John Alsop, The Rivermen, oil on canvas, 16 x 24 in., 2013.

I have long been fascinated with the old-time logging industry in Maine, and particularly the spring log drive. In pursuit of this interest, I found myself on YouTube when I should have been working, watching From Stump to Ship, a short 1930 film on a Washington County logging operation. Intrigued by the images I was seeing, I madly started snapping photos of the movie off my computer screen. I printed a bunch of blurry black-and-white pictures and then used them as references to construct the picture; amalgamating various figures and activities into one scene, and adding imagined color and extraneous detail. I did a bunch of them, but this one came out the best.

Here is the link to the short film I mentioned: https://youtu.be/cIKCjQdxtO0

Joel Babb, Downstream: Bear Haunted Woods, oil on linen, 39 x 30 in., 2003.

The location of Downstream: Bear Haunted Woods is in the Mahoosuc Range, not too far from my studio in Western Maine. On the Maine coast one constantly enjoys the exhilaration of views that open up over water, great distances, atmospherics, and light. In our forests the spaces are dense and confining, except wherever a brook passes through. The brook opens up a vista into the forest, and there always seems to be much going on. The movement of water and the play of light on it, the glimpses of the bottom through it, the consoling sounds as it conducts its way into the distance. I never feel a day is wasted when I am painting by a brook. I do many smaller paintings in the woods, but I also take photographs and do large paintings in the studio. Painting outside is absolutely necessary to understand the changing nature of light and color.

I never saw anyone day after day at my location on the brook. One morning driving slowly near my spot because of the poor condition of the road, I noticed a black bear galloping along beside my open window and attempting to overtake and pass me. My dog noticed too, and lunged into my lap and almost out the open window in pursuit of the bear who crossed the road in front of us, impatient with our slow progress on the road. I’ve seen bears when walking or fishing but never while painting, but clearly he was showing me he was a local, he lived here, and we were just visitors, whatever claim I had laid in my own mind about this being “my spot”.

A writer known for his writing about nature told me that he gets into nature better when he has something to do. For him it is fishing, which I understand, an activity requiring acute observation and understanding, skill, and getting into the right places at the right moment, effectively becoming part of the scene. But I’ve given up fishing for painting.

Joel Babb, Eight Figures on the Beach—Old Orchard Beach, oil on panel, 10 x 15 in., 2009.

Joel Babb, Port Clyde, oil on linen over panel, 10 x 24 in., 2019.

Krisanne Baker, Ocean Breathing, recycled kiln slumped and soldered glass, phosphorescent pigments, copper, monofilament, steel, and solar LEDs, 25 x 9 x 9 ft., 2019.

Ocean Breathing is a collaborative art and science project hosted by the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences on the coast of Maine. My specific goal with this project was to bring the truth of science, the imagination of art, and the wonder and curiosity shared by each discipline together to promote community understanding and stewardship of our oceans. I was paired with Dr. Michael Lomas, Senior Scientist of the National Marine Laboratory for Algae and Biota within Bigelow (the largest living algae library in the world). I had been studying marine biology on my own for over ten years following an evening swim in a cove glowing with bioluminescent life. I developed the painting and glass series Phytoplankton Dreaming based on underwater and laboratory microscope observations through home research and at a formative teaching artist-in-residency with Shoals Marine Laboratories on Appledore Island.

During a six-week period, I studied over 100 living samples of phytoplankton, observing and drawing them, as well as discussing my findings and questions with Dr. Lomas. I then re-imagined the algae as an installation; greatly magnified versions (with some mutating from climate change and ocean acidification) so the public could become familiar with their vast array of forms, beauty, and critical importance to ours and all life on the planet. I like to say that we come from the ocean, and are made of ocean, then our first breath truly belongs to the ocean. Phytoplankton are the microscopic plants responsible for sustaining a planetary breathable atmosphere and maintaining the chemistry of the ocean. As well, they are the basis of the ocean food web. First breath, first food. As diatoms (a type of phytoplankton) have protective natural glass coverings, I chose to work in recycled glass to convey their glowing gem-like qualities and fleeting fragilities.

