We are shaped by encounters and so is art. This issue explores the transformative significance of such events, and our contributors tell us about moments that had a profound, and often foundational, effect on them. We read about encounters with people, both living and dead, artists and artworks, nature and the creatures that inhabit it, foreign places and cultures, materials and techniques, writers and books, institutions and organizations, ideas and concepts, disciplines and fields of study, loss and death—and ultimately, the self. We could have titled this issue Encounters That Count. As a matter of fact, because of their momentous nature, such happenings are always remembered with great precision, which explains the importance of detailing the actual circumstances where these encounters took place: going through one’s daily routine at home, working in the studio, traveling and discovering unknown locales, studying, visiting museums, experiencing traumatic events, and dreaming.
Despite his short life, Baxter Koziol, who died last February at the age of twenty-nine, left an indelible impression on many. Philip Brou starts his reminiscences with his first encounter with the young artist’s works, when in 2013, Koziol applied to Maine College of Art & Design, submitting a portfolio that “far exceeded the core competencies required of incoming students, and it did so in a way [Brou] had never seen before.” As Koziol was about to graduate, the work he presented for his last critique left his professor “speechless.” For Brou, Koziol was able to transform unremarkable objects (usually made from fabric) “into something extraordinary.” This homage is followed by “a stitching together of memories of Baxter” that Abbeth Russell, John Sighless, and William Hessian gathered. Maggie Muth recounts meeting Koziol and acquiring one of his works.
Through her dreams, Cynthia Motian McGuirl connects with her Armenian ancestors, compelling her “to research both personal and general history,” which in turn fuels her work as an artist. Her paintings and prints thus allow her to interact with foremothers and to learn about their history and experiences.
Edgar Allen Beem sees in Samira Abbassy’s life and work an encounter between “cultural identities.” Beem shows how, for this Iranian-born artist, who has lived in Britain, now resides in the US, and who sees herself “lost in translation,” art helps her “forge an identity.” Beem observes how “[h]ands, eyes, mirrors and . . . self-portraits are keys to her visual vocabulary of personal mythology”.
During the 2020 COVID lockdown, Tom Butler had an encounter—with a room. Butler shares the drawings of empty rooms that resulted from these circumstances and that “explore the interiority that was part and parcel of the time they were made.” This extensive body of work—Butler produced hundreds of drawings—turned out to be “an odd kind of self-portrait,” a way of “processing trauma.” The room reappears in a current body of work, Found Photographs. Just like Drawing Rooms, Found Photographs can be seen as Butler’s encounters with his self, “unseen parts . . ., both interior and exterior.”
Trauma and interiority are also central to Claire Millikin’s essay, who sets in conversation the artwork of Leo Rabkin with that of Lucas Samaras. Millikin considers works that adopt the form of boxes (and thus also allude to rooms, homes, and the self) and that emerged from the post-World War II context. Calling them “post-traumatic,” she sees them as “the effects of meditative and processual responses to surviving trauma.”
Just after graduating from college, Stuart Kestenbaum traveled and encountered foreign cultures—the journey became a metaphor for seeking and finding inspiration as a budding writer. Kestenbaum shares a poem born from his encounter with the fresco in the Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi of The Sermon to the Birds.
One could say that Illustration Institute founders Scott Nash and Nancy Gibson-Nash are in the business of orchestrating encounters. They welcome them in their daily life, in their art, and at the Illustration Institute. They tell us how the institute itself was the product of encounters and recapitulate some of the many such meetings that have “flipped” their minds and fed their creativity. For the Nashes, “[o]pen-mindedness is a key principle.”
Places are fertile grounds for meaningful encounters, especially those that happen while traveling as we see in several essays. Alan Magee takes us through Berlin and shows how the city’s past and present inhabitants, streets, and monuments provoke in him affecting encounters with history. As he looks back “at the art and ideas that have captured [his] attention over the past seventy years,” Magee feels that his relationship to the city “seems almost predestined.” Carl Little shares some mementoes of his recent visit to Amsterdam’s STRAAT (“street” in Dutch), a museum dedicated to graffiti and street art. Another place Little recently visited is Yorkshire in England, where he met sculptor Mark Butler. We learn about Butler’s “100 Day Project,” in which the artist draws inspiration from the drawings of microscopic organisms by zoologist Ernst Haeckel and about his current body of work, which involves collaborating with poets and novelists.
For Michael Winkler, it’s the encounter with an idea that changed his life, turning him from electronic musician to visual artist. The work that has been occupying him for the past forty-five years was born from the meeting of letters with space. Winkler discovered that when the letters are placed in an “alphabetic configuration” and connected in order to map out words, it produced surprisingly compelling results. The exploration was carried through many different media—encounters in that sense as well—and has led to “involvement in the fields of literature, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, and the scientific study of word recognition.”
