UMVA Showcase – Fall 2025: Dan Dowd, Timothy Crawford Wilson, Shanna McNair

Dan Dowd

My work is very much driven by the materials that I collect from my local transfer station. A salvaged wool blanket or a rubber truck tire inner tube or rubber boot can begin the thought process about what I can transform it into. I am also sensitive to honoring the material and the maker and labor associated with what I find. Seldom will I take a newly-found material into my studio and make something from it immediately. I like to let things lie, rest, become part of the palette. At my “day job” (security officer at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art) and other landscaping jobs, and many times when I am walking in the woods of Phippsburg, I am granted periods of time to think about materials that I have and what I will combine them with and what makes sense to me from an aesthetic and thematic perspective. I usually get to the studio with a good idea of what I will do, but on many occasions, I will change my mind and utilize another material or idea. I think about textures, surfaces, color, and the underlying themes of the piece I am working on. This is when my thinking evolves. Sometimes I choose a piece of wood to create on and it can turn out that I don’t have enough of a particular material I was planning on using. Sometimes a combination of materials doesn’t feel right, and I’ll change my mind and try something else. When it’s right, I just know it.

Often through this creating process I make minor adjustments to what I am using and how I am using it. When the piece feels complete, I usually hang it on my studio wall, consider it, photograph it, and evaluate the “doneness” once more as a photograph. Seeing it as a photo can often cement the “doneness” but also give me ideas about the next piece. The next pieces can feel and look like they are related to the one I just completed, or they can move in very different directions. Because I work with both sides of many of the materials, the next piece can be an exploration of that as well.

I utilize both active and meditative states when I create. There are days when I am more active and there are days when I am more meditative. This is influenced by many things: my mood, the weather, how much time I have, my comfort, the music I play. It’s a constant exchange and a constant shuffle but ultimately, I have to believe in the piece enough to put my name on it.

 

Timothy Crawford Wilson

When asked about combining or alternating making and reflecting, action, and meditative states, I feel I am always in a meditative state, and that meditation is in itself a powerful form of action, and that action is meditation in motion. To me, the act of making is a form of worship, and as you do it, one draws closer and closer to one’s true self, and one’s thinking evolves accordingly.

Regarding how my thinking evolves through the act of making, most of my art and poetry begins spontaneously, but then it becomes a dance alternating between resolving the problems at hand, which then leads to more spontaneity with the whole process of creating, leading from one solution to another. Each piece of my art guides me to resolving problems on the one hand, and letting the creative flow lead me from resolution to resolution.

When considering how I balance control and spontaneity, my understanding of the creative process extends beyond the physical act of making. There is a saying among jazz musicians that when one is not actually playing they are still playing off the instrument, and I too am always doing my art even if I am not actually doing the painting. Many artists go through what is called a creative block, but they are really painting off the canvas and preparing for new breakthroughs and advanced ideas. Hidden truths are always being advanced and created.

As for whether the creative process helps me gain clarity and reveal hidden truths, when I’m in the active creative process, hidden truths, if recognized, reflect, reveal and mirror the process of life and hidden truths therein, thus gaining ever greater modes of clarity. And I am always in the active creative process. A transformative experience at the Metropolitan Museum of Art exemplifies this phenomenon. A teacher from our MFA program at Parsons was taking us around and commenting on various paintings. At one point we were standing in front of a Renaissance painting when all of a sudden a door of awareness opened in my mind and heart which were flooded with joy. Ever since then I’ve been able to see the sincerity and truth in all things.

Reflecting on how this process-oriented approach extends to other life issues and helps me envision new realities, in doing my art I never know how it will turn out. The whole process of creating, not knowing what images will be created next, is a metaphor and symbol of life itself, and one can use these metaphors as guidance in how to proceed in life. This experience of thinking through making helps me, and no doubt millions of people, imagine different kinds of thinking and manifest action in everything that I do.

My faith in art’s ability to envision futures finds expression in the well-known saying that “fife imitates art,” which is ample proof of imagining a future through art and the making of art. This belief was reinforced during a late-night listening session when I put on Thelonious Monk’ Monk Alone. I think it was the fourth song that literally restructured the way I think, helping me envision futures and realities.

Through my practice, the creative process becomes a technology for personal transformation and a method for accessing deeper truths about existence itself.

