In 2023 my paintings became informed by personal loss and collective grieving. As a society we were still recovering from our walk within COVID’s halls. Personally, within a six-month period, Mogi, my dog of thirteen years, died; Mom passed at ninety-five; and a...

My paintings are open-ended narratives, leaving room for various outcomes and are in their very nature unknowable. They can show the submerged mind as individuals in scenes or relations between characters with various motivations. Keeping in mind the subject of the...

I refer to the unknown and the unknowable in my work, whether it is through the story of a scientist who is trying to extend their sense by grafting on animal senses (The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes) or the character Ima Plume, Public Illustrator, who says: There were...

Of Mermaids, Giants, and Flying Fish Michael Waterman sometimes describes himself as a “parochial painter” or a “regionalist.” But, having known him since the 1970s, I would describe Waterman as something of a mystic and his art as gentle social surrealism. It is...

Part I If you have seen just one of Emilie Stark-Menneg’s paintings or short videos, you begin to understand that your eyes have glimpsed a special world like no other, like nothing else encountered of and in this world, the one you thought you knew. It is all there,...

I am not a visual artist. I am a writer. I am also a collector of Maine “outsider” art. The artists I collect may be outsiders in the art world, in the sense that most of them have had no formal training, nor gained recognition through traditional routes, but they are...

What follows is a description of a private event on a cold fall night in rural Maine. An artist is called to fulfill her unconscious need to be free of her work, a need which supersedes the accountability we expect. We don’t know why she is doing this, we don’t know...

Duane Slick’s painting An Actuarial Space (2021) and multiple silkscreen prints of coyote portraits (2022) anchor the exhibit The Exploding Native Inevitable at Bates College Museum this winter in Lewiston. With his work being exhibited in Maine, I had a chance to...

Stephanie Garon is uniquely prepared to mine the residue and history of a spurious “gold rush,” in northern Maine, of all places. I’ve been to Maine every summer of my octogenarian life, and until two years ago I had no idea that mining was a factor in the state’s...

Who Am I to Interpret? It's too bad that all these things Can only happen in my dreams Only in dreams In beautiful dreams. –Roy Orbison, from “In Dreams” Sometime in my twenties I read Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in the Modern Library edition (1950)...

I’m not a procrastinator by nature, but there are certain questions I’ve tried to avoid. Those are the deep down ones that you know you’ll need to answer sooner or later. It’s similar to the feeling you might have gotten in high school when you hadn’t read the...

Terry Winters / Mark Melnicove: Sometimes times The unconscious, the unknown, the unsaid: mirror images of these “uns” are the things themselves—the conscious, the known, the spoken. In between non-existence and existence are the sparks of art. The artist approaches...

In his message from the “deathless, universal plasma” that opens Now It Can Be—Why Did It Fail Before?, a new collection of his “founds,” Bern Porter (1911–2004), “formerly of Belfast, ME,” recounts his long-time commitment to the practice of providing self-help and...

Nightmares are my bailiwick. As a child, I had nightmares, at least five times a week, ranging from Tyrannosaurus rex chasing my entire family down the garden path, eating them one by one (I had been taken to the Natural History Museum and seen the skeletons; in fact,...