A Look at ME: Paintings from Maine, organised by Gail Spaien

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present A Look at ME: Paintings from Maine, a digital group project organised by Gail Spaien, bringing together 29 artists with strong and lasting ties to the state of Maine. The project launches on October 1.

For more than a century, Maine has held a distinctive place within American art, its landscape and light drawing generations of painters to live, work, and build community there. That legacy continues today through an active network of schools, residencies, and institutions that keep the state connected to wider currents in contemporary art, even as it retains a character very much its own.

Presented virtually, the exhibition brings this community of painters into conversation with a broader, international audience. Working across a wide range of styles and subjects, the artists featured are united less by a shared visual language than by their sustained engagement with Maine as a place: its landscape, its communities, and the life there. Taken together, their work offers a layered and multifaceted portrait of contemporary painting in Maine today, resisting any single, fixed idea of what Maine painting looks like. The exhibition invites viewers to consider how a place long associated with a particular artistic tradition continues to generate new and varied forms of expression, shaped by the ongoing exchange between local experience and a wider, global art world.

The exhibition is accompanied by newly commissioned texts written by: Aaron Rosen, PhD; Andres Verzosa; Devon Zimmerman, PhD; Elizabeth Moss; Gail Spaien; Sayantan Mukhopadhyay, PhD; Suzette McAvoy; and Tom Keyes.

Participating Artists: Anne Buckwalter; Beverly Hallam; Carlo Pittore; Cody Castle-Stack; Colin Page; David Wilson; Emilie Stark-Menneg; Gail Spaien; Gideon Bok; Grace Hager; Greg Jamie; Hilary Irons; Honour Mack; Jarid del Deo; Jay Stern; Jennifer Brou; Joanna Logue; Katherine Bradford; Leon Benn; Lynne Drexler; Mark Wethli; Meg Hahn; Meghan Brady; Natasha Mayers; Philip Brou; Robert Hamilton; Tessa Greene O'Brien; Tom Burckhardt, and Will Sears.

Gail Spaien

Artist 

At the edge of the North Atlantic, Maine is close enough to major cultural centers for rich exchange, yet far enough away for artists to experience contemplative time alongside the immediacy of contemporary time. There is a strong relationship to the temporal and geographic qualities of place in Maine. Time here has an emotional quality. Seasons are pronounced and felt. Things grow, disappear, freeze, thaw, and return. The seasonal rhythm -with its shifting temperatures and amounts of daylight- supports both internal reflection and external activity. This creates the conditions for serious studio focus. Where an artist works infuses a particular spirit into what they make. Every place has a particular frequency; a rhythm that affects energy and attitude. Painters in Maine are tuned in to alternating experiences of time. This undercurrent forms a common thread and ethos that seeps into the work.

Suzette McAvoy

Independent Curator and Arts Writer, Chief Curator and Director Emerita, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine

When asked why he chose to live in Maine, the artist Robert Hamilton (1917-2004) famously quipped, "It never gets too hot to work, and you could park anywhere."

While both statements are no longer quite as true, Maine recorded temperatures in the high 90s this summer, and seasonally, parking is often a problem. Still, the beauty of Maine's natural environment and its unparalleled North light continue to attract painters as they have since the middle of the 19th century, when Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School, first ventured to Mount Desert Island in 1844, declaring the coast "ironbound, with threatening crags in which the sea thunders."

An unbroken lineage of notable painters has followed, and while the landscape still seduces, it no longer predominates as a motif. Today, painting in Maine is richly diverse in subject and approach, as evidenced by the work in the current exhibition, affirming Maine's lasting impact on American art.

Devon Zimmerman, PhD

Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Ogunquit Museum of American Art

Stepping into the Maine art world just over four years ago has been a remarkable joy, revealing a region of extraordinary artistic vitality. Few communities in the United States so seamlessly unite tradition and avant-garde experimentation, natural beauty and urban networks, academic and public museums, formal and informal educational organizations.

It is these elements together that forge something elusive called "Maine art"—an idea I regularly struggle with, if not actively push against. What are the formal qualities of Maine? Are they found in the mesmerizing geometries of Wabanaki basketry or the luminous mythologies of Frederic Church? In the theatrical mise-en-scène of Winslow Homer, the genre-defying practices of Marguerite Zorach, or the queer bathers of Marsden Hartley? In the economy of Alex Katz, the fluidity of Lois Dodd, the photorealism of Richard Estes, or the architectonic forms of Katherine Bradford?

I find myself returning to the conclusion that there is no singular Maine art—only Maine artists, each drawn to this place by its landscape, community, and enduring culture of experimentation, exchange, and creative possibility.

Sayantan Mukhopadhyay, PhD

Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, Portland Museum of Art

When I came to Maine over three years ago, I quickly remarked on the seemingly endless fount of talent here: one studio visit feeding into another until it seemed like beauty was in every corner. I would say it was unexpected but in truth, coming from Los Angeles, I didn't know what to expect. In time I learned of Maine's central position in the histories of American modernism, and it soon seemed inevitable that a place so storied would continue to hold so much bounty.

While the discourse surrounding painting in New England can celebrate the bucolic, the pastoral, and the natural, I strive to remind viewers of how these aspects of painting are inherently political. These are stories of the land, of displacement, of home, of hauntings, of kinship, of standing on the shoulders of others. In this multivalence and multiplicity is the true brilliance of our community's making.

