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 benefit. Like the first, it was fabulous by all accounts!

Katherine Bradford, the highly-successful painter and UMVA founder, graciously welcomed the gathering and commended our efforts to reinvigorate the forty-nine-year-old nonprofit. The crowd responded with humbling applause. Kathy works in Maine and New York, has taught in several colleges and universities and has received widespread recognition in this country and internationally for thought-provoking paintings that explore her biography as an artist, woman, mother, and lesbian. She explained her development from abstraction to narrative figures inexplicably flying or swimming through a huge canvas or a very small one to fulfill perhaps an important compositional need. Her paintings seem deceptively simple, with enigmatic figures coming in and out of focus in different relationships but always luscious paint on the surface, often revealing her fondness for pinks and purples. She emphasized the importance of having fun and not second-guessing your every move.

John Bisbee, a renowned sculptor who has had solo exhibitions at Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and other museums, welcomed us into an even-larger studio on the fourth floor. He was equally at home sharing his space with us. For the past twenty-seven or so years he has been making huge, complex constructions by twisting and welding various sized nails, the largest twelve inches in length. The resulting pieces weigh a ton and have to be formed in often-imperceptible modules constructed and dismantled at the exhibition site. He astonished us with walls of large, remarkable paintings—a new interest he is just now exploring. He also charmed us with a song and guitar accompaniment about a bird who flew into his studio and stayed. John shared his time and space with Kyle Downs, the last of several young artists he has been mentoring. Kyle is exploring textures, colors and shapes in 2D and 3D creations from deconstructing basketballs.

Pam Smith is another UMVA founder and a former president in the early years. She is a dedicated painter who shares a studio with painter Michel Droge. Pam’s career has two parts, her early career in the 1970s and ‘80s and now in the past two years, she is making a long awaited return to painting. Her work often consists of a few quiet creams, greens, grays, and whites depicting simple geometic forms—often squares, rectangles and triangles, reflecting her background in architecture. They are usually not large but the effect is very engaging, giving viewers a wonderful sense of calm, order and serenity. She exhibited in many galleries in the 1980s, and in the 1985 Maine Biennial at the Portland Museum of Art.

Michel Droge is an award-winning painter and printmaker whose work engages with the environment and ideas of multi-species, non-binary, and entangled life systems. Her dark, large-scale, abstract paintings are smooth-surface, dreamy worlds populated by precisely-rendered, organic images that evoke underwater creatures and depths. She doesn’t favor a lot of texture. The works are inspired by landscape and mapping systems to unravel existing structures and enable a queer matrix of new ones. She is an MFA graduate of the Maine College of Art, a BFA graduate of Oberlin College, and attended Cooper Union.

Emilie Stark-Menneg is a Maine-based artist who received her MFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design and her BFA in combined media from Cornell University. Her show, Thread of Her Scent was on view at the Farnsworth Museum of Art from 17 February through 22 September. Other work is in the Shelburne Museum in Vermont through 20 October. Her large-scale paintings are a complex mix of overlapping narrative imagery from her life, surroundings, and vivid imagination, sprayed on with thinned acrylics. She has shown in several colleges, galleries and museums in Maine and New York, as well as galleries in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Taipei. Her work is in collections of the Farnsworth Museum and Bowdoin College.

The visits to these hard-working, successful artists in one location were a wonderful feast for the eyes and an inspirational jolt for the creative mind. The firsthand look at their work spaces in that tremendous building, their absolutely-remarkable art, attention to detail, and informal explanations of their ideas and methods was a delightful surprise to all. Participants stopped me in the parking lot afterward and continued to email later their excitement about what they had experienced.

Earlier Visits in Belfast

Linden Frederick and Maxwell Nolin had previously welcomed twelve members to their studios on 13 July for the first visits in the series. Linden led an informal, inspiring exchange of ideas and explanations of what draws viewers into his remarkably-detailed, landscape paintings and the palette systems he uses to help create the haunting familiarity and aesthetic unity we feel in seeing them. We were all greatly impressed with the quality of his work and left with a better understanding from a master craftsman as to why his work is so compelling. We had an extra treat of also visiting his luthier shop where he brings the same attention to detail to a second passion, the making of some forty beautiful stringed instruments, mostly fiddles.

Maxwell Nolin led an equally-stimulating exchange of ideas and candid views on what it means to be a dedicated, extraordinary, and serious portraitist. We all marveled at the many beautiful paintings and drawings we saw and his passion for capturing the essence and personality in the spot-on likenesses of his subjects. We came away with a good understanding of his respect for and dedication to the craft and why his portraits are so successful. Both the hosts and the visitors were obviously energized by the exchanges.

Alan Magee in September

Alan Magee was scheduled to welcome UMVA members to his Cushing studio on 15 September. From 1969 to 1985, he was an editorial and cover illustrator for major magazines and book publishers from 1969 to 1985, garnering numerous industry awards. In the late 1970s he began to concentrate on his personal paintings and in 1980 had his first solo exhibition at Staempfli Gallery in New York. He regularly presents solo shows throughout the United States and Europe. His astonishingly-detailed renderings of stones, tools, helmets, evocative figures and haunting faces are in the collections of major museums. In 2005, he painted the official portrait of Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell for the US Capitol in Washington, DC. There are numerous books, documentaries, and films about his work, including one in UMVA’s Maine Masters series and a 2019 feature documentary Alan Magee: Art Is Not a Solace.  In recent years he has turned his attention to creating large-scale tapestries and short films based on his original songs and artwork addressing social and political issues.

Summary

The visits to prominent artists’ studios, costume ball and auction, Carlo film screenings, and encouraging commentary from participants tell me that artists really want to get together for this kind of camaraderie. I’m convinced that it is an important key to UMVA’s success in growing the membership and engaging the art community.

 

Image at top: Katherine Bradford in studio (photo: studio artists).