The two-story high suspended glass forms replicate the wonder of the greatest biomass migration twice daily (diel) on the planet. Visitors to the Bigelow facility have the opportunity to engage in “Find That Plankton,” a type of Where’s Waldo game, identifying the types of plankton while viewing the installation and gaining knowledge of our human connection to the ocean’s vastness and its microscopic life. My ocean awareness works are calls to educate and protect what gives us all life— the delicate balance of our blue green planet. As my heroine Dr. Sylvia Earle says, “No blue, no green. No ocean, no us.”

Krisanne Baker, Phytoplankton Breathing: Coscinodiscus & Noctiluca scintillans, oil and phosphorescent pigment on cradled wood panel, 12 x 12 in., 2020.

I am a Maine ecological artist and educator focused on water advocacy, and the stewardship of all waters.

I view water as the lifeblood of the planet; coursing the globe, pulsing through our bodies. I make and teache water-conscious ocean art and ecology locally in Maine through my curriculum “Gulf of Maine: Dare to Care,” as well as with the internationally teaching educators’ project “Water is Life” through Malawian rainforest conservation. My upcoming project will focus on student-based stewardship of the delicate balance of the Mesoamerican reef systems through collaboration with marine biologists and community members.

I view my paintings and drawings as an intrinsic part of my ocean art advocacy process. These two-dimensional studies allow me to meditate upon the ensuing three-dimensional form and their contextual environments.

Siri Beckman, Approaching Storm, wood engraving, 4 ½ x 10 in., 1996.

Approaching Storm was a challenge because of its long horizontal composition. I happened to have just the right sized block of English boxwood; the preferred wood for engraving because of it’s very close growth rings and consequent hardness. The other factor was that this print would be part of a hand-printed and bound book titled A Week at the Lake (Lake Wytopitlock). My task was to create a sense of drama that the people in the boat must have felt leaving the dock for a long boat ride across the lake.

Siri Beckman, Basin Pond, wood engraving, 5 x 3 in., 2003.

Basin Pond is one of my favorites because of its simplicity. What I “cut out” is as important as the lines that are left. The print’s personal meaning is a memory of hiking up Katahdin.

Siri Beckman, Cod Fishing, wood engraving, 4 ⅜ x 2 ¾ in., 1996.

I have been a relief printmaker for 40 years, working primarily in the process called wood engraving. Wood engraving has several unique qualities. It is done traditionally on end-grain hardwoods, and the cuts are made with engraving tools much like those used on metal. Then the block is inked and printed on paper under pressure.

Holly Berry, Flat Fish, multi-block original linoleum block print, 9 x 12 in., 2009.

Holly Berry, In Honor of the Swamp Darter, hand embroidered original linoleum block print on linen, 9 x 12 in., 2020.

I created this embroidered linoleum block print specifically for the Maine Waters and Its Inhabitants exhibition. My intent was to celebrate a threatened or endangered aquatic creature in Maine that I did not yet know of. After a little research I learned about the perils of the Swamp Darter. First, I was enchanted by the name swamp darter, also known as etheostoma fusiforme.

Apparently, darters are “a diverse and colorful group of fish in eastern North America” but only the swamp darter comes north as far as the coastal region of southern Maine. At a maximum 2-inch length is it one of our smallest freshwater fish and provides food for herons and larger fish. Although quite hardy and adaptable, tolerating low oxygen levels and acidic conditions, the swamp darter population is vulnerable to human interference with the earth’s natural water systems.

The decorative design, broken into three panels, references the form of an altarpiece. The swamp darter is shown in its natural habitat at the bottom of a muddy stagnant swamp, bog, or sluggish stream surrounded by detritus and weedy vegetation. The side panels show swamp darter eggs clinging to vegetation and delectable amphipods on which the swamp darter dines. The life-size swamp darter in the central panel is highlighted by an outline of red and yellow stitches, like the colors in the sun, suggesting movement and energy.

Holly Berry, What We Don't See, original linoleum block print with watercolor, 22 x 14 in., 2016.

Nina Bohlen, Spring Runoff, oil on panel, 39 x 41 in., 2011.

For the L.C.Bates’s 2020 exhibition Maine Waters and Its Inhabitants, I chose a river. Spring Runoff was painted from my imagination and is about the power often destructive of water in the early spring, due to the melting ice and snow.

Leslie Bowman, Two Mackerel in a Pan, oil on panel, 11 x 14 in., 2019.

Every summer and fall I catch mackerel from the pier in Eastport. I have been doing this for decades. I grill some, smoke some, and paint quite a few. Here are some recent paintings of mackerels from Passamaquoddy Bay.

