Greenhut’s 12th Biennial Portland Show celebrates our dynamic and rapidly evolving city. With a single subject matter (our beloved city of Portland, Maine), this long-running exhibition consistently surprises with its diverse display of styles, media, and approaches. This year’s Portland Show includes work from 43 Maine artists, each offering a unique perspective on our city.

OPENING RECEPTION SATURDAY, MARCH 9 FROM 1-3PM

FEATURED ARTISTS

Rachel Gloria Adams, Ryan Adams, Chris Beneman, Matt Blackwell, Jeff Bye, Crystal Cawley, Thomas Connolly, Sandi Donnelly, Grant Drumheller, Diamond Duryea, Kate Emlen, Jim Flahaven, Philip Frey, Roy Germon, Tom Glover, Alison Goodwin, Frank Gregory, Ellen Gutekunst, Tom Hall, Lindsay Hancock, Celeste Henriquez, Maret Hensick, Mike Howat, Tina Ingraham, William Irvine, Cade Jarvis, C Michael Lewis, Margaret Lawrence, Dean McCrillis, Dan Mills, Daniel Minter, Nancy Morgan Barnes, James Mullen, Tom Paiement, Sandra Quinn, Alison Rector, Glenn Renell, Alec Richardson, Jenny Scheu, Alice Spencer, Mike Stiler, Sean Ware, Richard Wilson.

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Opening Reception: Thurs., Sept. 7, 5-7 pm

the Til n. the reservoir of all opportunities still available to you at this point in your life - all the countries you still have the energy to explore, the careers you still have the courage to pursue, the skills you still have the time to develop, the relationships you still have the time to make - like a pail of water you carry around in your head, which starts off feeling like an overwhelming burden but steadily draws down as you get older, splashing gallons over the side every time you take a step. (From the till, a shopkeeper’s register filled with unspent change + until.)

- Koenig, John. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021.

When my work was first exhibited at Greenhut in 1989, it was characterized by abstract geometric patterns that were seemingly woven together in tapestries to create surreal landscapes. In a review of my first solo show, Margot McWilliams wrote:

“Goodwin simplifies the elements of the landscape, placing them on planes so that they begin to totter off in tilted directions. She divides her canvases into geometric elements, and then decorates them fully with repeated motifs of spirals and rectangles. . . . She saturates the whole with colors that play vibrantly with each other.” (Casco Bay Weekly, July 25, 1991)

I was just 30 years-old and this style was new to me at the time; I had recently abandoned my more traditional landscapes and still lives that had gotten me through art school. I was discovering my voice.

My geometric patterns - with their saturated colors and unruly lines - remained the vocabulary of my work as I began to paint interiors, villages, and still lives that expressed both my own skewed perspective on the world and my sense of home and appreciation for my life in Maine and Vermont. Geometric shapes also formed the faces in my figurative work and my portraits of Saints.

Each pattern I create is - in my mind- its own abstract design. My wallpapers and floors, leaves and waves, eyes and lips, are each their own abstracted element. Many of my interiors also have a painting within a painting- a modernist abstract on the wall of a Fauvist room. Throughout my career, it is these abstract shapes and patterns that I focus on as I work; the final piece is a composition built of these many individual parts, but my inner world is preoccupied with the abstract.

My career in now in its 4th decade and I wish to allow this inner voice its opportunity to be fully expressed, without the distraction of lyric or narrative. This current body of work is what I’ve been whispering all along in every image I’ve created. Now I want it to be heard in a full-throated cry saying that this, in fact, is how I see the world. There is so much that we know and feel within that we rarely get a chance to isolate, identify, and express in a focused and unique way. In the images in my current body of work, I’ve allowed myself to settle into a specific feeling or vision and give the complexities of that emotional space my full attention. ~ Alison Goodwin

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Thomas Higgins - Bogs to Beaches

Painting for Thomas Higgins is an active and intuitive process of participating in natural spaces.  By working primarily on site through direct sensory experience, he seeks a mode of trenchant, painterly realism.  Of fundamental interest is the visual complexity of bogs and other ecosystems that inspire his pursuit of the miraculous in the commonplace.  Through his expressive mark-making and gestural brushstrokes, Higgins strives for the point when all of the elements have meshed into an essential, emotive image.   

Higgins grew up in New Hope, Pennsylvania, graduated cum laude from Maryville College (Tennessee) and received his MS and MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  His paintings have been displayed in numerous exhibitions in the U. S. and abroad, including at U. S. embassies in Canada, Hungary, Iceland, Gambia, Greece and France.  Residencies for which he was selected include Acadia National Park and the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center. 

 Having taught at Marietta College (Ohio), Colby College, and in the University of Maine System, Higgins retired as Professor Emeritus from the University of Maine at Farmington.  He continues to be an outdoor enthusiast and advocate for untrammeled places.

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Tom Hall captures the rugged, haunting beauty of the Maine landscape. Whether pristine or impacted by human hands, Hall emotionally conveys the true spirit of the place depicted in a manner that is immediately recognizable as his own.

