When the Bates College Museum of Art mounted a retrospective of Philip Barter’s work in 1992, the painter, then 53 years old, was on a major roll with regard to his reputation among aficionados of Maine art. His work was winging off the walls of prestigious galleries up and down the coast. Barter was also […]
ALTHOUGH I GREW UP IN NEW JERSEY, I’ve been going to Maine since I was 10. In the very beginning, actually, I was not quite in Maine. The place we visited, Star Island, is part of the Isles of Shoals, a small group of rocky islands about nine miles out fromPortsmouth, New Hampshire. But the […]
Susan Amons lives between the sea and the salt marsh in Biddeford, where she toils in her home studio to make exquisite paintings and prints — often of birds she can watch nearby, such as eagles, herons, terns, and ducks, but also of caribou, coyotes, lynx, and horses. Amons is not, however, a wildlife artist. […]
The Guardian UK selected Janice Anthony’s painting, Passing Disturbance II, for its March 2016 online art exhibition “At the Heart of the Flames.” The Guardian UK also used Anthony’s painting as it’s Twitter picture feed, which reached their 5.24 million viewers. Their Twitter account also posted a review of each picture by Ian Dejardin, the […]
In his studio loft overlooking Long Cove on Deer Isle, artist Jeffery Becton is getting used to having more room. He recently moved into the space after working in a smaller studio in his Deer Isle home for years, he said during an August 17 interview with Island Ad-Vantages. The change has come at the right […]
One day on a trip with his children to Mt. Desert Island, painter Ed Nadeau took a back road through Surry, just outside Ellsworth. As he drove along, Nadeau came across a small trailer dwarfed by a huge pile of firewood. He stopped the car, backed up and took a few photographs, struck by the […]
In John Heliker’s 1985 painting, Clamdigger with Dog, a man facing to the right looks over his right shoulder toward a black dog sitting behind him so that his face points at us. Behind him, below soft purple hills in the distance, a thick ribbon of cerulean water sets the straight horizon line at its […]
“A teacher affects eternity,” wrote Henry Adams. “He can never tell where his influence stops.” This sentiment is worth contemplating when regarding the exhibition of John Heliker’s works at Courthouse Gallery Fine Art in Ellsworth, Maine. Someone hurrying through it on their way to the next item in the busy summer event schedule Downeast might […]
Joseph Keiffer first came to Maine in the late 1970s with a visit to Alamoosook Lake in Orland. In the years that followed, the realist landscape painter spent time in Somesville and other towns on Mount Desert Island, sailing on Somes Sound and hiking the mountains of Acadia. Although he grew up in Rhode Island […]
Since it opened in 2006, the Courthouse Gallery in Ellsworth has occupied an 1838 building listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The gallery has now expanded into its companion building, the old registry. A show of paintings by Colin Page hangs in the main gallery. I reviewed his recent show at Greenhut Galleries […]