Véronique Plesch – Introduction Winter 2025: Stuck!

In our theme description and call for submissions, we reproduced a photograph in which we see Joan Mitchell in her Parisian studio. The artist sits on the floor, surrounded by unstretched canvases bearing the webs of her distinctive colorful gestural skeins. She looks up towards the photographer, in her hands is an almost consumed cigarette, with paints, cans, rags, and an empty bottle scattered on the floor next to her. She could be taking a break from intense creation and be quite pleased with her work. But of course, we see what we want to see and when I encountered the photo, I was looking for images for our theme description, in which we asked our contributors what they do when they are “stuck.” Mitchell didn’t appear to be enjoying a well-deserved breather, but instead I understood her pose and serious demeanor to be the result of her pondering what to do next, perhaps even brooding over feeling stalled.

The angle suggests that Life Magazine photographer Loomis Dean had just stepped into Mitchell’s studio and caught the artist in a state that we are tempted to interpret as one of creative indecision. In a way, with this issue we asked permission to be let into the intimacy of our contributors’ studios and minds, hoping for “the remarkable privilege to see work that’s in process, unfinished, and unsatisfactory” and, in so doing, “to benefit from [their] experience.” Clearly this theme struck a chord—if not a raw nerve—as being stuck is part and parcel of any creative endeavor.

Stuart Kestenbaum writes about the “meta moment” of “getting stuck writing an essay on the theme of being stuck when writing.” Recognizing that “stuck is the start of all my writing,” Kestenbaum tells us about the fear of getting started, the resulting tendency to stall, and its profound significance.

When her partner died, Marjorie Moore had to learn to live alone after more than five decades of marriage. While she experienced “a mixture of grief and loss,” she also felt “’stuck’ in terms of studio practice.” She embarked on a “quest for new order.” Devising categories, she organized all sorts of objects and tools, which led her “to find a new route from an older path.”

Reflecting on the diaries she has kept during her past forty-five years of sculptural activity, Lin Lisberger realizes that being stuck “is not an uncommon condition” for an artist. She notes that working in series offers a temporary reprieve, although one that lasts only until the series is completed. We learn about some of the ways in which she experiences and handles such difficulties and about the dangers of “fall[ing] back on comfortable techniques and approaches.”

Eva Goetz discusses with Abbeth Russell how “stuckness” feels for them and how they approach it. Unlike other contributors, the issue for Russell is not so much getting started, but rather the “challenging middle of the creative process.” She confesses that the “darkness” that characterizes such passages have led her “to find . . . many new forms of creative expression” and that setting deadlines, even if arbitrary ones, greatly helps. For Eva Goetz, on the other hand, it’s her “inner critic” that leads her “to the realm of being stuck.” For Goetz, “’Stuck’ is an invitation to ask ‘what’s up?’”

Katarina Weslien starts her contribution with the admission that she confused this issue’s topic of Stuck! with Failure. She ponders “this telling trick of memory.” For her, who has been practicing Buddhist meditation for decades, the root of feeling stuck might be “a lack of confidence in the present moment,” which should not be seen “as a stopping point but as a moving through or a pause.” She recounts the work leading to her current installation at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the hurdles she encountered, and her strategies “against blockage and getting stuck.”

Performance artist and director Marty Pottenger recaps the process and the obstacles of large-scale projects, which in her case involve many participants. As she tells us about City Water Tunnel #3, home land security, and her current project MAINEUSA: The History of Maine from the Ice Age Till Now, Pottenger reflects upon “making art and ways to dissolve ‘stuck.’”

Maury Colton remembers experiencing feeling stuck after completing art school—an experience so traumatic that it made him vow to “never stop or get stuck again.” Colton tells us that he has been able to keep that promise and shares how he manages to “keep a chain of activity in constant action” and how that translates in terms of medium and other material choices.

Calligrapher and book artist Jan Owen takes us into her studio and shows us materials; she tells us about sources of inspiration and activities that allow her to “hope that something turns up.” For Owen, being stuck often means being faced with a nagging “why,” but soon she dares to answer back: “Why not?” We learn of a few projects born from collecting and assembling, whether it is “words by various writers” or fragments from her own work, stashed away to be eventually retrieved and cut to create a new book.

Just like Owen reuses bits and pieces from discarded projects, Terry Havey Hilt collages elements from “not quite there” watercolors. Contacted by Carl Little, Hilt explains that for her combining elements from her “private collection” is like “making a puzzle that had no preconceived picture.” Hilt moves around and “snips” these fragments until a satisfactory composition emerges, only then glueing them into place. This modus operandi is remarkable by its fluidity, a quality it shares with watercolor, Hilt’s medium of choice. When Hilt declares: “Watercolor is as fluid as the mind in free association,” we hear clear echoes of her training as a psychotherapist.

