Our summer issue celebrates light. Our contributors answered the invitation to think about the fundamental challenge of representing this physical, yet immaterial, reality, indispensable to life and to vision. We invited them to explore the meanings this enduring theme takes on, beyond a passive “light in the dark” toward an active quest for enlightenment, revelation, discovery, and creation.
As we did on two previous occasions (in 2021 with Marks and Tracks and 2023 with Balance/Imbalance), this edition is the product of a partnership with the L.C. Bates Museum summer exhibition, whose theme of Light was the impetus for this issue. Given the museum’s emphasis on natural history, its annual shows approach their subject matter through this specific lens—in this case, night and day, seasonal cycles, the opposition between natural and artificial light, and so on—while this issue seizes the opportunity to broaden the concept’s scope.
In the transcript of a recent PechaKucha presentation, Lucy Preston and Winnie Ulland, who were the curators for this year’s exhibition, introduce the artwork in the show. They consider the many ways in which the twenty-four participating artists were inspired by the topic, showing how light is far from a static subject: it is an active and protean force that enters into dialogue with the sensible world (both natural and anthropogenic) to produce deeply personal experiences. For Preston and Ulland, these encounters with light “remind us that while light is fleeting and subjective, it shapes how we see, feel, and understand the world around us.”
As a child, Anneli Skaar was profoundly affected by yearly summer trips to Norway to visit her grandparents, transitioning from California’s golden light to a Northern “bluish light” that later in life she would find in Maine. Skaar is fascinated by the den blå timen (the blue hour)—the liminal moment where day and night blur and result for her in a state of “temporal suspension.” Rather than using light to clarify a sight, Skaar uses low illumination in order to “hold perception at the edge of visibility,” leaving a door open to the viewer’s interpretation.
Among the works Skaar discusses is Signum, her painting in the L.C. Bates exhibition. Michael Branca’s essay also features a canvas from the show, which pays homage to the Luminist Frederic Church. Where Skaar uses low light to conceal, Branca views light as a vehicle for revelation, forging deep connections to become “one with our environment, one with those with whom we share our discoveries, and one with ourselves.” Inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s observations of Walden Pond, he argues that “light enables us to see, but there is a lot more to observation than just seeing.” Thus, for him, tracking light and color is an act of presence that transforms “a seemingly prosaic subject . . . into a thoroughly remarkable object.”
On the occasion of a forthcoming pop-up exhibition organized by New York’s Alexandre Gallery at the former Maine Coast Artists building in Rockport village, Edgar Allen Beem writes on the late Emily Nelligan’s “brooding charcoal drawings,” which are “at once luminous, glowing with an inner light, and numinous, possessing a sense of mystery that is almost spiritual.” Driven by her belief that “the quality of light is the essence of the work,” Nelligan created charcoals in which light does not just brighten a landscape from the outside; rather, as curator Ruth Green-McNally noted, the artist’s own perception becomes the very light through which the natural world is revealed.
For Elise Klysa, light is a fierce instrument of social justice, illuminating, humanizing, and restoring dignity to those whom society keeps in the shadows. For the past five years, she has been photographing people experiencing housing and food insecurity in Augusta, Maine. Inspired by photographer Dorothea Lange, she aims at capturing “resilience and vulnerability in a single frame.” Her photos invite the viewer to look into her subjects’ eyes rather than look away. She also shines a light on the “caring community members . . . who strive to help.” For Klysa, light physically and metaphorically rescues people from systemic oblivion.
Claire Millikin reviews Jazz Requiem—Notations in Blue, a recent exhibition of Ming Smith‘s photography at the Portland Museum of Art. Highlighting Smith’s status as the first African American woman photographer whose work entered the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, Millikin examines how these images—captured primarily in the late 1970s and 1980s while touring with her jazz musician husband—display “Smith’s seminal use of light to represent sound,” with “manipulated shutter speed, creating the visual equivalent of jazz music’s signature syncopation, mystery, and cool urgency.” Ultimately, Millikin reads Smith’s masterful use of light and time as both a confrontation with America’s history of racial oppression and an affirmation of resilient joy.
Carl Little discusses the role of light in the recent exhibition of the works of Leon Benn at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Leon Benn: The Violet Hour). Commenting on Benn’s oneiric, heavily layered paintings on dyed cloth, Little notes that in them “[t]he illumination is at turns eerie, wavering, blurred, artificial, ominous, and uncanny.” Little also reports on the exhibition of the works of Gail Page held in September 2025 at the Gallery Within (Reversing Falls Sanctuary in Sedgwick). He notes how for Page, a Reiki practitioner, “light represents an energy she associates with connecting to the spirit or life force.” In the artist’s own words, this light, mysterious yet present, generates “a sense of feeling grounded yet unburdened,” while “it enables you to exhale, let go, and create.” Her new abstract compositions “seem to be infused with light.”