Leslie Bowman, Two Mackerel on Foil, oil on panel, 12 x 9 in., 2019.

Leslie Bowman, Mackerel on Plate, oil on canvas, 9 x 12 in., 2018.

Mike Branca, Spent, acrylic and dollar bill on canvas, 20 x 16 in., 2019.

There is no one storyline for this painting. I hope viewers will construct their own narratives. But here are some of the things that were on my mind when I painted it:
- the depths to which people will go in search of a dollar;
- the ways we waste the dollars we have;
- visual trickery and the history of trompe l’oeil painting, especially the works of John Haberle, with those exquisitely painted faux dollar bills that look like you could grab them from the canvas;
- the idea that we aren't supposed to touch artworks and how tempting it can sometimes be.

Philip Frey, Double Cannonball, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in., 2015.

My latest body of work centers around my long-held interest in Maine’s iconic landscape, working harbors, and intimate interiors. Experimentation with unexpected color, assertive shape, and multifarious and fearless brushstroke has always been an aspiration of my work. In this collection, all three amalgamate to reveal the latent qualities of paint on canvas: luscious and plain; crisp and blurred; opaque and transparent; vivid and muted. These elements coalesce to bring into focus the potential interplay between place, experience and creative agency.

Philip Frey, In the Moment, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in., 2014.

Jessica Lee Ives, Liquescent, oil on panel, 48 x 48 in., 2019.

Jessica Lee Ives, No Rush on the Rapid River, oil on panel, 40 x 60 in., 2018.

“Walking is a superfood. It’s the defining movement of a human.” (Katy Bowman)

Walking from the gate to the point where the Rapid River flows into Umbagog Lake is a ten-mile round-trip hike in boots, waders, and gear. What is fly fishing if not intentional; often slow and mindful walking, step by step along a trail, stumbling through brambles, squelching through mud, nearly rolling an ankle in boulder-strewn river beds, all in anticipation of the moment when, rooting firmly through the feet, the hook is set and a few quick dance steps position the net to land a beautiful brook trout. Fish don’t need feet. They are like the blood cells in my body, flowing freely along waterways that, like capillaries, bring nourishment and vitality to every square acre of earth they innervate. When I walk, each foot strike creates a pressure wave to pump blood through my veins. When I fish, I participate in the landscape and behold the life I was made for.

Jessica Lee Ives, You Are Alive, oil on panel, 48 x 48 in., 2019.

“I never feel that I am inspired unless my body is also. It too spurns a tame and commonplace life. They are fatally mistaken who think, while they strive with their minds, that they may suffer their bodies to stagnate in luxury or sloth. A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as his brain. We exaggerate the importance and exclusiveness of the headquarters.” ( Henry David Thoreau)

I always paint from a place of love—love for the world, and for the capacity of humans to know the world through movement, recreation, and adventure. Kinesthetic intelligence and imagination are very important to me, as well as the sensation of wonder. I believe I can see through my skin, through my muscle, and through my bone. I love feeling my body move with, and participate in the landscape. Back in the studio I remember my mind is attached to this body and am continually amazed that a small movement of a brush can capture a large movement of the body through water. More astounding yet: a painting can become terrain; inviting the viewer to remember their own selves and their own bodies, immersed in the feeling of being alive.

Janice Kasper, Dragonfly, oil on board, 12 x 18 in., 1997.

This painting is one of a series of small paintings that are about insects. It is inspired by a childhood phrase: “Dear Father, hear and bless thy beasts and singing birds, and guard with tenderness small things that have no words.” (Margaret Wise Brown, A Child’s Good Night Book).

Elise Klysa, Fishing Derby At Dawn, Great Pond, digital photograph, 17½ x 21 in., 2019.

I rose early to photograph the fog and sunrise on a crisp fall morning at Castle Island in Belgrade, Maine. Instead of a quiet pre-dawn morning, I came upon trucks, boats and a group of men. The men were launching their boats for the start of a fishing derby on Great Pond. I positioned myself on the dock just as the sunrise was rising, the fog began lifting and a fisherman prepared to board a boat. The image speaks to all the elements of water, light, and sky coming together creating a beautiful mystical moment.

Joël LeVasseur, Pemaquid Peninsula #4 (based on satellite images), mixed media on birch panel, 14 x 14 in., 2018.