Elizabeth Moss

Founder and Director of Moss Galleries, Portland and Falmouth, ME
Founder of Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, Portland, ME

When I met Lynne Drexler on Monhegan Island in 1993, my then-husband considered her "a nosey, crazy old lady" with endless tales of the New York art scene in the late fifties. Lynne loved to gossip and was eager to chat with me, the new girlfriend from Washington, D.C., studying art in graduate school. Whether her stories of the Chelsea Hotel, Mapplethorpe, and Motherwell were true or fabricated was never clear.

I distinctly remember seeing Lynne's paintings for the first time. Their color and abstraction were wild and exuberant. Waves crashing thirty feet away became cresting, elongated deep-blue lines on canvas; small square strokes of paint captured the light sparkling on the water. Her work felt completely intuitive to the island. She drank in the sea air with her eyes and translated it into image. She was the first artist I encountered who varied her brushstroke not just for texture, but for intention.

When I opened my gallery in 2004, I specialized in Monhegan artists from the postwar period through the 1980s, Lynne included. I watched her paintings rise from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars in just five years. I've also watched young contemporary women artists get "discovered" here in Maine. Emilie Stark-Menneg, Tessa Greene O'Brien, and Katherine Hargrave all had their first solo exhibitions here.

"Good regional art has both roots and reach," said Lucy Lippard. I've watched this prove itself again and again. Maine continues to produce artists whose work is deeply rooted here yet speaks to the world. Lynne's paintings of Monhegan are now exhibited in London and Hong Kong - her little love letter to Maine, read continents away.

Tom Keyes

Collector

As a longtime art collector with a deep passion for Maine's creative landscape, I've had the great privilege of discovering and supporting an extraordinary range of artists from across the state. From the rugged coastlines to the quiet inland towns, Maine continues to inspire a vast and diverse pool of talent. I've observed emerging talent respond to the lure of Maine's sublime landscapes while seasoned artists push their work in bold new directions shaped by the unique light, culture, and spirit of this place. Collecting their work is not just about building a personal archive; it's about preserving and celebrating the rich artistic legacy that Maine continues to cultivate.

Aaron Rosen, PhD

Founder and Director of The Parsonage Gallery, Searsport, ME
Author of books including Art & Religion in the 21st Century and Spiritual Traces: Reflections & Conversations on Contemporary Art

When I lived in England, I noticed something curious when I told people I came from Maine. Early on, I spent a lot of time explaining—almost apologizing—that it was not close to New York City. By the 2010s, however, Maine had developed an unexpected cachet, especially in the London art world. My home state, and thus my origin story, were suddenly on the map!

The state's remoteness, requiring intentional, often inconvenient travel had become a source of cultural mystique, the coin of the realm in the art world. At precisely the moment when globalism had begun to render even far corners of the world drearily accessible and undifferentiated to the international elite, Maine felt tantalizingly untouched in a way that Long Island, Cape Cod, and other historic coastal escapes for artists and aficionados had ceased to be.

What remains to be seen is whether this fresh visibility will be a blessing or a curse!

Altar for Hartley is a gentle homage to one of Maine's most celebrated artists, Marsden Hartley (1877–1943). Though aesthetically disparate and separated by time, the work draws out meaningful parallels between the artist's own creative practice and Hartley's: both are rooted in a desire to normalize and celebrate sexuality. In her case, through embedding erotic imagery within intimate domestic interiors; in Hartley's, through subtle nods to his queer identity that grew increasingly legible as his career progressed.

The painting is woven through with specific references to Hartley's oeuvre. The torso depicted in the framed work on the table is based on Madawaska — Acadian Light-Heavy (1940), a portrait of Hartley's model Lionel Daigle, a French-Canadian boxer from Madawaska, Maine, painted just three years before Hartley's death, at perhaps the most openly queer moment of his practice. The vase of calla lilies on the table references Buckwalter's favourite of Hartley's still lifes, Still Life No. 16 (1928), and is placed deliberately in front of the pelvis of the male figure behind it, the exaggerated feminine form of the lilies concealing an overt gesture of masculinity, a studied collision of binaries. The red cup to the right nods to Hartley's Handsome Drinks (1916).

What moves the artist about Hartley's oeuvre is the sense that he grew more deeply and authentically into himself through painting. Evidence, she believes, that painting is a means of self-understanding.

All of these references are set within a foyer characteristic of Buckwalter's work: intricate wallpaper, a braided rug, and a windowed door looking out onto a star-filled night sky, drawn from her life in rural Maine, where the absence of light pollution makes stargazing one of her quiet pleasures. Her dog Pete is curled up on the rug by the door, a domestic detail that anchors the painting's sense of intimate, inhabited space.

Beverly Hallam's (1923-2013) paintings, collages, and monotypes exist in constant dialogue with light, shadow, and reflection. Photography underpinned nearly everything Hallam made, and was the very foundation of how she composed, framed, and ultimately painted her subjects. She habitually worked from her own photographs, using the camera as a way of freezing fleeting effects of light.

Her subjects stayed consistent across a long career - flowers, interiors, landscapes, the sea - yet Hallam treated them as vehicles for formal experimentation rather than fixed themes. A trip through France, Italy, and Spain exposed her to the prismatic color of stained glass and the fractured geology of the Andalusian coast, both of which reshaped her palette toward layered, incandescent fields of ochre, gold, and deep color built up through collage.

