UMVA Showcase – Spring 2026: Mark Wethli, Ann Tracy, Arthur Nichols, Holly Kidder

Mark Wethli – The Shape of Time & The Shape of Content

In 1979 I was teaching drawing and painting at California State University, Long Beach. In the art office, to save paper, they would cut discarded photocopies into quarters and leave them face down on the counter for taking notes. I would often grab a few, fold them together, and keep them in my pocket for jotting down the names of artists during crits, or to record the names of artists or ideas I wanted to keep in mind (long before our cell phones became our note pads).

On 15 March of that year, the department hosted a talk by artist John Baldessari. At one point in the lecture, he recommended a book called The Shape of Time by George Kubler. I reached into my pocket, took out the sheets of scrap paper I’d picked up in the office, and in the dark, without looking, jotted down the name of the book.

The next day, going through my notes, I was startled to discover that the adjoining slip of paper, folded together with the first one, was a photocopy of the title page of another book, The Shape of Content, by Ben Shahn.

The odds of the two titles coinciding like this were so striking that I took it as a sign and read The Shape of Time, which I soon discovered was an affirmation of something I had already intuited; a relational, non-linear, and non-hierarchical approach to art history and material culture in general. The ideas in the book, among other sources, have inspired my path ever since and eventually took form, almost thirty years later, in a piece of mine called Piper Cub, from 2007. In addition to being an homage to my father, who built an actual Piper Cub fifty years earlier, Piper Cub is a life-size replica of the original aircraft that was intended to raise questions about its own identity: is it a model airplane, a sculpture, an industrial object, or is it even art? Hopefully, besides the delight of seeing a full size, hand-made airplane in an art gallery, dwelling on these irresolvable questions would introduce viewers to the kinds of insights that George Kubler suggests in The Shape of Time.

Despite the similarities in their titles, and their chance encounter in my lecture notes, the two books have little in common. There’s no indication that Kubler based his title on Shahn’s (which came five years earlier, in 1957). While each of them is notable and highly regarded in his own right, Kubler’s book is more theoretical and Shahn’s more rhetorical, making the case for artists’ social responsibility and the limitations of pure abstraction in achieving this goal.

Working on the Piper Cub, which is just about as literal as an object can get, I loved discovering a world of abstract forms that I could never have devised on my own, just as I encounter in the endless variety of abstract shapes when drawing from perception.

Finally, as if to affirm the coincidence of The Shape of Time and The Shape of Content coming together on two neighboring slips of paper in 1979, when I moved to Maine in 1985 I had the pleasure of meeting both Abby Shahn, Ben Shahn’s daughter, and Elena Kubler, George Kubler’s daughter.

 

Ann Tracy – The Time Has Come Today

Now that I’m a retired radio journalist, I find it amusing, considering the problems I have with time management today, that I once thrived in a business where I had two to four deadlines each hour I was on the air. Of course, that was back in 1977 when I was the first female voice on KTLK Denver radio doing the news overnight (they were a hard rock station). After fifteen years of trying to be a morning person, I just couldn’t do it anymore, working morning drive shifts. I segued to PR consulting after I left the wild world of radio when I saw the writing on the wall as the industry was deregulated during the Reagan era. I began to take my photography and digital art more seriously as I became an “idiot savant” graphic designer for PR clients and ran a theater company I created.

 Time has taken me down many paths in my life, some rockier than others.

To me, time is a big circle, based on how I see the year in my mind’s eye. January is at the top with the spring months to the left and summer months on the bottom and autumnal months on the right heading back into January: basically a clock-like design. I’m surprised I don’t visualize time going counter clockwise. When I lived in Cape Neddick in the first grade, I remember our backwards clock upon which the numbers went backwards as did the hands. Needless to say, I was confused by the clocks at school that I thought were wrong.

This artwork I’m submitting was created after I saw Christian Marclay’s The Clock installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art back in 2010, where I took photos of myself reflected taking photos. Then a few years later, I was visiting my sister when she lived in Savannah, and I went to Bonaventure Cemetery to take some photos, as she was moving and I had never been to that famous place. Time Moves Slowly in a Cemetery came together as a limited-edition digital collage.

 

Arthur Nichols

The images that I have chosen for this showcase, The Shape of Time, include two figure drawings from the (now discontinued) Bates College life-drawing open studio, and a third created in a similar open studio at USM. The Bates drawings use a water-soluble graphite pencil and watercolor crayons. In a practical sense, they allow warm-up and multiple versions using one sheet of (precious) paper. They represent the passage of time in that each pose has a duration, and the superimpositions represent movement and different poses over several minutes. A short narrative about the figure, the seer and the seen, emerges, delineated with color and form.

In the USM drawing, I actually used two different tools in one hand, simultaneously. This technique evokes a blink, a re-register, a distortion: are these the same in time, but different in space? (like, what’s the diff?) It connotes the perceptions of a squint, blurred with eyelashes, a shift. Perhaps it reveals change happening in a brief moment. How much of what we know occurs in the blink of an eye?

I often like to use watercolor and other pigments by layering—applying a relatively pure color, allowing that a moment to dry, and then applying another color/layer. The transparency allows for optical blending, whereas the pre-mixing of color pigments allows for what is called molecular blending. One of the characteristics of using the layering and optical blending technique, especially with the time-honored watercolor precept of working light-to-dark, is that one can decipher what was painted first, second, third, etc., thereby giving a timeline of artistry, an archaeology, a forensic trail, as well as the textures of brushstrokes, itself an action in time. These line drawings are much harder to de-code, suggesting that they are outside of time.

 

Holly Kidder

I’m a figurative artist.

In academic and atelier art, a long-pose life-drawing is spread out a few hours at a time over several days, weeks, or months. Between model sessions, I bring my drawing home to live with it, look at it, think about it; sometimes I level out the values to be ready for the next round with the model. Working on a long pose is deeply absorbing and grounding.

Each drawing records many hours of slow looking. It is by no means a snapshot, but an amalgamation of many moments documenting the experience of looking closely at somebody who is always subtly changing. It is both document and, I hope, poem: intangible attention shaped into tangible structure to share, invite, or convey further intangibles—awareness, essence, precision, aliveness.

Notice where you first enter a drawing and where your eye moves next, where you linger, and where you are done looking. I delight in reflected light, in the turning of form, and in the softness or sharpness of edges, and how these elements create feelings of both presence and timelessness.

Thank you for looking at my work. You complete the circle. I hope you remember to be present in your own life, aware within the moment, because the moment is all that any of us has.