Artist’s Statement

Tom Hall interviews Tom Hall

TH1: Let’s start with the basics. You were born where?

TH2: I was born right here in Portland. Matter of fact, right on Congress Street.

TH1: Congress Street? That’s very local. And you went to school…

TH2: University of Oregon, school of architecture, in Eugene. Then to Boston for 12 years, working as a young architect. Working in the big city as a young man was a life adventure. I think all Maine grads should leave the state, see the world, and then return and help make Maine even better.

TH1: Architecture? I thought you went to school for painting.

TH2: No, never took a painting class. Just picked it up along the way. Eventually the art passion took over the architecture passion. The immediacy and the control of painting won me over. I had my first studio in Somerville, MA. Down by the railroad tracks. In a building of 60 artists. I look back and see it as my art school.

TH1: I noticed the barn paintings in this show. That’s different.

TH2: Well, I painted Maine barns when I was that young painter in Somerville. Inspired by the late Wolf Kahn’s barn paintings. Kahn was brilliant. The work and the painter. With his recent passing, the barn paintings here are a simple gesture of thanks.

TH1: Are the small paintings, the tiny ones, studies for larger work?

TH2: No, the small ones are meant as finished pieces. Often bigger pieces are suggested by the smalls but it’s not a given. And a small piece, even the tiny ones, as you say, can be just as monumental as a big.

TH1: These are all Maine landscapes?

TH2: Yes. Actually the locales here represent a life’s footprint, of sorts. A triangle…Lakes Region to Moosehead Lake and back to Portland. I’ve done a lot of hiking over the years…as a landscape painter should. It’s been kind of a Huck Finn life. Of course the work has to get done and done well. That’s what you sign up for.

TH1: And Maine art?

TH2: Oh, one has to be excited. It’s the only option. I’ve seen institutions and galleries come and go. It’s all a cycle. The artist…and everyone else… needs to just work and stop moaning. Do the good work that uplifts and educates… making a better Maine.

TH1: What’s next?

TH2: I’m working on some pieces for a group show in October at Cove Street Arts…on sports.

TH1: Sports? What does a landscape painter do with that?

TH2: Well, that’s what I’m wondering about myself.

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Greenhut’s biennial landscape show, Maine: The Painted State, is both a proud nod to Maine’s storied and outsized place in American Art History, and a celebration of the exciting ways the landscape tradition continues. How it is being carried on, and in some cases, reinvented, by contemporary Maine artists.

Maine has been an artist magnet for over 100 years. The allure of its rugged coastline and the romance of the sea, its lakes and islands, its wild beauty and isolation and, of course, the distinctive qualities of its northern light have captivated generations of painters. Our landscape has been celebrated -- mythologized, really -- in classic works by some of the greatest painters in American Art History, from Thomas Cole to Frederick Church to Winslow Homer to Andrew Wyeth, Marsden Hartley, Neil Welliver, and beyond.

But the magic of Maine’s landscape is not a finite quantity, confined to a specific period. It is, in fact, eternal and Maine remains a vital locus of artistic inspiration, coursing with creative energy. Our April biennial, “Maine, the Painted State,” is a celebration of the exciting ways the landscape tradition continues.

FEATURED ARTISTS

Liz Awalt, Joel Babb, Susan Barnes, Chris Beneman, Todd Bezold, Matt Blackwell, Mary Bourke, Jeff Bye, Thomas Connolly, David Driskell, Grant Drumheller, David Estey, Sarah Faragher, Maurice Freedman, Philip Frey, Kathleen Galligan, Roy Germon, Alison Goodwin, Tom Hall, Conley Harris, Maret Hensick, Thomas Higgins, Craig Hood, Jon Imber, Tina Ingraham, William Irvine, Sarah Knock, Marty Kremer, Margaret Lawrence, Jonathan Mess, Dean McCrillis, Daniel Minter, Nancy Morgan Barnes, John David O’Shaughnessy, Colin Page, Tom Paiement, Alison Rector, Glenn Renell, Alec Richardson, Judy Schneider, Kathi Smith, Mike Stiler, Christopher Volpe, Michael Walek, Sean Ware, Neil Welliver, John Whalley, Holden Willard and Tim Wilson.

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Paul Klee, when asked what his painting was about, replied:
It is about line
It is about color
It is about form

In my 22 year affiliation with Greenhut my work has always been about these three elements.

The search for beauty is infinite in scope with endless solutions in every direction. It leads to such giants as Willem DeKooning scratching his head and declaring art as the anxiety of possibilities. In November of last year, while in Salt Lake City for a month, I started a series of flower drawings. Being away from my studio and having limited space to work I decided to use colored pencils on 14 x 14 inch drawing paper. I enjoy the challenges always present when drawing from life, and also enjoyed the respite from inventing line, inventing color and inventingform which, in much of my previous work, had been required. With the flowers, those elements were presented to me. It was simply a matter of looking, focusing, and meditating on the experience. Very zen like.