Reflecting on how in the book of Genesis, “God hasn’t made the light, but ‘separated the light from the darkness,’” Stuart Kestenbaum notes that “we are made of light and darkness.” Forming the most elemental of dichotomies, this primeval pair underlines all others—”innocence and experience, knowing and not knowing, joy and sorrow, life and death.” Just as seeds require the subterranean dark to be born, Kestenbaum reminds us that the creative journey itself demands a passage into the unknown. For him, light and darkness are indivisible.
Darkness and light are also present in two poems by Lily Brown. One of them, according to poetry editor Betsy Sholl, “evoke[s] a still unsettled post-dream state,” capturing the liminal friction of a sunrise that brings what Brown calls a “waking rage.” Her second poem responds to Liz Kalloch’s painting, First Light, and captures what the poet “could see” amidst acrylic washes’ play of light and dark that evoke in turn the dawn and night, the coast and the city, the ocean’s surface and its deepest reaches.
The first of two poems by t love smith that Sholl selected also starts in the morning. “Outside Today” deploys many dichotomies: inside and outside, self and society, visibility and invisibility, but also, as Sholl puts it, “pride and shame, lies and truth.” In the end, smith confronts the moment when “the light / gets stuck in your throat due to obstruction build up,” demanding that we “Spit it out!” In “Shovel of Gold,” the light shifts to the cosmic, unyielding “Powers of the Sun”—a love that is vast and impossible to balance accounts with. The poem follows the form of the “golden shovel,” incorporating words from the 14th-century Persian mystic and poet, Hafiz.
In our new column on photography, Rose Marasco chose work by Fran Vita-Taylor. Of course, as Marasco notes, photography—writing with light—is the perfect medium to be featured in this issue dedicated to the theme of light. Vita-Taylor’s composed still lifes use light not just to define objects, but to breathe motion and metaphor into them. Through intentional camera settings like her choice of f-stop, she controls how light enters the lens, capturing an interplay of softness and clarity that evokes powerful, deeply genuine sensations.
For this issue’s Art Historical Musings, Véronique Plesch focuses on the sun and how artists have rendered its rays, along with the symbolism they carry. Prompted by an encounter with Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s blinding Divisionist tour de force Il sole, Plesch traces the celestial body’s appearances at different points in time, from the life-giving deity in ancient Egyptian Amarna reliefs, to a tool of political persuasion under Louis XIV at Versailles, where architecture, mirrors, and gardens were engineered to mimic solar radiance. Ultimately, her musings bring us back to earth, demonstrating that whether illuminating a monarch’s absolutist rhetoric or a humble Italian countryside, the sun remains art’s most raw, universal symbol of life and renewal.
Victor Sabbatini writes on his fellow Colby student Alexander Reitman and his “Prometheus-like . . . quest for his own personal universe,” showing the profound importance of light to his work. Extensive use of gold leaf renders light that is both material and metaphorical, transmuting—and dematerializing—the canvas into “a site of critical reciprocity between artist and viewer.” As someone who had the pleasure of teaching both Sabbatini and Reitman, I am moved by this essay by a college sophomore on the work of a fellow student about to graduate. As Reitman’s pictorial surface becomes a threshold, I am reminded of the central stage of the tripartite structure of rites of passage. The young artist is—as Arnold van Gennep wrote about the liminal stage—suspended, about to cross into a new chapter of his life.
Similarly, middle schoolers are learning to harness their own expressive powers. In our Insight / Incite column dedicated to pedagogy, Caitlin Hutt and Samantha Maheu discuss the P.O.W.E.R. Project, an initiative rooted in the Samantha Smith Challenge—a statewide educational program that encourages youth to tackle complex civic and social issues. Hutt and Maheu share work their eighth-graders created to cast light on many current and pressing issues. By translating complex social realities into bold, visual statements, these students show us how the next generation is finding its agency and shining a brilliant light back onto our communities.
The first UMVA Showcase presents work by Lee Chisholm, Tim Van Hook, Jo Trafford, and James McCarthy. Chisholm delves into the paradox of light as the “unrevealed revealer”—an invisible force that enables both outward sight and inward artistic vision. For Chisholm, while light is art’s sine qua non, earnest creation in turn expands the boundaries of the world it illuminates and adds to light itself. Van Hook interrogates the word “light” through a playful yet poignant matrix of semantic puns, physical mass, and personal history. Tracing a path from geometric sculptures to a triptych confronting a childhood stutter, van Hook proves that art can truly lighten the weight of past trauma, shifting inner judging voices into an illuminating glaze. Trafford similarly unpacks the word “light.” Her collages move beyond a literal definition to approach “light not just as a noun but as a verb, adverb, and adjective.” Disparate elements are gathered to address themes ranging from the collective grief of the pandemic to sharp critiques of gun violence. McCarthy shares photos taken in 1973 and 1974. These “Four Variations on the Theme of Light” approach light not merely as a technical measurement of exposure, but as a healing, spiritual force capable of uncovering both natural purity and the inner light of human connection.
