Véronique Plesch – Introduction Fall 2024: The Portrait and Beyond
For this fall issue, we invited our contributors to tell us not only how they approach the figure and the role it plays in their work, but also to reflect upon the idea of portraiture. We hoped to read how the genre (including self-portraiture and portraits of places)...
Edgar Allen Beem — Maine in the Abstract
Maine Arts Journal Introduction: This essay was originally commissioned to appear in Maine Art New, a selection of essays and artist profiles edited by Edgar Allen Beem and Andres Verzosa and to have been published by the University of Maine Press. After a long,...
An Interview with Heather Chontos — Sarah Bouchard
Heather Chontos is an internationally recognized abstract painter and newly minted sculptor currently living and working in Berlin. I first met Heather in my role as Director of the Corey Daniels gallery in Wells, Maine. Soon after, we became fast friends. Heather’s...
Balance: Photographer Joe Della Valle and Alex Rheault — Daniel Kany
Joe Della Valle is a photographer who makes silver gelatin prints, that old-school analog medium of dodging, burning, cropping and spotting fame. His life partner Alex Rheault is a painter who founded the now-wandering arts project venue “drawing room.” They are also...
Michael H. Lewis: Balancing Life and Landscape — Carl Little
“I have lived in Maine since 1966, but it wasn’t until 1984 that I began to work seriously from the landscape.” In his statement for the landmark exhibition “On the Edge: 40 Years of Maine Painting 1952-1992” at Maine Coast Artists, Michael H. Lewis also noted that he...
Duane Paluska and Ellen Golden — Art In Balance
Duane Paluska and Ellen Golden live in Woolwich and work in Brunswick in the building that houses ICON Contemporary Art, the gallery that Duane has owned and operated for the past thirty years. Ellen: One of your first presents to me was the last painting that...
Kate Cheney Chappell — Art in Balance
“Nibbled at by ducks“ is a phrase my mother coined to gently complain of the demands of small children, minor tasks, and major responsibilities. She was an artist who gave up her studio, whose time was pecked away at until there was nothing left over for art. As a...
Balance: Kathy Weinberg’s Tile Paintings — Daniel Kany
I knew Kathy Weinberg’s faux tile paintings from seeing them in her studio before they were exhibited in public. They seemed to achieve a particularly complete synthesis of what she had been working towards. They combined scenes of her daily life which were infused...
Richard Brown Lethem — The Visionary Motive
Most artists worth their salt, sane or demented, aspire to be a visionary artist. To nail a universal truth made manifest in a grain of sand, and to innovate an iconic image, tempts all us ambitious souls. The subversive and challenging factor in art is its desire to...
Marguerite Zorach : She Achieved Balance in Her Life — by Jane Bianco
“…the things that have touched my life” –Marguerite Zorach, 1936[1] Marguerite Zorach strove for balance as an artist, wife and mother, beginning early in her career. Elements of design and domesticity intermingled in the rich fullness of her paintings, textiles and...
Jared Haug — On Image Fatigue
It's both a holy and a homely site Slowlier perused than eye can see (Whenever the stones blink a century Blacks out) by this vague track Of brick and thatch and birdsong any June Galactic pollen will have overstrewn. From Mirabell: Books of Number, by James Merrill....
UMF Water Bear Confabulum — Sarah Maline
Since 2015 on the last Saturday in October, UMF students, artists, and performers take over the unloved alleys (and sometimes the splendid woods) of Farmington for the Water Bear Confabulum. Students in drawing classes create a huge mural on the wall of the Homestead...
Southern Maine Community College — Jeff Badger
IN FOCUS: Southern Maine Community College, South Portland Southern Maine Community College is Maine's largest, oldest, and most diverse community college. Its art program is designed to prepare students for a career in the arts. Working in scenic studio facilities...
Poetry — Gibson Fay-LeBlanc
In his poem “A Supermarket in Portland,” Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is echoing the Allen Ginsberg poem, “A Supermarket in California,” in which Ginsberg imagines finding Walt Whitman in an all-night grocery. Here the poet finds Ginsberg and draws him into the busy life of a...
Poetry — Colin Cheney
In Colin Cheney’s “Ars Poetic with Vulture” we see at work a different kind of struggle for balance—between life and death, witness and trusting the word of another, the hard facts of environmental degradation in tension with the beauty still in the world. The poem...
Members’ Showcase: John Ripton, Paula Dougherty, David Allen
John Ripton These four black-and-white images represent the kind of photography that engages every bit of me. I get lost in city streets, wandering and venturing into the lives of people I see. Throughout the day people move through shadows burned on walls and...
Members’ Showcase: Val Porter, Susan Read Guthrie
Val Porter I see myself as a complex person, made up of many different parts. I call these my "inner family" and much of my healing has come through learning to accept, listen to, and respect all aspects of Self. I am a full time artist, a sculptor and painter. Art...
UMVA Portland Update (and some UMVA Board News)
The UMVA Gallery @ Portland Media Center is well into its 2019 schedule of engaging exhibitions. The April show “Portland City: Re-Imagined” was a successful exhibit organized by artists Bob Riemann and Rabee Kiwan featuring Bob's striking, colorful photographs and...
UMVA Lewiston/Auburn Chapter Update
Gritty’s Art and Ale Window Last month's window featured works from the Annual Student Show at Wicked Illustrations Studio and Gallery with artists from local area schools and studios. Best in Show by Charlotte Woodson, Grade 7, "Simple Song," acrylic and ink on...
ARRT! Update
The Artists' Rapid Response Team! is a project of the Union of Maine Visual Artists. The ARRTists are members of the UMVA who collaborate with progressive organizations throughout Maine to create "visual soundbites", frequently in the form of banners, to be used to...
UMVA Archives — Pat and Tony Owen
There is a ledge on the side of Mt. Megunticook in Camden Hills State Park. It can be seen from Camden's Main Street, a sheer granite face that drops and disappears into the woods below. A face of rock that people forget about; after all it has been there forever. It...
Artist Fees? UMVA History
Charging artists to enter shows has been a hot button issue since the UMVA was founded. We urge artists to continue to confront this challenge. Here are some pieces of UMVA history on the topic:
Maine Masters — Update
ROBERT SHETTERLY: AN AMERICAN WHO TELLS THE TRUTH By Richard Kane Robert Shetterly, former president of the UMVA, has become the subject of the latest episode in the Maine Masters film series I am directing. Since 2001 I’ve been following Rob’s passionate adventure...
Restore Tax Equity For Artists
Please join the UMVA in advocating for this important piece of legislation: Please let Jared Golden and Chellie Pingree know that Maine artists would like them to co-sponsor this proposal!
UMVA Gallery at the Portland Media Center Accepts Proposals for 2020
UMVA Gallery at PMC 2020 Exhibition Application The UMVA Gallery at PMC (Portland Media Center) accepts proposals to exhibit work from all UMVA member visual artists and curators*. We schedule monthly exhibitions throughout the year. The UMVA Portland Chapter...
Invitation to Contribute to the Fall 2019 Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly
Theme: Appropriation When we think about appropriation, it seems in many ways that’s what art does. We quote other works, build on our influences. It seems that imagination itself works by synthesis, drawing on many elements. The poet Charles Wright suggests that even...