Back in my studio in Maine, I continued the flower theme but pushed it into a new direction, a less literal, looser interpretation. Moving from paper and pencil to wood panels and oil paints, I could add texture to the work and allow the process of working and reworking to be evident. Some of the paintings focus entirely on texture, color and form and some, as in much of my other work, no matter the subject I have settled on or the approach, are overlaid with a defining black line. In the last paintings I finished before this exhibition, the drawing and painting seem to collide into one. As always, the possibilities of where to go next are endless.

~ Tom Paiement

Tom Paiement received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maine. After working in the aerospace industry for years, he decided to explore the creative process offering him an aesthetic outlet missing from his mathematical and scientific work. After earning his M.F.A. in Printmaking at the University of Iowa in 1985 under the tutelage of Mauricio Lasansky, Tom taught at Hamline University in St. Paul. Tom returned to Maine to paint full time and for 30 years he has exhibited extensively. His work is represented in private and public collections.

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Alison Rector

Studio Daze

I’m currently painting in a studio workspace in Portland. For the past 18 months, I’ve been watching the light moving through my workspace as time passes. I’ve made lots of paintings observing what I see. Hour by hour the light moves across the room through windows and doors. The view of the city beyond the windows changes.

These paintings are meditations on being in the studio. My workspace is a retreat and a sanctuary. People live, work, think and rest in these spaces. The human story is part of the painting.

~ Alison Rector

Painter and printmaker Alison Rector specializes in recreating interiors. She paints public establishments such as bowling alleys, laundromats, and post offices or the private spaces within a home, showing us passages into other rooms and glimpses of the outdoors. Occasionally her work focuses on a building within a landscape, a study of a place and a moment in time. Rector renders unconventional beauty and a special quality of light by way of a resonant realism.

In 2017, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art exhibited a solo show of 18 of Rector’s paintings of public libraries titled The Value of Thought. Her paintings were selected for the 2003 Portland Museum of Art Biennial and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art’s 50th anniversary invitational in 2002. Her work has been included in 3 art books by Carl Little; Artist Conversations, Maine Arts Magazine, a Maine Arts Commission publication; The Gettysburg Review, featured artist in the Autumn 2008 issue. Rector earned an undergraduate degree from Brown University in Providence RI, including courses at the Rhode Island School of Design.

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Joel Babb graduated in Art History from Princeton in 1969, studied with George Segal and George Ortman and spent a year in Munich and Rome before going to Boston to get an MFA from the Museum School and Tufts. There his style changed from abstraction to a contemporary realism. His cityscapes are the works for which he is best known in Boston. Some are street level panoramas like the large View of Harvard Square in the Charles Hotel, Cambridge. Others are panoramas from a high prospect like the View from the Roof of 500 Boylston for Mass Financial, or the View from the Financial District at Standish, Ayer and Wood, or the View of Cincinnati done for Gradison Investments. All of the panoramas play with problems of flattening a wide angled space into a picture plane.

In 1984 he began a series of aerial views based on photos he took from a helicopter over Boston. These are often experimental perspectives like the one point perspective straight down of Copley Plunge or the View of Back Bay at Harvard Business School and the two paintings for Fidelity.

In the mid 1970’s he began building a studio and residence in Sumner, Maine which soon became a full time residence. Though he continued to paint cityscapes in the late 1980’s he began a series of large landscapes of the woods near his studio. One is The Hounds of Spring which hangs in Baker Library at Harvard Business School.

In 1996 he finished the painting recreating the first successful organ transplant in man which hangs in the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School, working with the doctors who achieved this important medical innovation.

He has had three shows at Vose Galleries and been in shows at Naga in Boston, Sherry French, Gerold Wunderlich, The National Academy in New York City, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Portland Museum of Art, the Ogunquit Museum and Frost Gully Gallery in Maine, the Arnot Art Museum, The Naples Museum of Art, Trudy Labell Fine Arts in Florida, and many other galleries and museums. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Fogg Museum.

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Sandra Quinn: Beneath the Surface

While the world was spinning in response to the pandemic, I chose to take a break from painting and experiment with mark-making on paper. Using materials such as graphite, inks, watercolor, gesso, wax, and markers, I explored the feelings that arose during isolation. The studio provided a haven for quiet reflection.

Working abstractly and without a preconceived idea, I began with a mark or gesture. The challenge, then, was to create a balance between my inner world and the world I inhabit. The layers are the history of my process and an expression of my intuitive response. ~ Sandra Quinn

Quinn is a graduate of The Maine College of Art and a member of Peregrine Press in Portland, Maine.  Sandra paints the emotional world of feelings she carries inside. Her work is a reflection of sacred concepts made visual that express a sense of movement and grace in an atmosphere of space and light. Marks are carefully edited to maintain the prominence of the rhythm.

Memories become colored with time and redefined as truth. Each painting is an exploration of the artist’s memories and history. There is a tension between the sound and stillness that creates the rhythm, the dance, and the balance of life.

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The theme of this show is to present small still lives of objects in my studio that were of interest to me; that each, in some way, seemed to evoke a short story. Whether it was the worn patinas showing the small events of a lifetime of use that left their marks on their surfaces, or the natural processes of aging….oxidation of metal or splitting of wood - I wanted to present these things in such a way that they drew you in, to imagine the lives they had led.

