The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly
Materiality
Fall 2023
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 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.
Lights Out Gallery – Reed McLean
The door is about to open and we are ready, in our element, poised for the reveal. A brief pause and an inhale—I imagine the skeptical faces of my neighbors. This is what I have for you; will you have it? Then life arrives. The overflowing throng of every generation...
UMVA Archives: Beware of Shiny New Things – Pat and Tony Owen
Recently, I was looking at the work of artist Joseph Cornell (1903–72) who is best known for his constructions: boxes filled with objects, cast offs, discarded bits of humanity that he reassembled into surreal formats. The objects themselves held little meaning when...
MAJ Theme and Call for Submissions Winter 2024: Play
Play Is fundamental to culture and society. Play is synonymous with freedom and yet, it has rules and carries with it a sense of order; it opens up a space that is distinct from everyday life and that completely absorbs the person at play. That play is not practiced...
Véronique Plesch – Introduction Summer 2023: In Balance/Imbalance
As we settle into the summer, we bring to you an issue addressing a notion central to life: balance. We asked our contributors to think about the many ways in which equilibrium and imbalance play out in their work: how they affect composition, color scheme, style, or...
L.C. Bates Museum Summer Show 2023: In Balance/Imbalance
Every year, from May to October, the L.C. Bates Museum holds an exhibition that showcases artists from Maine or with ties to the state. In keeping with the museum’s collections and activities, the summer exhibitions always explore different aspects of the natural...
Andrew Ellis Johnson – Parity or Bust
Note: The first two works are in the In Balance/Imbalance exhibition and all the works included here are related to economic imbalance. In On Earth Never Sown, a cloud seemingly carved out of stone hovers like a mirage. The vast majority of people in the world still...
Jan Piribeck
Introduction The work I am submitting for the summer 2023 issue of the Maine Arts Journal is from the Maine-Greenland Collaborations project, which explores connections between social and ecological systems in Maine and Greenland (MEGL). The project looks outward at...
Piribeck-Gerstenblatt Collaboration – Locating Collecting Firing
These panels are the result of a collaboration between two artists who layered images and information on circular substrates to represent movement between temporal and spatial experiences. Emotive experiences are combined with daily observations in the “field” where...
Paula Gerstenblatt
My art is an expression and account of the ongoing balancing act inherent in finding and securing oneself while maintaining connection to and responsibility for concerns of the larger world. These images from three series represent an ongoing attempt to strike a...
Nora Tryon
As a visual thinker, I have often imagined my life as a series of balancing acts. I teeter on the edge, attempting to find that resting place, that sublime spot of perfect balance. But the act is more of a juggling act, a process of keeping the balls in motion with...
Rachel Church
My work has often played with the balance of history, and now of research and personal experience. My artist’s book Campi di blu e stelle, currently on view at the L.C. Bates Museum, was created in response to an experience in Italy and France and the repeating colors...
Ann Bartges
At thirteen-months old, my youngest son rises from the floor with great effort by pulling himself up on the coffee table. After pausing for a few moments to feel the still-new sensation of his feet flat against the floor, he tests gravity by releasing his grip. Still...
Richard Wilson
During the late 1960s and 70s there was an interest in astrology. I didn’t think much about it, except for the discovery of my own star sign, Libra. The qualities of that—balance, seeing both sides of anything, and difficulty in making a decision—were all familiar to...
Claire Millikin – Sculpting Balance: Jeremy Frey’s Art
Jeremy Frey is a Passamaquoddy artist who works in woven sculpture, innovating original art in balance with an inheritance of and respect for traditional practices. Drawing from Wabanaki basket-making traditions that the artist originally learned from his mother, Frey...
Edgar Allen Beem – The Balancing Act That Was Carlo Pittore
When painter Carlo Pittore (né Charles Stanley) received a terminal diagnosis in 2005, he asked me to come to Bowdoinham, gave me the bad news and asked me to write his obituary, which I was honored to do. As I wrote on his Legacy.com memorial page, “I have known many...
