Maine Arts Journal Fall 2025 cover (Kitty Wales, Mining in Pachuca, hand-colored etching on paper, 15 x 12 in).
For Jeff Woodbury, artmaking is “a journey of discovery” in which learning “emerges from the dialogue between artist and medium.” Using materials such as maps and slides, he employs various processes: printmaking, cutting, and drawing with fire. Believing that “openness is where learning thrives,” Woodbury has used a notebook for the past forty years, which offers both an “extrasomatic memory bank” and an “idea incubator.”
For Kitty Wales as well, the medium plays a fundamental role. She notes how the “[t]process may go through many transformations along the way, but material choices always help jumpstart things.” She describes the role research plays in her work and shares trouble-shooting and problem-solving strategies.
In a conversation with his wife and creative partner, Kate, Jonathan Mess describes how clay’s “physical material knowledge” drives his work. Given the unpredictability of reclaimed materials, preliminary steps call for the artist to be “methodically thinking, reflecting, and planning.” Mess considers the role experimentation and discovery play in his work and how the end product offers the viewer “an archeological excavation of what happened in [his] brain.”
In six inspiring and poetry-laden steps, Cig Harvey tells us “How to Make a Picture.” Harvey invites us to become “a member of the Order of the Eye” and “[f]ind the scene that makes you gasp.” In the end, “[i]t’s what you have to say that’s important.”
Ed Epping focuses on ideas and aims at being “open to broader investigations.” Trust plays a critical role in Epping’s relationship to the medium and to the viewer. In an attempt to comprehend the magnitude of incarcerated people in the US and their experience, his Corrections Project employs the notions of accounting and repetition. Each of the media Epping chooses, such as embroidery, pyrography, or graphic design, is charged with a powerful metaphoric intent.
Just as time—and the inchoateness of its experience for the incarcerated—is central to Epping’s project, the relationship between past, present, and future is at the core of David Wilson‘s painting. For Wilson, thinking takes place “after making”: each of his works “exists within a continuum, shaped by the actions that led to its current state and the possibilities it holds for future works.” As he applies paint wet on wet, “[t]act of making becomes a conversation between paint, gestures, and intuition” in which making “is not only a means of expression but a mode of inquiry.”
For Stuart Kestenbaum, “[w]ords are the material of poetry” and a “direct engagement with materials,” a way of learning. Yearning for a physical interaction with the text, Kestenbaum has developed techniques for writing to become an “embodied experience” in which “thinking and making are joined together.”
When poet Jeri Theriault started practicing collage, the “[s]ensory involvement” it provided proved to be liberating. In a conversation with fellow poet Claire Millikin we learn the ways in which Theriault handles discarded printed matter and the significance such materials take on and convey. As Thériault “thinks through touch,” meaning emerges from the making while a conversation with familial and artistic foremothers occurs.
Equating the creative process with decision-making, Véronique Plesch considers the ways in which art historians gain insights into artists’ thought processes and working methods. She shows how the subject matter or the medium leads artists to think in a certain manner and what lessons can be learned from the making. Finally, she looks at works that by being “a repository for thoughts” invite the viewer to accompany the artist in their mental processes.
As Carl Little writes, “[c]urious, we follow” Ian Trask’s thoughts as he repurposes discarded materials and “transforms the forsaken.” In a poem penned on the occasion of a recent exhibition at the University of Maine, Little tells us that the “impish artist” possesses “a mind for puzzles.” We thus witness the artist as he “figures out his next move” and “questions his work / while seeking a path / which winds, wonderfully.”
For our quarterly poetry section, Betsy Sholl selected two poems by Stuart Kestenbaum that tackle “the nature of artistic process.” The first metaphorically considers a challenging creative experience while in the other, ideas effortlessly float, words easily flow, and the pages in a journal “filled themselves quietly, / like the gentlest of snowfall.” In a poem by former Portland’s Poet Laureate Linda Aldrich, we witness actors training in the Stanislavski method. For Sholl, the poem captures a creative process that “has as much to do with values and character as any technical skill.” While addressing the actors’ hardships, Aldrich concludes on their resilient willingness to keep at it: “We will come back tomorrow.” Two poems by James Brasfield evoke liminal states in which “present and past interact with each other” and fuel creativity. The first possesses many elements that “speak to process, including memory, attentive observation, and mentorship,” while the second considers “the ongoing way the past (remembered and forgotten) continues to roll through us” (Sholl). Finally, a sonnet by Susan Cook offers “a more abstract and general approach to process” (Sholl) and the question of knowing when a work is completed.
