For this fall issue, we invited our contributors to tell us not only how they approach the figure and the role it plays in their work, but also to reflect upon the idea of portraiture. We hoped to read how the genre (including self-portraiture and portraits of places) might be deployed in an expansive manner beyond a traditional and literal conception. This issue shows indeed the multifarious ways in which art can capture and convey an individual’s (and even a community’s) essence, personality, psychology, identity (or lack of!), values, power, status, iconic nature, contributions to society and to oneself, and the motivations that compel artists to do so.
Edgar Allen Beem writes about photographer Felice Boucher whose poetic portraits of women possess an extraordinarily painterly appearance. Addressing the timeless quality in Boucher’s “haunting and romantic figures,” Beem extends his discussion to her “portraits” of flowers. Boucher’s photographs are “not so much a likeness as it is a little visual melodrama in which the subject is an actor performing a possible self.” The work is the result of a remarkable interaction between artist and sitter, which Boucher likens to a dance.
Chris Crosman writes about Jamie Wyeth, who painted his wife Phyllis Mills Wyeth “continuously” over the course of a marriage that lasted half a century. Wyeth famously declared: “everything I paint is a portrait” and his depictions of his wife do not simply capture her likeness, but “are also and fundamentally about paint.” They also function as self-portraits of sorts. Crosman reveals the web of sources of inspiration—pictorial and literary—that Wyeth fluidly weaves through “an additive, mental collage-like process” around his depictions of Phyllis and of many other subjects and sitters like Orca Bates.
As Stephen Petroff looks at Carlo Pittore’s self-portraits, he sketches a heartfelt, affecting, and penetrating portrait of a man who constructed an identity that “was largely self-created, probably several times.” This is also a portrait of a long and meaningful friendship, from the time Petroff first met Pittore in 1969 to the visit he paid him thirty-six years later one day before Pittore died. As we accompany Petroff on this journey, we are led to interrogate what it means for an artist to depict their own likeness and to consider its momentous and life-changing implications.
Martha Miller shares some of her favorite exercises for teaching portraiture. The belief that “creating a portrait is not necessarily about rendering a likeness” is central to her pedagogy as she encourages “students to create portraits that go beyond the outer appearance of the sitter, portraits which speak of an inner state of being, the psyche, the emotional and spiritual aspects of the individual.”
Lynn Karlin discusses her recent series of photographic portraits in which the sitters appear in exact profile, in front of an impenetrable black background. Karlin likens the topography of the sitter’s features to “dramatic mountain vistas” and attentively explores their “peaks and plateaus.” Capturing the sitters turned to the window in her Belfast studio, Karlin aims “to capture the moment when [the] subject’s inner self emerges,” capturing “a person’s strengths, courage, and vulnerabilities” Her work engages with the specificity of the sitters’ features and the timelessness of the profile format.
Stuart Kestenbaum writes about the portraits his Deer Isle neighbor Jon Imber painted after he was diagnosed with ALS and how he circumvented the loss of motor skills. In the summer of 2013, Imber produced over one hundred portraits, which acted as “a record of the community that he lived in and of the people who supported him.” The opening of the resulting exhibition offered “the unusual experience of being able to see ourselves and neighbors in person and on the walls at the same time.” As Kestenbaum describes this stirring experience, he reminds us of the links between portraiture and death: after all, a portrait defies life’s finitude—that of the sitter and of the artist.
Robin Brooks as well believes that her art contributes to fight oblivion—in her case, that of “the forgotten, the seemingly ordinary, mundane, or insignificant.” Through portraits that are “non-traditional,” she seeks to “elevate women’s stories through depicting the objects used by women at different stages of life.” Her paintings celebrate women and friendship. Mundane (but very personal) objects that “hold emotional resonance” allow her to dialogue with family members she never met, “bridging past and present.”
While Brooks depicts items of clothing to connect with absent family members, Dan Dowd uses fragments of actual garments. Dowd tells us about his beloved high school art teacher, Mrs. Weed and how after she passed, her daughter gifted Dowd a bag full of clothing. We learn about some of the pieces that he made “with these sacred fabrics.” These are true memorials—Dowd movingly recounts the enjoyment he experiences “when high school friends recognize the fabrics.” For Dowd, these assemblages are true portraits, meant to honor the person who once wore these garments.
For Judy Taylor, portraiture is essentially a dialogue, a way of connecting viewer and sitter. In a recent interview with Carl Little, Taylor discusses the importance of her sitters’ “direct gaze” as a means “to engage the viewer with the subject.” She comments upon choices such as the sitter’s pose and clothing, the setting, and other elements that allow her to convey “a fuller picture of the subject.”