 

Shanna McNair

My art centers on color. No matter what I am making, color is my guide. Color tells me what I need to know. I have some techniques, but they are pretty loose. I use rags as much as paintbrushes. I don’t keep a tidy easel. My pastels mount up around me as I use them, strewn around like so many spent cigarettes. All I want, for love of all things holy, is that wonderful stretch of stolen time. And away I go, following color, feeling alive and whole and connected. And if I am really lucky, I am connected to wild me. My unfettered, raw self. In my wildness, I am all that lives. I join the eternity of cycles.

As I work, with color as my guide—a sort of barometer of feeling—I push through movement to create what I call “passages.” Each passage is made up of movement-in-marks, and I feel through that flow intuitively. I ask: does this passage make way for the next? How is the conversation going between passages? How is the greater conversation between all of the passages? How’s the society of color? Arguments? Agreements? What’s being said? The passages inevitably tell me things I didn’t know and long to understand. The art says what it wants to say. The art finds itself. I can always catch up later. Art lives within me and without me.

Such high aims! I’m laughing at myself. I mean all of this, you know. And I also am acutely aware of the incredible pretense. I’m doing precisely what I don’t want to do: I’m deconstructing the act of making art. My yen is to let flow. Little concerts of being-in-movement. Intensely private and all my own. Okay, I’ll go on. I’ll share more.

Making art is an act of balance. My color barometer, my movement, my passages, my artistic animation. And discipline: skill plays a part. And one’s own personality and way of seeing. And how is this way of seeing influenced by the imprints of culture? Emotion is a feature. Circumstances. Money, relationships. And that pernicious ego of mine with its ideas. So how to be open and present and unfettered and ready? To at least set aside, for a time, the constraints of everyday expectations. To find connection and meaning in just being and doing. To pray.

I frustrate myself because my mind won’t be silent, after all. So stand back and look. I make sure that I give myself a whole bunch of vantages—up close, medium up-close, far away. And then, maybe, an actual cigarette. And maybe a break. Sometimes I will take a photo on my phone and go sit with it, apart from the work—in case it allows me to be more objective. I work for several hours at a clip and lose time. Because taking a break in this way—I’m still working. My focus is extraordinary. I slip into time fugues. I love every second of it, however long that second actually lasts! And yes, again, I need to think through as I work—but it is usually best if I’m not actively thinking and making marks at the same time. Because thinking can halt me—get in the way. Along these lines, it’s meditation without the actual machinations of thought that I am after. To trust myself to know where I am going with a mark as I reach and move and work. Let me be a conduit—let me move easily and with intuitive intention and ability when I am in the act of making. My favorite passages tend to arise from riffing, playing. Taking flight.

I am also a singer, and I’ve found an acapella riffing technique where I am able to let my voice open and move and play. This wouldn’t work at all if I didn’t have decent pitch and if I didn’t have training in music. I write, too. I enjoy exacting thought in words. In writing, I try to offer up a freeform expansiveness to the reader, via lyricism. To provide space between words, so that a reader can feel and intuit and make their own passages.

The images that accompany this essay are from a four-by-thirty-two foot canvas/oil mural in eight panels that I created this past August, Et Tu, Lily?. I chose a pretty heady point of departure, hinging on Claude Monet’s water lilies. Monet’s lilies are deeply recognizable—we all know them well. There is an immediate familiarity when one views the grouping of circles and ovals, suspended in blue and green color fields. Monet’s tradition influences our concept of beauty—while the lilies are beautiful—some influences do not. So how does imprinting inform identity? What are we looking at? What is original? And how to weigh art’s own contribution to what we make?

Maybe the notion that original thought is special is a flawed conceit. What if original thought is common—what if original thought is that play that happens in the wild, spontaneous moment of making? An artist alone, in conversation with art. Maybe it’s that simple. Moving and doing and being. And just as the thought develops, it dissipates and becomes another thought and so on until a whole piece sings in its passages. I return to color-in-motion. That glorious private place. Where I am lost and where I am found.

As I painted Et Tu, Lily?, I had to remind myself not to over-think. To let the shapes be less literal and defined. To play. I kept worrying that I was making my point too many times over! How many circles does the viewer need? Do I really need to include every color imaginable on these canvases? Will the viewer know how much finger painting I did? Does the viewer see my birthday cake passage on Panel One? Do they think it’s funny? Does it matter?

So what does matter? For me, my connection with color is biggest and most important. There are stories in color and in the shapes color makes. Shapes evolve and move in color. Whatever I make, once I am finished—the work is no longer mine. It has its own life. So you tell me! What matters to you. Once I am done, the connection is literally no longer private. Just as this essay reveals what it reveals. I’ve made my process—or at least some of it—a piece apart from me. I wonder how you will travel this moment. I hope you will let me know.