For over a decade she worked almost exclusively in monotype, an unrepeatable printmaking process she taught herself using gelatin rollers instead of a press. This deliberately unorthodox method suited her resistance to repetition. Organic forms in these prints hover between abstraction and representation, dissolving into suggestion as quickly as they emerge.

Her later and best-known airbrush paintings grew out of a process of arranging flowers in her dining room, photographing them repeatedly to catch shifting shadows and late-afternoon light, then translating a single chosen image into a large-scale painting. Despite their botanical precision, she considered herself fundamentally an abstract painter insisting that while she worked, her subjects were pure shape and color, only resolving into recognizable flowers once the painting was finished.

In her final years she turned to photo collage and early digital tools, cutting and reassembling images of her own paintings - a restless final chapter in a practice built on constant reinvention. Across every medium she touched, Hallam's work asks viewers to slow down and look closely, offering, in her stillness and quiet meditations on light and color, a kind of renewal, a way of reconnecting with the natural world and with ourselves.

Curatorial statement, Sarah Bouchard, 2023

The most significant piece of work Carlo Pittore created in his lifetime was Carlo Pittore, and he was a piece of work.

Born Charles Stanley, 'Carlo Pittore' was a fabricated identity created by a young Jewish kid from Long Island. During a pivotal stay in Monticchiello, Tuscany, the local kids followed Charles shouting 'Carlo, Pittore!' – 'Carlo, the painter' – and for Charles, that moniker stuck. Much like a vacationer who never wants to return home, Charles took on an identity that allowed him to be forever outside of himself. He often presented as a bit of a buffoon – loud, over-the-top. His art became the art of self-promotion, his likeness plastered in and on everything he could dream up – from paintings to drawings to postcards to video to masks to magazines – all in an effort to understand himself and in so doing, to encourage others to do the same.

Carlo loved food and flesh and wine and opera. He was passionate. What most didn't see was the depth of self-reflection, the extreme self-doubt. The demons. The inner battle with mild addictions – cigarettes, weed, alcohol – none of which overcame him. He was a very human being who struggled to find connection and longed for adoration. He was finding his way at a time when being a gay Jewish man from Long Island wasn't an easy option. The pressures and constraints he put on himself were astounding.

The one arena in which Carlo felt truly free was in front of the canvas. In painting, he found his most enduring love. To Carlo, life was painting. Painting was life.

I never met Carlo. I became involved with his work after he passed. For the past fifteen years, I've immersed myself in everything he created. One of his most significant works is the mural, La Buffonera – Carlo's meditation on the life of the artist. Nearly every character under the Big Tent is the same person – the boxer, Steve Nusser. To Carlo, an artist had to be everyone, do everything, to realize his goals. The boxer also signified how he often felt about being an artist – the bruises and blood and sweat. The total exhaustion. But also the idea of becoming a champion. A contender.

Carlo's self-portraits are some of his strongest works, which makes sense. His identity was his medium. He was consistently playing and defining what it meant to be an artist – mostly based upon his experience and adoration for the old Italian Masters, filtered through the time of the xerox machine and multiples and the International Mail Art Network.

The strength of Carlo's work can be difficult to convey. Some pieces feel more like performance relics than fully realized artworks. They are evidence of an attempt at connection – residue from the effort of creating the entity 'Carlo Pittore' – one of the most significant artistic figures the state of Maine has ever seen.

'Carlo Pittore’s importance to Maine never stopped at the edge of a canvas. A founder of the Union of Maine Visual Artists alongside Katherine Bradford and Natasha Mayers, he built community through life drawing, teaching, argument, and advocacy. Carlo lived in the bodies he painted and in the body of artists he gathered.'

Andres Verzosa
Founder, Aucocisco Galleries in Portland, ME
Executive Director and Curator, Stanley-Whitman House, Farmington, CT

Cody Castle-Stack tends to paint the same handful of things—a house, a chair, a mirror, a dog, a figure or two—perhaps because they're what stays behind once everything else about a memory has faded. The house in After a Home II is just a thin outline, unfilled, and nearly swallowed by a smudge of its past color. The mirror in Mirror reflects nothing back. In Boys in the Yard II, two figures have their backs to us, gazing at both the sun and moon simultaneously.

That's how Castle-Stack reads these paintings: feelings held all the way down, even when the reasons for them aren't. Each of these paintings' scenes exists in an infinite field - wide and unfixed, unmoored by perspective and specifics. They keep the palette quiet and the paint thin, stopping before detail crowds the mystery. Resting in that openness, a single scene stops being about one particular home, one particular afternoon, and starts to hold the weight of every similar one.

In these paintings, Colin Page reimagines the still life as a family portrait and the landscape as a site of connection. His crowded still life compositions capture both the fullness and the chaos of family life, with each object carrying its own story of time spent together. Tabletops swirl and swell with the textures of daily life - flowers, games, crafts, books, snacks, and colour - while the collective disorder and tilted perspective of each composition echo the rhythm of parenting. Colour and pattern become expressions of familial happiness, with pattern emerging as a dominant feature throughout the body of work, a nod to painting's intrinsically decorative function. These ornamental arrangements of colour and shape invite viewers to consider painting itself as a decorative object.