Alan Crichton shares an “an unexpected, intimate encounter with the sculptures, paintings, and poetry of three very dear friends,” Joe, Lynn, and Max Ascrizzi. When Crichton visited an exhibition that gathered for the first time the works of the late Joe and Lynn and their son Max last May, he felt it offered him “a unique communion with these friends—a weaving of dimensions in time, space, and spirit.” The exhibition is also an encounter between words and images as it combines poetry and visual art.
About Nicole Wittenberg’s paintings (currently on view in several exhibitions, notably, two in Maine) Chris Crosman declares that they generate in the viewer “inchoate, liminal thoughts and feelings akin to encountering nature for the very first time.” As Crosman engages with Wittenberg’s art, he suggests points of encounter with many artists, contemporary and historical.
Christopher Richards writes about a few artworks in the Colby College Museum of Art. He disentangles the network of encounters—erotic and artistic—that Jared French stages, between the artist, his lover, his lover’s sometime lover, and the viewer. Here and in other paintings, the mirror, a site for encounters, becomes a potent metaphor for scopophilia and creation. As Richards places these works in conversation with the myth of Narcissus and in particular its depiction in medieval art, he sees that they “reflect on the mirror as a distinctively queer artistic device.”
Véronique Plesch as well writes about paintings in the Colby College Museum of Art, which have the remarkable distinction of being by four 17th-century artists who knew each other and who, as it were, meet again, across time and space. Uncovering such connections feels like experiencing “encounters across time” as one does when strolling through Rome’s historic center and having street names remind one of momentous events, for instance in Caravaggio’s tormented life.
That museums are places for encounters is what Ann Zill, who served as director of the University of New England Art Gallery for over twenty years, tells us in her essay. Zill recounts the many different publics she brought to her galleries and the many benefits they derived from their visits.
Retired art teacher Argy Nestor wonders what retired art teachers “encounter after the classroom.” Kal Elmore and Catherine Ring show us that, as Nestor puts it, “leaving the classroom does not always mark the end of creative influence” and that “retirement is another meaningful encounter—an opportunity to engage with people, places, and creative ideas.”
Peggy Muir shows us how caring for the legacy of an artist (in her case, that of her late husband Bryce Muir) can foster encounters with many different institutions and individuals. It also requires great dedication and problem-solving skills. Peggy’s essay is very much about an encounter—that with Bryce’s world and what was left behind.
In the poem by Carol Bachofner that Betsy Sholl selected for this issue, we find an “encounter with loss and death, but also an encounter with the many things the [poet’s] dying mother loved.” In a poem by Brian Boyd, we see encounters with a place (Avignon in France) and its history. The poem’s speaker witnesses the meeting of a woman and her baby with a prison inmate, whom we assume is the child’s father, as well as with other inmates.
In the first of our UMVA members showcases, our contributors travel back in time to their formative years. Kelly Desrosiers tells us about the many encounters with art and with science that have shaped her life and her creative output. David Little recounts momentous meetings with figures central to the Surrealist movement: Max Ernst—both his work and even, in a memorable occasion, his person—and gallerist Julien Levy. Brian Boyd reminisces about the “tempestuous time, . . . hopeful time” he spent in Denmark with his sister and their mother, painter Connie Fox. In the second showcase, we see paintings by Martha Fergusson that reflect “the ecological disaster of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.” Marjorie Arnett shares three paintings and Ruth Sylmor four photographs—all born from encounters. In the third and last showcase, Jean Noon affirms that “[g]reat photos involve personal encounters,” while Leeann Rhoades’s works document encounters, past and present, with activities, people, and animals. David Wade’s photo of a heron next to a turtle prompts him to reflect on the many myths and stories that involve the two animals and Betsey Foster ponders the encounter with a newborn child.
As usual, this issue includes quarterly reports. Read about the banners ARRT! (Artists’ Rapid Response Team) has recently created, which provide “support for artists, activists, and concerned community members” and discover LumenARRT!’s new project, Know Your Villains. UMVA president Joanne Tarlin shares a flurry of news and the UMVA Portland Chapter reports on its recent show, Washed Away, which addressed the effects of climate change. Tony Owen discovers in the UMVA archives a few newsletters, that, despite being written decades ago, eerily echo our present times.
Yes, we live in difficult times (see our spring issue, In Times Like These) but as the essays in this issue show, no matter how challenging our current circumstances might be, life is full of encounters, scheduled or unforeseen, prosaic or extraordinary, which feed our heart and our creativity.
Maine Arts Journal Summer 2025 cover (Baxter Koziol, Baxtoy, fake fur, zipper, pink yarn, 2016 [photo: Baxter Koziol]).