Carl Little – Morris David Dorenfeld: Abstract Balancing Acts
Being a painter by training, I use the loom to weave wool tapestries—paintings in fiber. The weavings rely on compositions of harmony, proportion, balance, and above all the visual music of color. Brilliant primary color itself is the subject of the artwork—color is...
Gianne Conard – Art and Environment
When Susan Groce studied printmaking in the mid-70s, printmaking materials were basically the same as in Rembrandt’s time, nitric acid and all. In 1979, when she came to teach at the University of Maine and found no ventilation in the print studio, she realized that...
Véronique Plesch – A Balancing Art
Balancing A look at the dictionary’s definition of the word “balance” reveals a multitude of meanings—physical, formal, aesthetic, psychological (and many more, such as in accounting!). It is, fundamentally, an ideal notion, and its visual translation is both a...
Stuart Kestenbaum – Centered
Years ago, I was a potter’s apprentice. I had recently graduated from college with a degree in comparative religion, and was also an aspiring poet. Learning to center clay on the potter’s wheel held a near-mystical significance for me. I felt the implicit metaphor in...
Richard Foerster – Poetry
Balance and imbalance, the solstice teetering on the edge, a held breath—these symbols fill this exquisite poem by Richard Foerster. The speaker both invests in darkness and is “a celebrant of solstice light.” He well knows “the situation of our time,” and is also...
Betsy Sholl – Poetry
I began this poem as part of a project started by the late Lee Sharkey in partnership with the Portland Museum of Art, in which poets were invited to write in response to an exhibit. Between Isak Dinesen’s reaction to Richard Avedon’s portrait and her story of Babette...
Pam Burr Smith – Poetry
There’s a “relaxed center” in Pam Burr Smith’s poem, in which opposites briefly find a kind of stasis. The painting is both seen and imagined. It is both distant and close, tilting and balanced. The poem’s ending suggests that moment when we let go of telling our...
Sharon Gallant – Balance: Art Integration in the Science Classroom
As a science teacher for thirty years at Gardiner Area High School in Gardiner, Maine, traditional education has dictated that evaluations generally be in the form of a paper and pencil exam that basically assesses memorized information. Research, however, clearly...
Chris Crosman – Anna Queen: Let
In tennis parlance, a “let” is a ball that grazes the net during a player’s first or second serve. It’s also a mulligan, (if your thing is golf) or a fresh chance to start over. A let will often skip off the net, slow down, or change direction while remaining...
Carl Little – Creator Deity: Celeste Roberge and Her Women of the Gulf of Maine
Celeste Roberge became enamored of seaweed during a residency in Nova Scotia in 2008. While visiting Hirtle’s Beach in Kingsburg, Roberge encountered Agarum clathratum, notable for its distinctive perforations. She gathered some specimens, brought them home to study,...
In Memory of Yvonne Jacquette
Yvonne Jacquette (1934–2023) We are saddened to hear the news of the passing of Yvonne Jacquette, painter and long-time Maine summer resident. Yvonne Jacquette began her time in Maine more than fifty years ago on the Searsmont property where she and her family spent...
UMVA Showcase Summer 2023: Artists A–G
Mildred Bachrach The Deterioration of the Soul, depicts what happens to one’s essence (being “in balance”) when constantly confronted by negativity and demoralizing behavior. I have seen this syndrome when someone is involved with a narcissistic personality. One’s...
UMVA Showcase Summer 2023: Artists H–R
Kimberly Harding Sandy’s stability threatened to unravel during her husband’s final months of melanoma and cancer treatment-induced type one diabetes. Used to the protection and pampering of her loving husband for over sixty years, she focused on compulsive tidiness,...
UMVA Showcase Summer 2023: Artists S–Z
Kathryn Shagas My painted paper freeform collages are a visual interpretation of sound and energy in motion. They draw from my early training in music and a curiosity about the intersection of physics and the arts. When a chaotic jumble of papers are glued together...