His landscape paintings begin outdoors through direct observation and are later resolved in the studio. These works evoke Page's remembered experience of a place - its light, its atmosphere - drawing on photographs and sketches as memory aids while he searches for ways to translate landscape into emotive colour and dynamic composition. Often blending or adapting real locations to strengthen a composition or better align with memory, these studio paintings are as much constructed as they are observed.

"…The works that immediately drew me to the rear of the galleries are by David Wilson. He uses acrylic in black and various grisaille shades applied to Monk's cloth, a loosely woven cotton fabric normally utilized for punch needle embroidery. Despite the monochromatic palette, Wilson imagines stands of trees with the enchanted wonderment of a fairy tale. They teem with insects and what might be tree spirits. We can practically hear the buzzing, fluttering, cawing and rustling. They are spellbinding."

— Jorge S. Arango, Portland Press Herald, 23 April 2023

Influences on Wilson include illuminated manuscripts, Mughal painting, and the all-seeing eye of Surrealism. The work of painters William Blake, Casper David Friedrich, Charles Burchfield, and Marsden Hartley inform his work, as well as the memories of his native Scotland and the landscape of his current home along the craggy coast of Maine. For the past thirty years, Wilson primarily worked on small pieces, paintings not much larger than postcards. An epiphany occurred while painting a large stage set and his most recent works have grown considerably in scale, perhaps to encompass the expansive Maine landscape and to open up unseen lands beyond.

Wilson's practice unfolds through process: stains, spills, and daubs accumulate until, like an image surfacing in a photographic developer, a precarious order emerges from fluid chaos. He is candid that any sense of transcendence comes less while painting than afterward, in the act of viewing the finished canvas - a fleeting feeling he nonetheless returns to the studio to chase.

Emilie Stark-Menneg hopes to subvert worn out tropes and create new feminist iconography through archetypal and personal depictions of herself and her loved ones. She thinks of her portraits as mystical actions captured in paint, in which figures emerge from otherworldly landscapes. These dream spaces are composed of many layers and painterly languages. From smearing and pouring to spraying and pushing, Stark-Menneg is always looking for new ways to transform this magical material. This exhibition features three new autobiographical works.

Emilie Stark-Menneg lives on the coast of Maine with her partner, the artist John Bisbee, Pageant the pigeon, Waffles the dog, and Moosey the mouse. This fairytale menagerie flows into her work, as a kind of faith, a belief in the fantastical and in the interconnectedness of all beings.

Gail Spaien (b. 1958, Hartford, Connecticut) is a Maine-based artist whose paintings of observed and imagined places celebrate the beauty of everyday acts and the quiet rhythms of daily life. Her use of decorative patterning and subtly off-kilter perspectives invites viewers into a conversation about the idea of home and the gap between idealized utopias and lived experience. Created through repetitive, handcrafted processes, the way Spaien makes her work reflects practices of slowness, attention, and care. Her paintings offer a hopeful vision and the possibility of a gentler way of living.

Drawing inspiration from the landscapes, gardens, and vernacular architecture of seaside New England, Spaien's work features the cottage as a site of contemplation, rest, and contact with nature. The images she composes blend still life with landscape, often depicting a unification between the interior and exterior of a place. The spectators of her paintings become the inhabitant of the space, arousing a feeling of familiarity, warmth, and safety.

The artist's wide breadth of knowledge of visual arts and history informs her work in myriad ways, taking inspiration from a variety of source materials. Her source material ranges from the animated movies of Hayao Miyazaki and Walt Disney, to the symbolism of Dutch Still Life paintings. She references quilts, samplers, mourning paintings, Japanese embroidery, early American wooden furniture, wooden boats, and the architecture of simple cottages. The meditative and precise quality of paint-by-numbers, which she did as a child, also informs her work, as well as her admiration of early American folk artists, the Pattern and Decoration movement, Intimism and the ancient artists of Ukiyo-e.

"Gail Spaien's tables, flowers, patterned interiors, and gardens propose another way of inhabiting the world, built slowly from ornament, repetition, and balance until the familiar turns strange without losing its pleasure. In her work, care is neither passive nor sentimental."

Andres Verzosa
Founder, Aucocisco Galleries in Portland, ME
Executive Director and Curator, Stanley-Whitman House, Farmington, CT

Gideon Bok (b. 1966) is committed to painting the passage of time within a confined space, his own studio. He depicts it over and over in various states of array with objects such as draped clothes, musical instruments, and artist supplies. His intent is to make the room seem alive, showing it shortly after it has been occupied. Through his slow process, Bok has a unique ability to capture the viewer's attention by making his space feel familiar. His honest depiction of the changes that naturally occur over time opens up the opportunity to take a longer pause to notice the visual gifts that tell the story of his studio.

Grace Hager's (b. 1993, Los Angeles, CA) work locates the natural world as a realm of possibility: a source of transformative encounters that generate awe, revealing the magical within the observable world. Continuing in a tradition of Romantic landscape painting and drawing upon psychedelic aesthetics of the 60s and 70s, such experiences stand out as moments where empirical, fantastical, and emotional worlds begin to intermingle. In her paintings and ceramic sculptures, color is the abstract language she uses to incorporate emotional and psychic experiences into observed and imagined landscapes. The awe-inspiring natural order of rainbow wavelengths within visible light inspires her use of vibrant, kaleidoscopic color that charges her subjects with a sense of magic and transcendence. Combining spectral coloring with natural elements arranged in serendipitous alignment, her work recalls the feeling of being in the right place at the right time to catch a glimpse of the miraculous. Using the landscape as a primary source, Hager's current work draws combined inspiration from American landscape painting alongside Japanese and Indian art and seeks to cultivate a deeper sense of mysticism inherent in nature.