This is an extension of my research of the Wabanaki Indians and their presence on Pemaquid Peninsula, in Midcoast Maine, more than 2500 years ago. I live in Damariscotta, where heaps of oyster shells left by the Wabanaki have been preserved and can be seen at the Whaleback Shell Midden State Historic Site, and also from Route 1 outside of town, on the east side of the Damariscotta River. In this painting, I have tried to view, and depict, this region from an aerial perspective, through satellite images, and sometimes through a helicopter. The detail has been mostly left out intentionally, to help portray the ghost of the Wabanaki and their oyster feasting, along the waters and trails they followed.

Maggie Libby, Will You Uncover the Hidden References to the Sandy River, Women’s Lives, Native Lands?, mixed media and painter’s tape on canvas, 48 x 40 in., 2018–19.

Will You Uncover was created for a 2019 show at University of Maine at Farmington's Art Gallery entitled Across References: Mapping the Paths of Glaciers, Rivers, and Women's Lives. Its three vertical sections explore the interconnections between the Sandy River, notable women from Farmington, and the indigenous land and diaspora of the Wabanakis. Viewers are encouraged to remove pieces of tape to uncover hidden information, an analogy to the archival research and formal processes used to create the piece.

Natasha Mayers, Blue Waterfalls, Vertical, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 18 in., 2019.

This painting follows Men in Suits (2016) and Men in Trouble (2018) which followed World Banksters (2013). Men in suits materialized in my work soon after the financial crisis.

These men are often headless, intoxicated with their own power, dangerous, blind, in a world full of violence toward one another and the planet, with men, historically, at the center of the problem. The work often reflects anger, frustration, a sense of the absurd, and analysis of what masculine power, white privilege and tradition have wrought. I talk about what is scary and threatening to me/us with a touch of irony, humor, pattern, exuberant color, and eccentricity.

I painted some waterfalls en plein air, but it is not satisfying to just reproduce what I see, so I put these men in suits in the falls.

John Meader, Pemaquid Surf Watchers, digital photograph, 24 x 20 in., 2018.

I picked up my first camera and started taking photographs in 1978 on a cross-country trip. Trying to capture something more than a snapshot became the aim of every shot. Though most of my photos never reached that lofty goal, it became the reason to take pictures. Over the years, with a variety of cameras, I have attempted to place my camera in the right spots at the right times to capture the moment at hand. It's not easy, but it's rewarding when you hit the mark. To me, the greatest value in this endeavor is the process of learning to see, learning to anticipate, and putting myself in those spots at the right time.

John Meader, The Eddy Turn, digital photograph, 18 x 12 in., 2012.

The Eddy Turn is the essence of getting the shot by being in the right place at the right time. An eddy turn is a quick maneuver that canoeists make in whitewater rapids to turn your canoe a full 180° out of moving water into a small safe-zone behind a rock. Well executed, it's a thing of beauty and takes only seconds to perform, if you do it wrong you may be swimming! In this case, I was shooting from a canoe myself, trying to capture Steve in mid-eddy turn. To get the shot I had to be in just the right place, but enough out of the way so that he could perform the maneuver. The challenge was to snap the shot quickly from my own moving boat and capture a sharp clean image. It's a tricky shot of a tricky maneuver, a dance of two boats, two canoeists, on the moving water of the Sebasticook River.

Rachael O’Shaughnessy, Celestial Sea, ink on paper, 3 x 2 ½ in., 2018.

Celestial Sea was created from an exploration of sumi and sea, within the effects of salt water on ink-wash drawings, and I was moving through the series of small works from feeling as tiny as a drop of salt water, within the vastness I experience while at the oceanside each day. The Maine coast holds rapturous coastal beauty and ink and charcoal and emotion swirl for me with the waves that I witness, and that we are all ultimately composed of.

Maine coastal sites are pilgrimages for me. Presence yields to memory in each two-dimensional culling of light, gesture, and surf. A myriad of ocean experiences must become a single salient present within each work. I elude the literal to render nature as felt, walked through, breathed in, and condensed.

Rachael O’Shaughnessy, Turbulence 2, ink, charcoal, and chalk on paper, 1 ¾ x 2 in., 2018.

