UMVA Showcase – Winter 2025: Sandy Olson, Jean Wiecha, Anne-Marie Nolin, Argy Nestor

Sandy Olson – Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot

Central to an art practice is the need to undo certainties, thinking you’ll do a picture of the entire universe but you end up with a coffee pot.

—William Kentridge

Yesterday these words of William Kentridge’s showed up in an article in Hyperallergic I was reading. His words spoke to what stops me and gives me permission to keep working. My self-portraits appear like characters in a dream. Lately they are socks, clothespins, dogs, arms, and fish. These are my current totems—the inhabitants of my world, the connectors. I have spent too much time trying to find my muse outside of myself and my studio, so I know Stuck! To get unstuck I have to forget. I have to move far away from the work at hand or the empty paper, physically walk away, break my connection, blind myself to it, sometimes even hate it. When I no longer feel invested or in charge I can come back.

At the worst of it, twenty-plus years ago, I took a job for fourteen years and put it all away. Disruptions in my life and the feeling that I could not move forward properly got me good and stuck. I put my paint brush down for years, gave away my paints, and moved on. I had some wonderful learning experiences but I could not find the meaning. I wasn’t able to return to the studio for fifteen years. During that time I watched my peers grow in their lives and creative force. Today, I have nothing but admiration for their strength and clarity of vision, their honing of their craft and working in community.

Eventually I got the signal to return to my studio. That was five years ago. I started putting in the work again. I was way behind the curve but in the right place: at home with my inner self’s work.

Then this summer after I did not get into any of the shows I entered, I felt the kind of stuck that made me question whether it was too late. I was too old. But this time I didn’t give up. I realized that if I was going to keep painting I had to stop looking out in the world and paint whatever tells me to pay attention. I had to own my images, spend time with them. Work with them. The first marks have been made. No color yet. I am drawing and writing. Doodling, looking inward.

There will be that moment very soon when I step up to the paper and lay down paint, the language that gratefully supersedes all else. Then I just put brush to paper without censure. In the past I held my breath in that place. It was anxiety producing, a kind of embarrassing nakedness. And so much fear of failure. I might work slower now but with less anxiety and a sense of being in the right place, doubts and all. I am just finding out that it’s not about moving forward, but rather moving inward and showing up to tell the story I want to tell.

 

Jean Wiecha – Stuck on Islesboro

One day last summer we wheeled our bikes onto the Margaret Chase Smith and crossed over to Islesboro. The day was exquisite. It opened up like a jewel box: sapphire sky, turquoise water, pearly clouds. We pedaled north toward Turtle Head Cove, stopping where the road scoots along the beach so we could look west and south across and down the bay. The view was breathtaking. I took a picture—just one—and we pedaled on.

That quick snapshot said everything about the perfect day. I decided to use it as a catalyst for a painting. I wanted to capture the feeling of the view, the energy in the space and colors and light. I wanted my painting to be a real place and also my memory of that place. But I wasn’t sure what that meant, and I definitely didn’t know how to paint like that. I got stuck right away. 

I started out paying careful attention to the geometry and logic of space and perspective. But being analytical seemed to kill the energy pretty quickly. I could tell I needed to hold the geometry gently, rather than grip it, so the softer sense of a memory might emerge. I needed some balance of tight and loose painting, but I couldn’t make it work. I put the project down.

When I get stuck, I move onto other projects and let the troublesome one percolate in the background. From time to time I circle back and try to solve the puzzle. I make small sketches, study the source photograph, write in my journal, ogle better art, and meditate. Sometimes I have to let it go. But other times, I’m sure I’m on the brink of a discovery so I forgive my failures and just keep trying. Poking at this project, I eventually became convinced the issue was with the foreground. One day I sketched a quick watercolor without thinking too much—and something clicked. The foreground came out loose and free-form, creating soft negative shapes between my marks and the bottom of the page. I remember thinking, “of course memories aren’t rectangular!” The way the view felt in memory, the near space was only important as a kind of light-filled threshold. It didn’t need any detail at all, and by leaving it vague it allowed the eye to travel quickly into the scene and arrive at the tightly painted point of dark pines in the distance.