The suite of works included in this exhibition traces the prevalence of the color green throughout Hager's recent drawings and paintings. The color green evokes the deep magic of the natural world and its cycles of rebirth and renewal. From the folkloric figure of the Green Man to the return of spring and summer lushness, green signals the affective power of wild spaces as soothing or invigorating, full of vitality and life.

In Radiance, an acid-like, green light washes over a beachside campfire as the sun either rises above or sinks below a sparkling horizon. Sunlight streams through emerald trunks in Forest Bathing, where the green color seems to permeate the depicted atmosphere. Lastly, Camouflage (Double Suns) was painted during the fall and winter. Although its palette is more muted than the others, reflecting the season, still a green glimmer twinkles in the bark of bare trees promising spring's (and green's) return.

Greg Jamie is a visual artist, musician and film programmer living in Portland, Maine.

He works in watercolor and pencil creating fantastical, fairy-tale adjacent story-images that allude to dark magic and symbolism without context. There is an interest in an invented, non-specific mythology that adheres to an internal logic of naturalism. Beasts and humans exist side by side in bright abstract landscapes, often captured mid-transformation.

Irons' work revolves around opticality, the landscape, and material culture, exploring the ways in which our reading of space and object are impacted by color, mark, and light.

'Hilary Irons’ landscapes refuse to behave; one visual language slipping through another, so that a painting confirmed and denied its own space at once. Her paintings ask us not simply to recognize a landscape, but to watch one being assembled.'

Andres Verzosa
Founder, Aucocisco Galleries in Portland, ME
Executive Director and Curator, Stanley-Whitman House, Farmington, CT

I paint ghosts. My work emerges from the tension between memory and loss, presence and absence. Six years ago, my mother asked me the same question ten times in ten minutes. Now she asks what day it is so often that I stop counting. Two years ago, while cleaning a closet in her house, I discovered a folder of letters she had written to her father as a young woman on the cusp of marriage and motherhood. At the same time that I am losing her, I am uncovering pieces of her I never knew.

My paintings are haunted by both the concrete and the elusive. I think about weather, atmosphere, and light—and how fleeting they are. I try to grasp at something solid, but what emerges are images that resist definition: the residue of presence, the trace of moments lived and felt, an attempt to hold onto what is already slipping away.

I rely on the confluence of process, material, color, and metaphor to guide me. The work is enigmatic and unpredictable, shaped by previous painting decisions rather than a predetermined outcome. My images evolve without a fixed target, developing through intuitive and unexpected moves. Early decisions create structures to push against with increasing spontaneity, allowing the painting to reveal possibilities I couldn't have anticipated. I seek to discover things I've never seen before. I want—and work—to surprise myself, and I hope that sense of discovery extends to the viewer as well.

'Maine painting is a conversation to keep open rather than a canon to close. Honour Mack's paintings enact a similar patience. She builds them slowly, layer over layer, letting one decision provoke the next until a form hovers at the edge of legibility, familiar enough to hold you and abstract enough to keep you looking.'

Andres Verzosa
Founder, Aucocisco Galleries in Portland, ME
Executive Director and Curator, Stanley-Whitman House, Farmington, CT

For this show, del Deo turned his attention to unassuming, everyday views of his local environment. He was drawn to the idea of how a newcomer might experience Maine and to capturing the way the landscape here frames even the most ordinary subjects, lending them a quiet sense of enchantment.

Jay Stern's practice as a painter begins with an encounter: an unexpected moment of surprise in which the examination of physical form reveals a deeper contemplation of spirit and intention. This moment of visual revelation becomes a practice of awareness and recognition from a distance. A balance of representation and abstraction unfolds through fractured layers and elongated lines, where the familiar and the surreal fade into coexistence. His paintings transcend mere documentation to invite viewers into a quiet dialogue focused on stillness, impermanence, and the emotional resonance of spaces left behind. Together, these works reflect an ongoing search for meaning in the spaces between presence and absence, time and memory, and the quiet beauty of everyday life.

Using a Cubist approach, Stern oscillates between breaking apart and rebuilding the composition, using lush shapes to mend fractured forms while quick, detailed marks reveal the layers beneath. His paintings in the show investigate how the environments we inhabit, whether a screen porch room, a tabletop surface with everyday objects, or the liminal space between architecture and landscape, hold emotional residue. By omitting human figures, he focuses on the echo of their presence, using absence to explore themes of identity, transition, and memory. Everyday objects like a half-eaten meal or the outline of a doorway are elevated into symbols of the sacred. He aims to slow time, urging viewers to notice what often goes unseen.

Jennifer Brou's drawing practice is based on the ritual of wandering. Whether isolated in the woods or deeply invested in a drawing, she allows herself to become lost in the process. She draws her subjects from direct observation. She also uses photography, which allows her to retrieve her subjects and bring them to her studio as a reference. Drawing in this manner is both a wandering and a search for stillness, a translation and distillation of place into an accumulation of marks. This becomes a ritual, drawing her subjects nearer through a slow and meticulous contemplation which is a combination of direct observation, photographic reference, and imagined elements. She transports her subjects from their reality to a surface in her studio and proves her devotion as they evolve again, and she loses herself in a fabricated reality.

