Courthouse Gallery Fine Art opens for the season on May 1 with their Annual Spring Show, which highlights the work of twenty artists. Also on view is a solo show for printmaker Siri Beckman whose enchanting prints are highlighted in a new book by Down East Books.

Our Spring Show exhibition celebrates this most welcome change of season by bringing together artists living and working in Maine, bot past and present. One painting in the show titled Ladder Into Spring by Blue Hill artist Heidi Daub is accompanied by a poem she wrote that expresses the challenges and joys of a Maine spring.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS Susan Amons, Janice Anthony, Ragna Bruno, Tom Curry, Heidi Daub, Gregory Dunham, Kate Emlen, Rick Fox, Philip Frey, June Grey, William Irvine, Joseph Keiffer, Sarah LaFontaine, Holly Meade (1956–2013), Emily Muir (1904–2003), John Neville, Linda Packard, Alison Rector, Lilian Day Thorpe, Katherine Wilkes

Ladder Into Spring
When all around me is you,
even the construction zone
of mud and broken fences
looks beautiful, because you are
turning and smiling
with the raw force of daffodils—
hope singing, like rising
little suns from tawny ground.

Imagine,
with petals strewn and vigil light–
in reverence our love rejoices,
your familiar face, up close and aged.

In this sad sweet sorrow
we are laughing until we cry.
Self-possessed with our camera,
what hilarity, how lucky
to be alive! When the willows
are weeping their new green,
and we, captured, take our gift of freedom
and easily climb ladders into spring.