It was thirty-one years ago that I was sitting in a tree in Manu National Park, Peru. I was participating in a survey of birds in the lowland Amazonian forest canopy. A black hawk eagle landed on the same branch ten feet away from me. It merited only a glance before...

Setting a Pulse pairs photographs of lightning with cameraless prints depicting magnetic force—making energy visible between the lines and distilling multiple events of a storm into a single frame. In recent years, earthen materials and weather systems have become a...

I am very interested in how we see (or don’t see) what is right in front of us, and I am also keenly interested in how the camera sees, especially over time or in the dark. My photographs show more than the unassisted eye can see. The camera can hold multiple layers...

It occurs to me now, when my baby is twenty years old, that I must have had some kind of attenuated extended postpartum melancholy that whole time, the year or two after he was born. We were living in relative isolation outside of Rockland, and I’d drive us around...

I’ve been doing portraits lately using a system of scumbling opaque, high-intensity color over contrasting color to hopefully achieve neutral tertiary color worlds that are also vibrant. Before the person comes to sit for the portrait I paint the room, the chair, and...

My practice exists for the sole purpose of self-expression. It's a space of personal exploration where I process a traumatic past and, at times, debilitating anxiety. I strive for clarity in the world and the relationships that have touched my life, whether past or...

I have a spontaneous tendency to see recognizable images, shapes, and patterns within unrelated forms. My unconscious is aware of visual elements that appear in contrasting light and dark, color, and abstract shapes embedded in the surrounding environment; for...

On a visit with family in Charlottesville, Virginia, in late October, the winter 2022–23 Maine Arts Journal writing prompt kept swirling around in my head. A question from that provocative nudge nagged me: “How do you engage with remembering and forgetting, erasing,...

The late, beloved American painter, Andrew Wyeth (1917–2006), once mused about his most famous work, Christina’s World (1948, collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York), that if he had been “any good” as an artist, he would have left Christina entirely out of...

Where to begin? A shape, a notion of color? The great thing about making art is that when you reexperience something you have the chance to resolve it, to make changes based on what has gone before. Working the way I do, I build upon initial moves to influence the...

Some mornings the locker room feels like the anteroom to the afterlife. I’m shedding my clothes and music is playing loudly, as if to get me ready for the next step on my mortal journey—music from elementary school, high school, college, from when my children were...

When I compare what is right here, right now, to what was right there, right then, the biggest absence is the expectation of a dependable future. That’s a tough one, and I hate the thought that my granddaughter, so sweet with her bright eyes of innocent expectation...

In his catalogue essay for her 2007 Everyday exhibition at Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, artist and Waterfall Arts founder Alan Crichton aptly described Barbara Sullivan as “Maine’s hip sister of fresco, elbowing and joking the medium out of the Middle Ages and into...