Joanna Logue's (b. 1964, Scone, NSW, Australia) paintings begin in direct response to landscape, most recently the Atlantic coast of Maine, where woodland, marsh, rocky shoreline, and glacier-scoured granite peaks around Acadia National Park have anchored a body of work made over the past year in Logue's studio on Mount Desert Island, ME. The paintings evolve from plein air notation into a rigorous studio practice, a process shaped by years of navigating this new landscape after her move from Australia to North America.

The artist describes this experience as creatively invigorating, demanding acute observation and intense drawing. Logue situates her work within a lineage of painters who have previously sought to capture the essence of this place, among them Marsden Hartley, Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, Lois Dodd, and John Walker, while probing an open question at the heart of her practice: whether landscape shapes an artist's visual language, or whether that language is instead a matter of individual point of view, refined through the study of how others have painted the land before her. Her paintings are, at once, a celebration of nature and a sustained engagement with the formal concerns of image-making and process. She hopes that in their specificity, her works gesture toward something universal: a timeless, almost archetypal sense of wilderness.

Leon Benn has long been fascinated by ruins - structures slowly decaying and crumbling under the ecological elements. His interest lies not only in their formal, picturesque beauty, but in the philosophical symbolism they carry: the impermanence of civilization itself. Looking at the state of the world today, Benn views ruins as places of refuge, spaces for contemplating history - both its darkness and its illumination.

His newer paintings are made on recycled, dyed fabric scraps saved from earlier works, stretched and primed over repurposed panels from crates. The dyed color remains visible along the sides, serving as a record of his own artistic journey. For Benn, painting functions much like a ruin: commanding the viewer, and the painter, to slow down and look closely, tuning out the frantic pace of contemporary life. Like the ruins themselves, his paint can be pleasantly rough; the coarse texture of the fabric allows him to mottle oil stick into a fuzzy, atmospheric surface that echoes the texture of stone and rock.

The three paintings in this body of work depict historic relics of American wartime defense in Casco Bay, Maine, spanning the early 1800s through World War II. Taking the ferry from Portland to Peaks Island gave Benn the opportunity to closely observe and study these structures. The works are intended to convey a contemplative reflection on a past marked by violence and fear, now masked by vines and overgrowth - and, in some cases, offering a mirror to the current socio-political climate. Through them, Benn poses a quiet question: when will the destruction end, and when will nature be allowed to persevere?

Lynne Mapp Drexler (1928 - 1999) emerged as a distinctive voice in postwar American painting, coming of age within the Abstract Expressionist movement of the late 1950s. After earning her degree from the College of William and Mary, she studied with Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown, then pursued graduate work at Hunter College under Robert Motherwell. Her early paintings centered on color and composition - concerns she would spend the rest of her career refining, ultimately fusing them with her lifelong interest in landscape during a rich late period in the 1980s and '90s. It was in the 1950s, however, that Drexler arrived at the language that would define her work: a blend of Post-Impressionist landscape sensibility with the gestural energy of post-war abstraction. The result set her apart from her contemporaries, with tightly woven, relief-like brushwork that gives her paintings an unmistakable presence.

In the early 1960s she married fellow painter John Hultberg, whom she met at an Artists' Club dance. The couple began spending summers on Monhegan Island, off the Maine coast, where Drexler painted and sketched outdoors. Back in New York each winter, those studies became the basis for increasingly bold, color-saturated, and frenetic paintings. She eventually settled permanently on Monhegan, spending her final sixteen years there until her death in 1999. This full-time move to Monhegan coincided with the transition of her work from fully abstract to representational. From 1983 onward, her work centered on domestic interiors, still life, and landscape: paintings that captured her experience of life on the remote island.

'I presented Lynne Drexler’s work at my gallery when few were paying attention. Two decades later, her paintings bring in more than a million dollars at auction. Her story is a lesson in how women's reputations are lost and recovered, and a reminder that stewardship begins long before recognition.' 

Andres Verzosa

Founder, Aucocisco Galleries in Portland, ME

Executive Director and Curator, Stanley-Whitman House, Farmington, CT

Well known for his serene but quietly dramatic interiors, among other bodies of work, Wethli's careful attention to composition is a hallmark of his practice. Derived from photos but freely interpreted, their precisely proportioned relationships between rectangular elements - such as walls, floors, windows, and doors - reveal their kinship to geometric abstraction. The passage of light and shadow animates these formal relationships, creating a poetic dialog between everyday spaces and the geometry of light.

As each painting develops - through many layers of thinly applied paint and subtle adjustments in color and value contrasts - the larger goal of the work gradually comes into focus; to create a moment of stillness as a respite from the cacophony of daily life, but to also suggest something about the nature of consciousness itself, that ever present yet elusive web of sensations that most often goes unnoticed. The ultimate aim of each painting is to afford a contemplative space that brings the viewer's experience of perception and cognition to conscious attention, not only as the subject of the work but as an interactive experience inherent in the salutary act of quiet observation.

'Mark Wethli joined Bowdoin College in 1985 and retired recently as the A. LeRoy Greason Professor of Art Emeritus. Painting, pedagogy, and mentorship do not appear as separate pursuits in his career. Each depends on attention: to relationships among forms, to the consequences of placement, and to how structures can make room for discovery and surprise.'