Edgar Allen Beem writes about the many decades he spent trying to finish a book on the life of Russian émigré artist Serge Rossolowsky, whom he had met in Portland. Started in 1976, the year Rossolowsky died, the novel was eventually self-published in 2020. We learn of the circumstances that delayed its completion, along with the different forms The Russian Lesson took over the years, from “a non-fiction memoir . . . , a Dr. Zhivago-esque screenplay, and as the historical novel Mr. Rossolowsky had intended.” Most importantly, Beem analyses the reasons that transformed this project into an albatross around his neck.

For her quarterly Art Historical Musings, Véronique Plesch looks at art that visually translates the notion of being adrift, when one wonders “where to go next when a sense of direction, of purpose, seems to be lost?” Plesch comments on artworks that allegorize the choices and solutions needed to get back on the right path—whether that of life or of artistic creation. She also comments on works that reflect upon the paralyzing effects of decision-making and that illustrate solutions to “open up the flow of creativity,” find new paths, and undertake transformational journeys.

The metaphor of the crossroads that appears in some of the examples that Plesch reproduces is central to Chris Crosman’s piece. Crosman remembers how as a teenager, newly arrived from Kansas, he first saw Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat at the National Gallery. Even though decades later, the figure “remains impossibly remote and stunningly enigmatic,” this encounter was no doubt a defining episode in Crosman’s life and his long and distinguished career in museums.

For this issue, Poetry editor Betsy Sholl selected two poems by Dawn Potter. The first, she writes, “isn’t [about] writer’s block, it is a culture being shattered and described to us through the voice of a young woman in all the perplexity the situation creates.” The second is about “what it means to be stuck as the neighborhood watches a family crisis unfolding.” Next, Sholl presents two poems by Marita O’Neill that “address the experience of being stuck in different ways.” Last, a poem by Carl Little turns “the concept of being stuck into the ability to cling to what is beautiful and sustaining during seasons of change and doubt.”

Claire Millikin’s essay is “a meditation” on two works by verónica pérez and Celeste Roberge that are featured in Life Forms: Gather, the current exhibition at Speedwell Contemporary. Millikin envisions these works “as responses to our nation’s ‘stuck’ condition of climate and social crises, reflecting on America’s entrenched immersion in hallmark qualities of the Anthropocene.”

In this quarter’s Members’ Showcase, Sandy Olson explains her approach to getting “unstuck”: establishing a distance between her and the work. She talks about moving “far away from the work at hand,” while at the same time the artwork she shares is the result of “moving inward.” Jean Wiecha tells us how she “solve[d] the puzzle” of a painting, while Anne-Marie Nolin lists “books written to help remove a creative block” and recounts how while attending a class at Waterfalls Arts, she experienced a “breakthrough” that “guided [her] back to painting.” Argy Nestor’s advice when stuck is simple: “Get up early!” Nestor describes how first light fuels her creativity.

On the occasion of the publication of Roots, Stones, and Baggage, Carl Little writes about Richard Brown Lethem’s career as painter and poet. The book contains “fifty-plus ‘poems and fragments’ dating from the 1950s to 2023” along with “a dozen or so of Lethem’s paintings.” Little also reviews Stuff: Instead of a Memoir by Lucy Lippard, whom he considers “[a]mong the most important art writers of the last fifty years.”

As some of the essays in this issue show, stasis can be experienced individually and collectively. We are grateful to David Estey for the extraordinary work he achieved during his tenure as UMVA President and the renewed energy he infused into it. In his final contribution as president, Estey surveys these accomplishments. ARRT! and LumenARRT! report on their recent activities and show how in the support they bring to groups and organizations throughout Maine, they contribute to advancing progressive causes—the terms “advancing” and “progressive” say it all: the goal is to fight societal inertia. Finally, in their quarterly report, the UMVA Midcoast chapter announces a forthcoming exhibition that will be opening in January, Dark Skies.

What becomes clear as one reads through this issue, is not only how central to the creative process being stuck is, but also that it is unavoidable and indispensable. We’ve all heard the quote, attributed to Thomas Edison: “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”: no (good) work of art was ever created without effort.

If I may be permitted, I will conclude on a personal note. Every quarter, as I tackle my introduction, I feel daunted. The feeling is an all too familiar one, as I experience it with every single writing project, large or small. In those moments, I keep telling myself: “trust the process.” Since I became aware of my recourse to this mantra and how accurate it turned out to be, I have started mentioning it to my students, which has led me to further reflect upon it. As it turns out, this pithy phrase says it all. The imperative verb asserts the need to not succumb to the destabilizing effect of something inchoate and therefore to have faith in—and that’s the operative word—the process. Stated differently, a desired, satisfactory outcome cannot be reached unless one embraces the process, which according to Merriam-Webster is “a series of actions or operations conducing to an end.” This cannot be achieved instantaneously: one must be willing to go on a journey, to accept the creative path’s twists and turns, and, as Eddison put it, be prepared to sweat.