What I love about short stories is they can offer you a glimpse into a life or a circumstance, and leave you to fill in the pasts or futures of the characters they describe. Over the years, I certainly have done more elaborate works that might seem closer to a novel or a memoir, but not here. The compositions have anywhere from one to four main characters that I have picked up at a Maine antique shop or flea market. I’ve arranged them with care. As with the oil cans in “Primaries,” the hammer and wrench in “Camouflage,” the worn balls in “Duo,” or the spigots in the appropriately named “Spigots,” the actors are almost like members of a family, and we compare them for similarities or contrasting dissimilarities.

I love objects of nature that I find by the bay behind our home, and have included a few of these items, as well as a large drawing of grasses that had been cut along our road last summer, and lay drying in the hot sun. The drawing was an ambitious one, taking over 400 hours to complete during this last fall and winter. I’ve also included one seascape of sorts - the fish weirs on the far end of Campobello Island - just past the last of Maine on the coast and into the beginnings of Canada.

I hope these works bring you pleasure and that this group of humble short stories speaks in some meaningful way to you.

~ John Whalley

Advancing the tradition of American realists and acknowledging the Dutch masters, John Whalley’s paintings go well beyond mere technique. His work exudes tremendous warmth, luminosity and charm. He responds to what he calls “the beauty that speaks softly.” He was born in Brooklyn, New York and currently lives in midcoast Maine. Whalley received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1976.

His work is in numerous private, national and international collections including the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia; the Otto Naumann Collection, New York City and the Alfred Bader Collection, Milwaukee, Wisconsin to name a few. His publications include John Whalley – American Realist published in 2001 and John Whalley – In New Light, a 30 year retrospective book of drawings and paintings published in 2006. In addition, he was featured on the television show Bill Green’s Maine in 2008.

Read the review HERE.

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Chris Beneman

Lineation II

Christine Beneman’s work combines architectural details and fragmented imagery to create reimagined urban landscapes.

She creates her monoprints using collagraph plates and hand-cut stencils. These unique prints are frequently cut out and layered a top of each other, allowing room for intention and improvisation. Her acrylic on panel paintings explore similar themes and may also include architectural plans.

Chris graduated from Bates College and has work in many public collections including the Farnsworth Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art, New York Public Library and the Bates, Bowdoin and Colby College Museums of Art. She was recently included in the book, Singular and Serial by Schiffer Publishing. She is an active member of Peregrine Press, the Boston Printmakers and the Monotype Guild of New England.

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Most of the large paintings in this exhibition are of the “Anonymous Portrait (A.P.)” series begun some time ago. However, during these covid years, these subjects’ faces have been replaced by masks , which one viewer found upsetting, noting that there was no way to tell if the subject was happy or sad, and thus revealing their point of view in which the painting is regarded as a subject that relies on likeness and accuracy to something outside itself. On the other hand, one can see the painting as an object with certain qualities of invention, construction, and a skillful organization of elements. In the first case, where the painting doesn’t match the viewer’s mindset or their thinking the anonymity in the title means the painting lacks substance or clarity, dissatisfaction is understandable . If one sees “A.P. #21, Green with Envy” within the first category, then one might ask what’s causing the lady’s sickly complexion? Well it’s the yellow-blue environment, of course. To me, what drives the process are the structural choices offered within a particular color construct. - Ed Douglas

Born in 1935, Ed Douglas began his fine arts education at the Rhode Island School of Design earning a BFA in 1963. He earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was influenced by Bay Area giant Richard Diebenkorn. From 1973 to 2000, Douglas taught drawing and painting at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, and for most of his tenure there, he also served as Chair of the Art Department. Douglas has been a Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Ohio, and the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. In 2013, he was an invited guest lecturer and art critic at Colby College. Ed's work is included in the permanent collections of the Portland Museum of Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Dayton Art Museum, Dayton, Ohio, Lincoln Land Community College, Springfield, Illinois, the Cincinnati Art Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the Papendrecht Museum of Contemporary Art, Netherlands, as well as in private collections in the United States, Canada, Spain, Netherlands, and Greece. His work is known for it's palette of beautiful color combinations academically and thoughtfully laid to surface. He derives inspiration from classic Impressionist masterpieces. Douglas maintains a residence in Maine spending summers in Essex, New York.

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Michael Torlen

Going Deep: Monhegan Watercolors

My recent work encompasses many aspects of the sea—romantic, nostalgic, and dangerous. I have painted the ocean, in plein air on Monhegan Island during the summers for over three decades, attracted to Monhegan’s rich artistic history, sustainable lobster fishery, cultural community, and limits on land development.

For this work, I also draw upon my experiences aboard ship with my father, a Norwegian commercial fisherman, and as a crewmember on a commercial purse seine tuna boat. Beyond commercial fishing, life on earth too is contingent upon the sea—the origin of all life, sustaining and maintaining our endangered “water planet.”