Andres Verzosa
Founder, Aucocisco Galleries in Portland, ME
Executive Director and Curator, Stanley-Whitman House, Farmington, CT

Meg Hahn's practice is rooted in the process of painting and drawing, and influenced by the formal qualities found in her surroundings. She is drawn to patterns, shapes, and colors that she collects through observation, such as architectural structures, cast shadows, and scenes from the everyday. Geometric shapes are composed through drawing and cut paper. Layers of color are built to create monochromatic palettes and subtle shifts in contrast, inviting a slower viewing experience. Her paintings are a record between creating steadiness and then an interruption.

This body of work reflects her continued interest in building monochromatic color, in particular through darker shades. Hahn is motivated by the range these hues contain and how close looking is required to see the subtle shifts between temperature and texture. These paintings begin with grid-like compositions, then are built through several layers of color, each one informing the other. The works rely on process, and draw from scenes such as the shape of a cast shadow, a silhouette through a window in the evening, or the light from a lit candle in a dark room.

Like the patchwork quilter's bushel of castoff scraps, Brady has a treasure trunk of motifs and persistent ciphers, symbols and pictorial talismans that tug at her sleeve, totemic forms that appear, disappear for a time, and then strut back onstage in new incarnations and arrangements from painting to painting. Here are crowns (the stuff of royals or paper birthday party ephemera), cartwheels and pinwheels, citrus-like wedges, and square, triangular and semi-circular solids that have the elemental simplicity of kindergarten blocks and the immediacy of construction paper projects. There are rusty oxidizing suns, with childlike rays, blazing over patterned chromatic grounds of ochre or muddy plum, or confounded by benthic hedgerows of lapis, blood orange and putty.

With a looseness that reshapes forms and indirectly references the human body, Brady finds a language of everyday abstraction. She generates her deliberate and gestural marks with bold colors, which are as much rooted in painting as they are in drawing. Shapes and forms, abstracted, abstracting, flattened out, simplified down to their basic constituent overlapping and interlocking geometries, the paintings have the assembled, constructed, layered look of collages, as if her oil painted chevrons and punctuation dots and zigzags and crenulated bands of corbellings had been carefully cut from bolts of fabric or sheets of scrap paper rather than applied with a brush. The talismanic snakes and serpents that appear periodically from canvas to canvas may be reminiscent of the sequential steps and missteps lying in wait in the old snakes-and-ladders games of bygone eras, but in their contortions and writhings, their prodding and pushing against the frame of the canvas this way and that, they offer a compelling visual testimony to the decisions and assertions and hard-won moments of absolute conviction of the painter, who continues, unflappable, sending out signals to herself and the world.

Widely described as the heart and soul of activist art in Maine, Natasha Mayers has spent decades using art as a tool for community engagement and social conscience. She has supervised more than 600 school and community murals across Maine, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, and her painted utility poles depicting local history - featured in Lucy Lippard's The Lure of the Local - reflect her belief that art can be made by, about, and for a community, empowering that community to portray and know itself. For the past forty years she has built parade floats for Whitefield's 4th of July parade, and since 1975 she has worked as a Touring Artist with the Maine Arts Commission Artist-in-Residency Program, teaching students from nursery school through college, as well as immigrants, refugees, prisoners, unhoused people, and psychiatric patients, with whom she worked for 45 years, organizing numerous exhibitions of their work.

Mayers has exhibited since 1976, consistently exploring themes of peace and social justice. Her work has been shown at the Portland Museum of Art (Mapping Maine: Four Contemporary Views, 2003), Aucocisco Gallery, SPACE Gallery, the Maine Jewish Museum, Harlow Gallery, Cove Street Arts, and Zero Station, among others. For a year, she produced a daily artwork for the progressive news site Common Dreams, reaching a daily audience of 150,000 readers. Her portrait was painted by Robert Shetterly as part of his Americans Who Tell the Truth series.

Her recent work traces a sustained investigation into masculine and institutional power: World Banksters (2013), Men in Suits (2016, reviewed in Hyperallergic), Men in Trouble (2018, with Kenny Cole), and the War Chests series (2019–20, two works presented in this exhibition). The war chests - decorated with medals, bars and stripes, epaulets, braids, sashes, and tattoos - are often headless figures intoxicated with their own power: dangerous, blind, and complicit in a world of violence toward one another and the planet, with men, historically, at its center. Rendered with exuberant color, pattern, and a current of irony and dark humor, the series channels anger, absurdity, and clear-eyed analysis of what masculine power, white privilege, and tradition have wrought. As Mayers has said of the recurring figure: "men in suits, at the nexus of corporate, financial, and military power, help to explain what we are doing as a country," revealing a shared entitlement and belief in American exceptionalism that grants impunity to those who put profit ahead of morality, as she describes.

Mayers co-founded the Union of Maine Visual Artists' Maine Arts Journal in 2014, where she remains editor-in-chief, and in 2012 founded ARRT! (Artists' Rapid Response Team), a collective that has produced over 700 banners, props, and yard signs for progressive organizations across Maine. Her honors include the Maine Arts Commission's Individual Artist's Fellowship (1998), the New England Foundation for the Arts' Artists Projects: New Forms Award, the Zorach Scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1976), and selection as Maine's "Millennium Artist" for a national White House/NEA residency program, during which she worked in Portsmouth, Ohio.