High school art teacher Shaelin Shields shares her pedagogy, in which the students “are in charge of their artistic decisions and choices.” She believes that in the process of generating ideas, “playful engagement of materials and processes is crucial” and “can lead to new ways of thinking and increased creative problem-solving abilities.”
In the first of our Members Showcases, Dan Dowd tells us how the materials he finds at his local transfer station provide a starting point for a process in which reflection leads to transformation, which he carries, “honoring the material and the maker and labor associated” with them. The thinking that takes place when he’s away from the studio often evolves when handling the materials. While Dowd works in states that are in turn “active and meditative,” for Timothy Crawford Wilson “meditation is in itself a powerful form of action, and . . . action is meditation in motion.” His creative process, which alternates between spontaneity and problem solving, “becomes a technology for personal transformation and a method for accessing deeper truths about existence itself.” For Shanna McNair as well, truths are revealed (“things I didn’t know and long to understand”) and color plays a critical role as a guide and “a sort of barometer of feeling.” She too strikes a balance between spontaneous action and reflective repose.
In the second Showcase, Amy Bellezza writes about the process behind a series of photographs that involve a bed coil along with other still life elements. She declares that “[t]he act of making becomes inseparable from the act of thinking, as each gesture in the studio unfolds new layers of meaning.” Kharris Brill writes about starting a workday and discovering anew the reclaimed materials she uses in her work and experiences a “moment of recognition.” For her, “[m]aking and reflecting move together in a kind of rhythm.” As she considers how meaning emerges from the making, she tells us how “[t]his way of working has become a way of living.” Don Peterson tells us about the “foundational art and life experiences” upon which he built his way of thinking through making and how his dual pursuit of painting and photography inform each other. In a manner similar to what Brill experiences at the start of a day, paintings that have been put away are rediscovered and reworked with a new “clarity and perspective gained from time and loss.” Anna Dibble’s painting is fueled by the sense of awe for the natural world she experienced in her childhood. Her process, which involves “the balance of focusing on an intellectual or emotional ‘idea’ and letting the hand, eyes, materials, and tools be guided by intuition, is overloaded on the intuitive side.”
Susie Warren Hanley writes about Spindleworks, an “artist-run collaborative studio and gallery” based in Brunswick and Gardiner that for close to five decades “has transformed the perception of individuals with disabilities by showcasing their strengths.” Read about the history of the program and its many activities, meet the people involved, and see some of the art created at Spindleworks.
Carl Little writes about Nancy Davidson, who recently stepped down as the founding resident curator of the Maine Jewish Museum in Portland, and her forthcoming show at Cove Street Arts in Portland. Featuring the work of forty painters and sculptors, Critters is the ninth exhibition Davidson has organized on this topic. Read about the show’s theme and its different iterations and see works that have been included.
David Little contributes a highly informative essay on the challenges that aging represents for artists and for their legacies. He reports on the discussions on the topic organized by the Midcoast Salon. Little’s essay is followed by a case study, in which Linda Jay Burley, the keeper of Lina Burley’s “artistic reputation and extensive body of work,” discusses “what it entails both physically and emotionally to inherit a relative’s remaining works of art.” Burley also shares her experience growing up the daughter of an artist.
In their quarterly dispatch, the Artists’ Rapid Response Team! (ARRT!) reports on their responses to “the daily accumulation of destructive sound bites, assaults on personal dignity, and human lives” that we experience on a daily basis. See photos from their monthly sessions, the Fourth of July parade in Whitefield, and banners and placards displayed by different organizations at the 2025 Common Ground Fair and throughout the state. LumenARRT! also reports on their collaborations through video projections, graphic design production, and interactive media projects with which they contribute to “shining a light on important issues for all of us.”
Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA) president Joanne Tarlin reports on recent meetings of the executive Board of Directors while Tony Owen digs into the UMVA archives and offers a meditation on how one remembers and reads the memories embedded in materials.
Owen’s piece brings us back to the theme of creation as a form of reflection and to one of the ideas that emerge from this issue: the crucial role played by the medium. What also becomes apparent is that the thinking that takes place while making is a dialogue, “a constant exchange and a constant shuffle” as Dan Dowd puts it. Our contributors evoke action and contemplation, intuitive spontaneity and thoughtful reflection, artist and work, idea and medium. Many essays underscore the ways in which engaging with the materials becomes a fertile ground for ideas and for “gaining ever greater modes of clarity” (Timothy Crawford Wilson). This revelatory process of discovery may even have profound impacts on how one lives. Allowing for discoveries to happen also teaches us to embrace uncertainty and, as several contributors note, even holds a spiritual dimension. When all is said and done, what about updating René Descartes’s “Cogito, ergo sum,” “I think, therefore I am,” into “Creo ergo cogito,” “I create therefore I think”?