Ruth Sylmor shares some of her photographs currently on view at the Maine Jewish Museum in Portland. In 2023, Sylmor photographed stencils by street artist C215 (Christian Guémy) that she saw on Parisian mailboxes that memorialize children who died in the Holocaust. Sylmor comments how she “developed a relationship with them,” relating to the parents who took the photos on which Guémy based his stencils. These photos unearth for Sylmor some of the darkest moments in French history and so in order to convey a sense of resilience and even joy, she decided to match them with “candid” images of children in today’s Paris.
Considering why “poets might be drawn to portraiture,” MAJ’s poetry editor Betsy Sholl comments on poems in which the relationship between beholder and the object of one’s gaze is central. We read about a poem by Tomas Transtromer that refers to two paintings by Vermeer and one by Lee Upton about Thomas Higginson’s visit to Emily Dickinson. Sholl notes that art allows the kind of sustained gaze that in real life is impossible “without violating someone’s privacy or threatening their vulnerability.” She compares images and texts, musing upon their relationship to space and time and how they convey a person’s “physical appearance” and other personal information.
In this quarter’s Art Historical Musings, Véronique Plesch likewise experiences “meeting” long-deceased figures she encounters in a painting hanging in a museum. Through a selection of artworks that span millennia, she discusses the “[f]undamental tensions” between “imperfect individuality” and idealized totality, personality and status, timelessness and contextual specificity at the core of the drive to capture an individual’s likeness.
Identity is central to Claire Millikin’s essay, in which she reports on two “two significant new art events” organized by Indigo Arts Alliance and the Abbe Museum, which taken together “function as original portraits, portraying Maine’s true identity . . . as place of Indigenous people, the Wabanaki (the Penobscot Nation, the Passamaquoddy Nation, the Mi’kmaq Nation, and the Houlton Band of Maliseet), a place where people of the African diaspora live and thrive, and a signal place on the Underground Railroad, as people of the African diaspora escaped enslavement.”
Jane Herbert and Jean Noon tell us about last summer’s residency of ARRT! (Artists’ Rapid Response Team) at the Sipayik School. The resulting five murals bear witness to “a conscious effort to preserve and celebrate the culture, by hearing, remembering, and repeating [Passamaquody] traditional myths and stories.” Yard signs with images and the corresponding Passamaquoddy word were created and placed throughout the reservation in order “to teach and promote/celebrate the language.” Herbert and Noon suggest that the experience resulted in a true “Portrait of a Community.”
Jennie Driscoll, who teaches “primarily photography classes,” finds that her students’ work often “ends up being a portrait whether or not the literal, figurative aspect can be seen.” She discusses some of the assignments she has designed for her adolescent students, in which “[p]hotography can be used as a tool for exploration to get to the essence of who they are as individuals.”
Carl Little and Alan Crichton review Alana VanDerwerker’s 2019 book Haystack at Liberty: From Insight to Mountain to Island. For both critics, the book offers a portrait of the fabled school, but also of many of the people who played a role since its founding in 1950. Little details the school’s history while Crichton focuses on the “Montville neighborhood called the Kingdom” where the idea for the school was first conceived and tested.
Special places deserve portraits and that is also what Tony Owen writes about in his quarterly letter from Ireland. As he sketches a portrait of the Irish village of Annascaul where he and Pat Owen live, we learn about a myth associated with the area’s topography and how it inspired the interactive work of art that they created in 2021, while the community was still in the throes of the pandemic.
In our quarterly report about the Maine Masters film series, director Richard Kane reproduces a letter he received for his film on Robert Shetterly and his portrait series of Americans Who Tell the Truth.
This quarter’s UMVA Members’ Showcase presents three very different ways to engage with the idea of portraiture. In a series titled Domestic Partners, Carol Sloane paints people and their pets. Lee Chisholm describes the “memorable experience” of weekly meetings of a group of “Artists Drawing Artists.” Robert Solomon writes about Joseph Stapleton’s “highly expressive self-portraits,” which often incorporate words.
Besides the many motivations and reasons for trying to render someone’s features, what emerges from this issue is that portraiture is an encounter—with another individual or with oneself. At the core of the genre is an unflinching drive to go beyond the appearances to access an individual’s essence and to comprehend them in their wholeness and complexity. At the same time, the intense physiognomic scrutiny that characterizes the practice of portraiture might be grounded in the hope that external features hold the keys to connecting on a deeper level—physiognomy revealing psychology.
In our quarterly reports from the Union of Maine Visual Artists, David Estey writes about the studio visits that took place in July, August, and September, and Ann Tracy and Richard Kane about last August’s UMVA Carlo Pittore Costume Ball and Art Auction. We also read about the Portland UMVA Chapter’s recent exhibition Magic, Myth, Machine, & Matter. In the latest essay in his series on practical advice to artists, Estey tackles curating. Finally, Edgar Allen Beem recounts the history and the legal implications of what became known as Maine’s Artist’s Estate Tax Law and Maine’s Percent for Art program.
Image at top: Maine Arts Journal Fall 2024 cover (Felice Boucher, Mind’s Eye, digital photograph).