Painting the sea in plein air is a nearly impossible project. Everything is in motion. When I return to the same place to paint, the appearances are different—tides, waves, lichens, clouds, skies, and light. Depending on the tides and motion of the water, even the rocks appear to change. I love the challenge because I must make it up. Why not take a photograph? A photograph captures only what the camera lens sees, not what the human eye sees. - Michael Torlen

Michael Torlen is a painter, printmaker, writer, and Professor Emeritus of the School of Art+Design at Purchase College, State University of New York, where he taught painting and drawing. He earned his BFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and his MFA at Ohio State University.

Torlen has painted during annual trips to Monhegan for 25 years. His work appears in David Little and Carl Little’s book Art of Acadia and in Carl Little’s Paintings of Maine. Carl Little’s profile, “Michael Torlen: Tied to the Sea,” appeared in the July/August 2020 issue of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors.

In Maine he has shown work at Archipelago Gallery, Bayview Gallery, Jonathan Frost Gallery, and Lupine Gallery on Monhegan Island. His work is in the collections of several museums as well as in corporate and private collections.  

Torlen has published poetry, articles, essays, and art reviews and has written a book about painting, drawing, and perception, due out in 2023.He maintains a studio and lives in Westbrook, with his wife, author Eleanor Phillips Brackbill.

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OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, Dec. 4, 1 - 3 pm

Greenhut's 27th Annual Holiday Show. This exhibition includes new work by our entire roster of artists. With styles ranging from realism to colorful abstraction and everything in between, there is something for everyone!

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Narrative art is, quite simply, art that tells a story. Ranging from Bronze Age cave drawings to comic strips, narrative art’s history is long and, well, “storied”…

This exhibition brings together six artists making exciting and imaginative work within the narrative genre. Working in a variety of two-and-three-dimensional media, all manage to capture rich, complex narratives, in unique and highly engaging ways through subject matters ranging from myth (often with irreverent reframing), to celebratory expressions of cultural identity, to purely fictitious childhood scenes. The result is thought-provoking, visually stunning, and refreshingly fun.

Fresh Air is an exhibition of new oil paintings by Margaret Lawrence.

Reception: Thursday, October 7, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

“Taking inspiration from the natural beauty Maine has to offer, these paintings further my exploration of the intersection of water, land, and sky. Given the various challenges of the past year - global, national, and personal, I am increasingly grateful to live so close to nature, free to roam and breathe fresh air.”

~ Margaret Lawrence

Intrigued by varying elements in the landscape, Lawrence’s paintings are developed by removing paint as much as by applying it. Through the give and take of paint, an image that was inspired by a specific place transforms into a sense of place. This approach yields work that is charged with emotion and mood, remarkable for its rich, textural surfaces and the complexity of it’s palette.

Margaret has a background in nursing. In 1993 she earned her BFA with a concentration in painting at Maine College of Art in Portland.

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Tradition and Generation is an exhibition of new paintings by Alison Goodwin

Reception: Thursday, September 2, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

I have been painting fisherman saints for over 20 years now. When I began, I was drawn to the traditional, iconic image of a Maine fisherman—rugged, earnest, up before dawn for an honest day's work. Having grown up on the water in Kennebunk, I had memories of watching fishermen going back to my early childhood. By adding a halo, I sought to reflect the dignity and holiness of their hard work and their daily battle with nature. As Carl Little commented in 2008, my work sought to "elevate this simple man in his waterproof Grundens to, if not sainthood, the status of blessed symbol."

While this is still true, my latest fisherman saints take a new turn. I now try to see beyond the iconic symbols and to witness the rise of a new generation of fishers. I've lost interest in the iconic portrait. Instead, I want to paint real people, the ones I see where I live in Rockland—the young men and women rising to the challenge of taking on this critical role in our coastal communities. Sins and all, there's always something right with them, something redeeming, transformative, and integral to our relationship to the earth and creation.

~ Alison Goodwin

Influenced by Hundertwasser, Klimt, Matisse and Calder, Goodwin's work throughout her career is characterized both by her use of turbulent, saturated color and by the delightfully skewed perspectives of her compositions, typically depicting fisherman saints, unruly landscapes, expressive interiors, and kinetic villages. Goodwin's voice is energetic and funky, hip-yet-sincere. Though her work boldly references many masters, her style is unique, and distinctively her own. As art historian Shannon Egan put it: "By taking Gauguin's halo, van Gogh's colors, Matisse's patterns, and Picasso's ambiguities of subject and space, Goodwin presents a complicated marriage of particular art-historical references. She avoids pastiche and instead finds originality in a careful use of a visual and historical language. Goodwin translates the pictorial concerns of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists into a new vision for contemporary painting." 

Alison Goodwin graduated from the University of Southern Maine (1981) and Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art) (1984). Her work is included in private and corporate collections regionally and throughout the world, including those of Grown Brothers Harriman & Company, Wellesley College, Pierce Atwood, Nelson Kinder & Mosseau, Fletcher Allen Health Care, and National Semiconductor.

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This exhibition features a diverse selection of David Driskell’s works in various media created over the past four decades. All themes typical of the late, great, internationally renowned and dearly loved artist’s oeuvre are represented.