The second UMVA Showcase, hosts Buzz Masters, Ed Nadeau, Marcie Jan Bronstein, Todd Watts, and Ruth Sylmor. Masters builds her landscapes through diaphanous, overlapping washes of color that infuse the panels with a luminous, shifting glow. Working by sections, she uses “multiple horizons and setting/rising suns and moons” that come to “link the narratives in the painting,” capturing the light of transitional hours to convey “loneliness and loss mixed with ease and contentment.” In his paintings, Nadeau stresses the importance of Maine’s unique light. Grounded in a close, careful observation of how light interacts with physical objects, Nadeau’s work captures not only “how the light that surrounds us influences how we see,” but how it can assume a truly transcendent dimension. Bronstein creates ceramic candleholders meant “to spread light and equanimity.” In these dark times, her improvisational clay works are designed to invite “ritual, reverence, and peace”—standing ultimately as both “an invitation and an offering.” The aptly named Watts explores how we navigate our environing world and, in a witty lesson on Newton’s inverse square law, how lighting dictates our comfort. Reflecting on the “conscious/unconscious dichotomy” in our perception of light, Watts declares that it “can transport us to a high-energy state.” As Sylmor explores Paris, the City of Light, she muses on the role of light in photography as “a source of illumination and revelation and a metaphor for knowledge.” Capturing “an ever-changing moment—the whole essence of some situation,” her photographs bridge past and present.
Speaking of bridging past and present, we have some thrilling news regarding our journal’s history. The first eleven issues of the Maine Arts Journal, published between 2014 and 2017, have now been digitized and added to our online archive. This herculean feat was made possible by the hard work of one of our interns, Sofía Escobar Amaya, before she graduated from Colby (our thanks to Sofi for all her dedication over the past thee years!). You can read all about this major milestone, and preview a few screenshots from our Summer 2015 issue, in “News About the MAJ Archive.”
As usual, you will find an update on the recent activities of the Artists’ Rapid Response Team! Among the many progressive groups and organizations with which they worked these past months, ARRT! contributed to For All the Fish in Machias. In a perfect reflection of this issue’s theme, the event was described by the organizers as “shining a light on the growing concerns surrounding industrial salmon net-pen farming and its impacts on Maine’s coastal waters.” LumenARRT!, a project of ARRT! that works with video projections, graphic design production, and interactive media projects, was also busier than ever this past spring, literally and conceptually illuminating many pressing matters.
Talk about bringing important issues to light! This is exactly what “Right Now!: Processing the Moment,” a feature we launched in our last issue, is meant to do. This primarily visual showcase bears witness to our contributors’ creative reactions to our challenging times.
You can also read about the many activities that took place these past months under the auspices of the UMVA. The UMVA Brunswick group held an inaugural workshop to brainstorm ideas for upcoming exhibitions, the Portland group hosted a show and an inspiring reading of ekphrastic poetry, and the Midcoast chapter gathered at the Camden Public Library for a meeting and a well-attended opening reception.
Finally, for his quarterly exploration of the UMVA archives, Tony Owen offers us a poetic meditation on the power of light to bring hope, clarity, and connection across vast stretches of time. Owen weaves together the long summer days in Ireland, the winter solstice illumination in the Irish Neolithic site of Newgrange, and the words of Robert Shetterly (who served as President of the Union of Maine Visual Artists for twenty-five years) on the “immobilizing glare” of Edward Hopper’s “dramatic light.”
As Shetterly characterizes Hopper’s light, we read about an elemental force at once optical (“glare”), physical (“immobilizing”), and psychological (“dramatic”). Our contributors, in their multifarious takes on the theme, show that light is indeed never merely a visual element; it is an active, transformative force. Whether infusing physical landscapes with emotional resonance, connecting real and alternative realms, serving as a liminal bridge between space and time, or acting as a beacon for urgent contemporary issues, light remains the ultimate connective thread running through artistic practice and our experience of and engagement with the world—or, as the existential philosophers would put it, our being-in-the-world.
Full view of the image at top: Maine Arts Journal Summer 2026 cover (Anneli Skaar, Signum, 24 x 36 in., 2015).