After I witnessed consecutive sunrises for about six years, I turned my attention toward Maine's stormy waters, to explore the darker, more mysterious forces in nature. I witnessed many storms over turbulent seas, and began to draw with that in mind on Monhegan Island, as witnessed in this tiny work Turbulence 2. I had been out on the island with my (now) husband painting a series of wave works, and my miniature drawings culminated with the study of the moonlight over turbulent waters. Out on Monhegan in early fall, all that I could hear was the crashing waves and the sound of my own breath, halting in the glowing light of night. My eyes caught the edges of waves as they seemed to swirl toward the pull of the moon. It is interesting to note that the edges of the sea are raked through with life after a particularly strong moon's path. The moon can pull the swelling tides to unearth shells and seaweed and debris, shifting the sands for miles of coastline, and the beach inhabitants and birds come alive to explore it. I think of painters in the same way when it comes to dramatic storms, or elusive island moonlight. We come alive to explore the fresh marks nature leaves us.

John Stetson, Approaching "ice out" and climate change, digital photograph, 16 x 20 in., 2017.

This photo was taken using a camera suspended below a kite. The ice was just opening on Sebago Lake on March 23, 2017. The USGS scatter graph with a regression line shows the time of ice-out since 1800 for Sebago Lake. This is one way of observing climate change.

John Stetson, Medusa Hydrozoa, micrograph, 16 x 20 in., 2019.

This photo is a micrograph of a medusa hydrozoa. From an evolutionary standpoint, the medusa and its kin are quite interesting creatures. Jellyfish are the oldest multi-organism animals; they appeared in the fossil record 500 million years ago. They're also the first swimmers. Note, plankton don't really swim. Rather they just move with the wind, changes in water density and the tide.

Barbara Sullivan, Nature and Man, Friends and Foes, sharpie drawings with shaped frescoes attached, 84 x 288 x 6 in., 2011.

It has occurred to me that we think animals are adorable in the wild, but as soon as animals like skunks, fox, raccoons and birds come close and into our habitats, we FREAK. We think of getting sprayed by a skunk, or fear rabies from a rabid fox. Ironically, they come to us because we have invaded their habitats. We have brought them roadkill in the form of a fast-food bag that they tear open to eat. They are now in our food chain of trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup. Our planet is suffering from global warming and these animals are also suffering. Are they our friends or our foes?

Susan Williams, Moonshine Study 2, oil on acetate, 11 x 14 in., 2019.

Moonshine 2 and Swept Study 3 are part of a body of new work, I call The Art of Interference, because it deliberately interferes with traditional representations of natural beauty. When I began painting landscapes, I often worked from my observations of the natural world. I was also influenced by art from the past. As my work evolved, I pushed farther and farther beyond literal realities. I wanted to paint nature from my memories and from my imagination.

These new paintings have an element of realism in that the rocks and trees and lakes in them are recognizable as such, but they are not actual places. They are traces of my mind wandering. By minimizing the literal and enlarging the imaginary, I am trying to take viewers into a liminal space, to place them in a borderland between nature as they know it and the many variations of nature that appear in my mind’s eye.

The paintings in The Art of Interference simultaneously undercut and pay homage to earlier traditions of landscape painting. They also quietly hint at the anxieties of our times—the existential dread caused by climate change, the peril to democracy around the world, and the gloom that goes with a global lockdown.

What next? I feel a strong desire to see more than I have seen. I want to create beauty. But I also want to be able to wreck the beauty and sift through the ruins. I want to push my brushwork and the paint itself to the point where they destabilize familiar boundaries between the real and the imagined. Above all, I want to set aside the expectations that have guided my paints and see what emerges when I follow my imagination wherever it leads.

Susan Williams, Swept Study 3, oil on acetate, 11 x 14 in., 2019.

Sharon Yates, Crossroads No. 2, oil on panel, 9 x 10 ¾ in., 1992.

One gorgeous unusually warm early October day, I needed to find a change from painting cows. Roaming around searching for a motif, I came to a little bridge crossing the Pennamaquan River Dam situated behind a deserted motel and restaurant called Crossroads. Reflections of the fading green foliage barely turning color captured my imagination. The next morning I was back there in the sunshine with my gear in tow. I studied the slope of the bank and at the base there was just enough flat earth to set up without being swallowed by the tide. In a few consecutive days of calm warm sunny weather, I luckily completed a few paintings.