Opening Reception: Thursday, August 5, 2021, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

David Driskell (1931-2020) earned his widely held reputation as a foremost authority on African American Art by committing his long life, his luminous intellect, and his enormous talent and energy as an artist, scholar, and curator to the cause. A recipient of thirteen honorary doctorates, Dr. Driskell’s contributions to scholarship in the history of American art and, importantly, Black artists’ role within it, are significant. His impact, perhaps, beyond measure. As an educator, curator, and art advisor to important public and private collections, including those of Oprah Winfrey and President and Mrs. Clinton, Driskell nurtured and promoted the careers and legacies of many other other Black artists. In all of his roles, David worked tirelessly throughout his career to demonstrate the truth of his conviction that “African American art is American art,” its inclusion crucial to a complete understanding of the canon.

Born in 1931 in Eatonton, Georgia, Driskell was educated at Howard University, and later earned a Master of Fine Arts from The Catholic University Of America.  In 1953, Dr. Driskell attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. During his residency, he fell in love with the state of Maine and, in 1961, he and his wife Thelma bought a plot of land in Falmouth. There David designed and built his own studio, returning every summer to paint, to garden, and to entertain his many, many friends, old and new, with his warm hospitality and delightful storytelling. Dr. Driskell held the title of Distinguished University Professor of Art, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland, College Park, and in 1997, he was awarded the President’s Medal, which is the highest honor the University bestows on a member of its faculty.  In 1998, the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora was established to promote and preserve Driskell’s scholarship and to honor his service to the University.  In December of 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Dr. Driskell the National Humanities Medal. In 2004, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta established its annual David C. Driskell Prize, which was first awarded in 2005. Its distinguished recipients include First Lady Michele Obama’s official portraitist, Amy Sherald. In 2018. Dr .Driskell was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

When the indomitable human spirit rises above the chaos of violence, hunger and pain and soars to a heightened relief through the making of art, we are classless and raceless so long as we create the spiritual vision. As an artist of African ancestry, I have had to learn to live with racism, sexism and all of the prejudices. I often find refuge and, indeed, solace in the creative process. In the quiet of my small studio nestled in the majestic pines and white birches in Maine, two worlds merge in my work, one of sight, the other of vision. The beauty of nature and the creative world of the imaginations together express the joyous vision I have as an artist, responding to the spiritual urge within to fulfill my earthly task of making and creating my own beautiful world.

— David Driskell

As an artist, David Driskell worked primarily in collage and mixed media. His paintings and prints have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Portland Museum of Art, where a phenomenal traveling retrospective entitled David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History is on display through September 12, 2021.  Learn more about this important exhibition HERE. During his lifetime, Dr. Driskell was the recipient of many foundation fellowships, among which are the Harmon Foundation, three Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, and the Danforth Foundation Fellowship.

Driskell’s large and vibrant body of work is informed and impacted by the broad perspective of his own life experience as well as by his unique personal identity. He was the child of sharecroppers, born into the segregated South, but also a celebrated international artist and scholar. He was both an urbane denizen of our nation’s capital and a sophisticated world traveler with a deep connection to, and understanding of, the art of Africa and other world cultures. But just as importantly, he was the designer, creator, and loving tender of his own rather Edenic Falmouth, Maine gardens. Driskell -- an artist very much concerned with the artist’s quasi-religious role as a “seer” and forthbringer of new forms -- created vivid, imaginative art that is equal parts Americana and Africana in his hand-hewn rural idyll, which is itself a form brought forth from Driskell’s rich, fertile, and prolific imagination.

David cites the strongest influences on his work as: 1) Environment -- the natural world, but also “home,” both as a physical space and as a concept. The artist saw a type of “spirit” in the objects he depicts, and the spirit that animates these mundane subjects (furniture, etc.) becomes visible in his finished work); 2) Upbringing - David’s father was a Baptist minister, and many of Driskell’s works are highly stylized, uniquely personal expressions of Biblical themes, or contain motifs from the Judeo-Christian tradition; 3) “My intellectual pursuit of learning from the great civilizations of the world” – we see evidence of this influence through his incorporation of elements of Africana (masks, textile motifs, etc.) and other world cultures (including American, via spirituals, gospel, jazz and blues); and 4) Memory and Imagination.

In Driskell’s work, all of these source energies converge to form a voice complementary to, but unique and distinct from, other important African-American artists of the past and the present. Signatures of his style include rich, vivid color, rhythm, and line (as pictoral element), recurring motifs, and a spirit of constant invention and re-invention. Much of David’s work contains strong decorative elements: calligraphy, African textile motifs, the patterned imagery of folk art, etc., but Driskell never replicates existing patterns. In viewing his work, we see that David has created his own individualized, and fascinating, aesthetic language.

To learn even more about Driskell’s enormous and ongoing impact and legacy, be sure to check out the HBO documentary Black Art: In The Absence Of Light. The film is Inspired by Driskell’s landmark 1976 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Two Centuries of Black American Art” and offers an illuminating introduction to the work of some of the most prominent Black visual artists working today. Learn more about the documentary HERE.

