabino, an abstract representational painter in Newcastle and Director of Pricing and Project Management for Goodwin Procter, LLP, is the newest member of the board of directors of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA). As an artist, Emily aims to capture a...
David Estey – Exclusive Studio Visits for UMVA Members
The Union of Maine Visual Artists is launching a free series of visits for UMVA members to prominent artists’ studios, beginning with UMVA members Linden Frederick and Maxwell Nolin in Belfast on Saturday, 13 July 2024, from 1:00 pm to 4:30 pm. Participants will have...
David Estey – UMVA Update: New Website, Summer 2024
UMVA has contracted with New York designer Elizabeth Ann Cline to deliver a new, interactive website with easier access by 1 August 2024. The new website will allow members to: share and acquire information about events and opportunities to show their art; view films...
ARRT! Update – Summer 2024
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....
MAJ Theme and Call for Submissions Fall 2024: The Portrait and Beyond
For our fall issue we invite you to consider how you approach the figure and the role it plays in your work. We hope you will think about the idea of portraiture (including self-portraiture) in an expansive manner, beyond a traditional—and literal—conception,...