'For Natasha Mayers, artistic community is not merely a cluster of neighboring studios but a movement. In her hands, Maine is not a refuge from history. It is a place where power becomes visible, where neighbors find a public voice, and where painting takes part in the unfinished labor of democracy.'

Andres Verzosa
Founder, Aucocisco Galleries in Portland, ME
Executive Director and Curator, Stanley-Whitman House, Farmington, CT

The works included in this exhibition explore the varied ways likeness, expression, and human contact are made and mediated. They were created using a combination of direct observation and photographic reference from carefully staged arrangements. All three paintings include depictions of emergency blankets, which were chosen for their perceptual qualities and metaphorical meanings. Emergency blankets hide, shelter, reflect, signal, protect, and optically fragment.

The first painting, The Mirror with a Memory, was rendered from a mannequin wrapped in an emergency blanket and placed within a chamber filled with fake flowers. Crumpled balls of paper were attached to mimic eyes. The second painting, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, was made using a similar setup, but the exterior of the wrapped mannequin was covered with stickers of popular emoji faces commonly employed as a shorthand for human emotion. In Strange Brew, the model is the artist. He is shown wearing an emergency blanket, fake plastic gemstones, a baseball cap with an image of an eye, and a pair of sunglasses. In some ways these paintings are portraits, but in other ways, they are only meant to resemble them.

Robert Hamilton (1917-2004) treats the picture plane as a stage for depicting fantastical dreams and invented narratives that brim with humor, pathos, and an unquenchable zest for life.

Hamilton's experiences during the war profoundly influenced the imagery in his paintings, which often depict planes and trains, soldiers and bandits, figures from history and from art, and bon vivant characters blithely enjoying life and defying the inevitability of death. His love of jazz - his son is the noted jazz saxophonist Scott Hamilton - is reflected in the syncopation of his colors and idiosyncratic compositions. "I knew my paintings had to be improvised, spontaneous, made up out of whole cloth, one thing leading to another, accidental, a series of metamorphoses, surprised arrivals," he wrote. His friend and neighbor, Andrew Wyeth, called Hamilton "a real painter."

“O’Brien begins each composition with what she calls “bath day,” when she cuts swaths of linen or canvas and moves them between three large vats of dye: yellow, warm red or pink tones, and cool blue tones. “I’m not going for a consistent, even dye,” she says. “I like [the fabric] to have a surface texture.” After she washes and dries the dyed fabric, she stretches it to create the substrate for her process. “There’s already a kind of composition on there,” she says. “I’ll look through my photo folder of landscapes or nature scenes to see if [the shapes] remind me of anything.” She begins to draw with bleach over the colored canvas, then employs batik—the method of pouring hot wax over the lighter areas to make sure further pigment can’t touch those spots—before once again layering dye to establish the darker areas. The resulting color field of light and dark slowly becomes her chosen still life or landscape composition. Painting is “an emotional experience,” she says, “and that is how I try to connect with the viewer. I want my paintings to convey kindness, expansiveness, wonder, a sense of play, a sense of delight.”

- Nolan Kirschner, The American Scholar

At his core, Tom Burckhardt (b. 1964, NYC) is an abstractionist, though one with an inherent distrust of the movement's 'historical elitism and lack of humor'. His practice seeks to infuse abstraction with a sense of its own absurdity: poking fun at it while maintaining a genuine affection for its strength and ambition. Equally, he resists purism, incorporating figuration while bleeding it of literal realism in search of an accommodation between the two spheres.

In his recent paintings, Burckhardt works on stretched linen with hand-cut stretcher bars, giving each work a wobbly edge that stops just short of the shaped canvas, humanising the work, lending it a sense of persona rather than object. The process is improvisational and in constant revision, with no shape allowed to function as shorthand for eye, nose, or mouth. He preserves the "representational innocence" of form for as long as possible, resisting resolution until the very last moment in order to sustain momentum and energy.

It is at this final stage that vestiges of figuration are conjured from the abstraction through pareidolia, the phenomenon by which we recognise images in non-objective situations. Burckhardt is interested in that threshold between recognisability and visual wandering, and specifically in the most basic register of facial recognition: not gender, emotion, or specificity, but the prior question of whether what we are looking at is human at all. He describes the ideal state of making as ecstatic: time dissolves, and he steps back to find things he did not know would be there.

'Tom Burkhardt's paintings hover between abstraction and recognition, inviting you to assemble fragments and then doubt what you had assembled. What I value most is his willingness to expose painting's conventions, props, and inherited expectations, while still believing in what it can do.'

Andres Verzosa
Founder, Aucocisco Galleries in Portland, ME
Executive Director and Curator, Stanley-Whitman House, Farmington, CT

Will Sears (b. 1987, Philadelphia, PA) is interested in how color and material relate to space in different ways. He crafts compositions out of painted wood which pose color fields next to adjacent color fields. These color relationships create a sense of push and pull which yield a perceived sense of depth as the mind tries to make sense of the hierarchal relationship between the colors. This optical phenomenon can be in contrast to viewing the work as a two dimensional surface which adorns the art object itself. Sears also notes the function of the inevitable imperfection of his human hand while crafting his works. The slightly misaligned corners and the burnished edges of the tiny wood components offer a reminder of surface; a different function of space than the perceived one. There is a conversation between these two types of space as the eye's focus shifts between these qualities, and for Sears that is where the magic in these works resides.