And to view additional Driskell work in Greenhut’s inventory, click HERE.

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Down to the Seas Again is an exhibition of new oil paintings by one of Maine's masters of plein air painting, Colin Page.

Artist Talk and Reception: Thursday, July 1, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

My curiosity as an artist and as a sailor inspired this series of paintings. As a painter, I am drawn to interesting light or exciting color relationships. As a person, I am drawn to the adventure of being on the water. I want to be near it, surrounded by deep blues, bouncing light, and reflective waves. I want to know more about the tides, marine life, currents and wind, studying how color and light act in the ocean air. I want to recreate the energy and drama of sunlight and shifting conditions in nature.

 I am raising my kids in and among the islands and harbors of Penobscot Bay. Much of our time is spent exploring the coast, where every beach is a chance to find new treasures. The water is a draw whether I am behind the tiller or looking out at the sea from a neighborhood yard. The islands seem endless and the summer bay calls out. This series is about the joy of our Maine coast.

 The title for the show came from the following poem:

“I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking. 

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.”

― John Masefield, Sea Fever: Selected Poems

~ Colin Page

Colin Page was raised in Baltimore, MD and attended the Rhode Island School of Design. He graduated from Cooper Union, New York with a concentration on painting. Upon graduation he lived in New York City for three years where he was an active member in a large and thriving art community. In search of a more diverse landscape, Page moved to Maine. In Maine, Colin paints the coast en plein air and focuses on capturing the atmosphere and light of a scene.

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In our side gallery this month, we have Maret Hensick’s Flowers Past and Present a poignant and poetic series of mixed media on paper floral paintings in tribute to her late mother’s love of flowers and travel

I can only speak for myself when I say an artist starts working in any given direction based on an enthusiastic, albeit delusional, concept of where she’s going. You have an idea. You think you know where you’re headed. But hours -- or maybe days -- later, the painting looks absolutely nothing like you originally conceived it. Whatever concept you began with has disappeared, though you are not sure exactly how or why. This is where art gets interesting, inventive, exploratory and, for the artist, thrilling.

The first piece I created in the Flowers Past and Present series was The Past Will Always Be There. The initial painting was a white phlox in the center of the paper, begun in July of 2019, four months after my mother’s passing. I was finally back in my Maine studio, which has always been a place of refuge and solace. White phlox had bloomed in my garden, and the idea hanging in front of me was a big, white-on-white flower of impressive delicacy to express all the love and grief I was harboring. What came out was a tight, narrow, shrunken phlox floating all alone on a piece of paper. It both puzzled and irritated me to have so obviously failed.

Slowly, I kept adding flowers to the composition, picking what grew in the garden and painting them around the original phlox. I wanted to capture both their beauty and their imperfect character. For a few days, the flowers just floated on the paper until I added first one vase and then another. I wanted the vases to share the delicate character of the flowers without using the same approach, so I began to construct them from matte varnish and tissue paper. Rooting around in my studio looking for something else to use, I came across a box of things my mother had kept: old letters, stamps, wine bottle labels, Chinese cutouts, cards from the twenties and thirties, postcards from all her travels, maps. We lived in Europe through the sixties and seventies, and in that small box, I found a little treasure trove of my mother’s mementos to use in this painting and the ones to follow. My mother loved to travel and she loved flowers. From then on, through all 9 of the paintings I made for this series, I had an accurate concept of where to go and how to get there.

This body of work honors my mother, our lives as expatriates, and the fragile connections we all have to our worlds and to each other, past and present. My mother was a traveler. And as I painted, she was with me all along.

~ Maret Hensick

Maret Hensick graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, and from 1980-1986, she studied printmaking in the Hamline University studios with Leonardo Lasansky. She moved to Maine with her husband in 1986, and in 2020 after retiring a long and successful career in surface design, turned her redirected her talent and her full attention toward her fine art practice.

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A two-person exhibition of vibrant and exciting new figurative work, landscapes and seascapes by two extraordinarily bold and energetic painters, Grant Drumheller and Kathi Smith.

Artist Talk, June 9, 6 p.m.: Join us for our first in person event since the pandemic: an artist talk by Drumheller and Smith this exhibition. The talk will also be streamed live on Facebook.

I am a figurative artist. I am moved to paint the world I inhabit, the spaces and people of my experience. Whether I am in Maine, or New York City, or Rome, or my home studio in New Hampshire, I carry that from painting to painting. My work has become more color driven in recent years, and perhaps in certain aspects more about what lies around the figures.

As for abstraction, I employ abstract concepts in the formation of a work, and when I am erasing a painting or altering areas, I return it  to an abstract composition, i.e., one where only shapes of color exist.

Since I am no longer teaching, I feel greater liberty in my work, free to try different techniques, subjects, and media. Freedom is the true currency of being an artist.

~ Grant Drumheller

Drumheller earned a BFA (1976) and a Master of Fine Arts (1978) cum laude from Boston University. He also studied with Philip Guston, James Weeks and Reed Kay. Drumheller has taught at Boston University, the Art Institute of Boston and recently retired from his post as Professor of Art at the University of New Hampshire. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Grant in Painting to Italy. He has also been the recipient of a Blanche Colman Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Fellowship, a New England Foundation for the Arts Grant and a grant from the Pollock- Krasner Foundation.

