The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly
In Balance/Imbalance
Summer 2023
In this issue of the Maine Arts Journal, contributors think about the many ways in which equilibrium and imbalance play out in their work.
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 Arts 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.
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...
UMVA Portland Chapter Report – Summer 2023
UMVA Portland Chapter Spring 2023 Update The UMVA Portland Art Gallery was a busy place this spring. Haley Linnet, Aidan Fraser, Quinn Evans, and Natalie Nelson presented a multidisciplinary figurative art show in March, Bodies of Work, exploring the lived experiences...
UMVA Midcoast Chapter Report – Summer 2023
UMVA Midcoast Chapter presents Waterways at the Central Lincoln County YMCA, 525 Maine St., Damariscotta, juried by Matthew Barter (15 July–15 September 2023). An artists’ reception is scheduled for Saturday 22 July, from 2 to 5 p.m. The event is free and open to the...
David Estey – Reimagining UMVA
In an effort to expand its presence in Maine, the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA) is remaking itself and has added six remarkable new members to the Board of Directors. With UMVA approaching its fiftieth anniversary in 2024, the emergence of a dynamic new...
David Estey – Lights Out Gallery Co-founder Joins UMVA Board
I recruited Daniel Sipe to join the UMVA Board of Directors and want to focus on him here because he and Lights Out Gallery are doing exciting things that parallel our goals and because they need more widespread promotion and support to continue their success. Read...
Reed McLean – A Frightening and Vulnerable Beginning: Our First Year Renovating Maine’s Snowshoe Factory
I went walking today to the snowshoe factory, a location that has consumed my waking thoughts for the past year ever since my partners and I decided, on slightly more than an impulse, to transform its 15,000 square feet into an art gallery, coworking space, maker’s...
Greg Burns – Grant Writing from the Perspective of a Grant Reviewer
I’m a professional artist who has applied for well over twenty grants in my career. I’ve been rejected every single time except once, and I think that one time I was guaranteed to get the grant based on the criteria. Some say that’s a pretty good success rate hovering...
ARRT! Update – Summer 2023
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....
Maine Masters Update – Summer 2023: Carlo Pittore’s 15th Round
Maine Masters Report by Richard Kane “Feast your eyes on Carlo Pittore’s brilliant strokes” read the headline in the 9 May 2010 edition of the Portland Press Herald’s article by Dan Kany. After eighteen years since his untimely death at the age of sixty-two, his...
Pat and Tony Owen – Tipping of the Scale
So you have been at it for a while now, and nothing seems to have changed. You ignore the possibility that your work has gone unnoticed for so long now that it has become blanketed in cobwebs. The last exhibition you participated in was a group show, comprised of a...
Summer Play: Cadavre Exquis
As we will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Surrealism in 1924 (the First Manifesto was published on 15 October 1924, but it's already earlier in that year that we witness a shift from Parisian Dadaism to Surrealism), we would like to invite you to...
Theme and Invitation to Submit Fall 2023: Materiality
Art is fundamentally material: even conceptual art can be seen as an affirmation of art’s corporeality through its negation. We invite you to reflect upon the many ways in which your work engages with the notion of materiality, in every stage of your creative process,...