After that loose little sketch, the painting started to come together. I painted two small acrylic versions, one with a finished foreground and one without, and liked the unfinished foreground better. In late fall I moved on to the final oil painting, Let’s Come Back Again Tomorrow. I’m very happy with it. It brings back that moment in the cove, and embodies a new, gentler way to conceptualize my landscape compositions. It helped me realize that the shape of a painting, while informed by its edges, need not actually conform to them. 

 

Anne-Marie Nolin – Unstuck: Emerging from a Creative Block Later in Life

I have a few of the books written to help remove a creative block. One of them is aptly titled Creative Block by Danielle Krysa. In it, the author, also known as The Jealous Curator, interviews fifty artists for their advice about freeing their creativity. Another is Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment edited by Paper Monument. And, somehow, I ended up with three copies of Julia Cameron’s classic The Artist’s Way. But, no amount of morning pages had been able to get me going again nearly fifty years after I earned my BFA. I joked that I would read Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland, but I was too afraid.

In my senior year of college I took my first class in watercolor and before the end of the semester had created a body of work that would become my solo show earning me Departmental Honors at graduation. I never expected the well of creative output to dry up only a few years later. My minimal abstract imagery had become so minimal that it virtually disappeared. I pivoted to arts administration when I first hit a creative roadblock in the late 1970s. I thought I might work my way back to art making in retirement

Since retiring to Maine from New Jersey I’ve taken many classes at Waterfall Arts, which drew me and my husband to Belfast. Over ten years I took introductory classes in drawing, acrylic painting, printmaking (including aquatint and monoprint, linocut, and geli), color theory, encaustic, and, finally, a couple of watercolor workshops. In each studio offering I picked up skills and produced a few pieces that could only be categorized as “one ofs,” and was disappointed that I didn’t make a connection to the direct, fluid and generative way of painting abstractly that I had experienced so many years ago.

A breakthrough took place at the end of an eight-week course this past winter Finding Your Voice in Watercolor taught by Amy Bird. Before registering I had teed up for it through a multi-session creativity experience offered on Zoom called Shaken Until Stirred with poet Maya Stein. With Amy Bird, and through a series of classic art school exercises, I was guided back to painting. We used basic watercolors and cheap paper until we were ready to graduate to better quality sheets. We drew and painted blind contour drawings of our hands, each other, and objects we found in the classroom. Then we progressed to still life arrangements, interiors and landscapes. By the last class I was ready to return to abstraction, switched to the liquid Dr. Ph. Martin’s watercolors that I had first discovered in college, and was relaunched.

I’ve created a series of encaustic paintings and collages on wood incorporating watercolors on paper. My husband, Bob Adler, and I recently joined the Union of Maine Visual Artists and appreciate the welcoming and supportive reception we have received.

In no particular order, I’d like to thank my teachers at Waterfall Arts in addition to Amy Bird. They are Mike Fletcher, Gwen Tatro, Tara Law, Kris Engman, Richard Mann, Abbie Read, Karin Otto, Marcie Jan Bronstein, Lesia Sochor, and Helene Farrar. Also, writer Kate Miles. We are grateful that such a place exists. 

 

Argy Nestor

Get up early! That’s what I do when I’m stuck. The quiet of the morning as light comes into my darkness is inspiring. I watch from inside the house or walk to the end of the driveway and look across the field to the neighbors’ farm in the distance. The morning sky is different every day. I love the intensity of the oranges and reds and equally when my view is filled with ranges of blues. Some of my favorite morning skies are when the clouds are piled high and the sunlight is lining the top edge of the clouds near the horizon, waiting patiently to burst into the day. I try not to look away since the changes can be rapid and I don’t want to miss the unfolding scene. I take long and slow breaths and when my smile emerges, and I feel myself wondering, I know I am ready to create!