Almost exactly one year ago, I sanded down every oil painting I had going in the studio and started anew. To me, there was no going back to the world in which they were created. For a while instead of painting, I took long walks along the edges and through the interior of Great Cranberry Island. I made sketches and took thousands of photographs of the outer islands which I had the chance to sail around for the first time. Through this process I eventually came back to myself and found a point of stability in the studio. I created these newest paintings there, mostly from memory. When I needed more information I would hike back to sit in front of the subject to soak it in. My “sea songs” include the quiet notes of night crossings on our boat to the island, the familiar tunes of known places and spaces along the interior and the steady rhythm of the ocean. They have served as my meditations in this strange year.

To me, Maine is rough, unforgiving, curious, familiar, and beautiful. The textured surfaces, energetic marks, and color notes that I use are intended to reach all five senses. I’m interested in making paintings that are tangible, physical, and all-embracing. And while the paintings I make are still rooted in observation, I am equally interested in abstraction and expression. My paintings are compilations of real and remembered worlds that I visit ritually, and are made to honor the sense of each of those places.

~ Kathi Smith

Smith earned a BFA in Painting & Drawing from the University of Southern Maine, and an MFA in Painting from the University of New Hampshire. Smith is an Associate Professor of Studio Arts at Husson University in Bangor. She is an active participant in the Maine contemporary art scene and keeps her studio in Bangor, ME.

GRANT DRUMHELLER

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KATHI SMITH

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Featuring Eileen Gillespie in the side gallery

In our side gallery this month we have work by another highly accomplished Maine painter, Eileen Gillespie, whose vibrantly expressionistic oil paintings are a joyful and energetic take on the tradition of floral still life.

My work uses a visceral painting language to describe the natural world in structural terms. Direct observation of both local landscapes and distant places to which I visit serve as subject matter and inspiration. Daily walks out in nature provide much of the content for my paintings. My paintings aim to capture a moment in time. It is through painting that I discover, experiment and enjoy leaps of faith that land onto the canvas and become unique objects of their own. Emotion, abstraction, rigor and playfulness are all involved. Working with flowers and the genre of still life brings the subject at hand directly into the studio. Through observation the floral subject becomes a means to further explore the medium of painting itself. When the marks become alive on the canvas they become their own individual subject and object. The painting takes over and what is left is an abstract representation of the spark that the painting is intended to portray. The historical aspect of floral painting as a genre is fascinating to me and as a painter as I am taking a turn at placing myself into this history. In the end I find that the timeless lushness, intricacy of nature, expression of color and gesture is well suited to my painting vocabulary and sense of expression.

~ Eileen Gillespie

Gillespie earned her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, where a year studying in Rome with RISD’s European Honors Program marked the genesis of a career long interest in architecture and structure in nature as a subject for her work. She received her MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania. Gillespie’s awards include a visiting artist position at the American Academy in Rome, a residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts, and a Fellowship at the Carina House on Monhegan Island, Maine. She is the recipient of a 2004 Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Ms. Gillespie has exhibited in numerous solo shows in Boston and Maine and many group shows throughout the northeast. Her work can be found in the collections of The Boston Athenaeum, Fidelity Investments, Wellington Management Company, Mount Sinai Hospital, and the Hertz Corporation among others.

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Greenhut’s biennial landscape show, “Maine, the Painted State,” is both a proud nod to Maine’s storied and outsized place in American Art History, and a celebration of the exciting ways the landscape tradition continues. How it is being carried on, and in some cases, reinvented, by contemporary Maine artists.

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Objects/Objectivity places non-representational sculptural objects made by Maine artists George Mason, Jonathan Mess, and Oliver Solmitz in conversation with each other. The materials are diverse, and the dialogue fascinating.

Click here to read the review

GEORGE MASON: I am asking whether the visual inquiry can be a relational vehicle that builds community and honors place. I am noting that putting work in unlikely places affords the audience opportunities for an utterly fresh response. I am seeing that light and shadow, color and texture can nourish without telling a story. I am suspecting the object may not be the 'art'.

I create conditions/experiments that I then follow with great curiosity. This appears to involve 'listening' and following the thread of what is observed. The materials I experiment with include plaster, clay, burlap, pigment, casein paint, and encaustic. Light, shadow, texture and relief, and the primacy of gravity continue to capture my attention.

JONATHAN MESS: My recent work has involved several series that visually and metaphorically reference land, maps, strata, geology, and geography. Process and its evidence have emerged as an essential aspect of this work.

My artwork is characterized by experimental abstraction using reclaimed ceramic materials and referencing natural land forms, constantly pushing my materials and processes into new territory. I have developed a low-waste making system by collecting discarded ceramic materials and recycling them into new forms.

OLIVER SOLMITZ: Rather than object or volume, my three dimensional work explores qualities of space defined by structure and color, revealed by light.

I embrace the tension found between modern materials that reflect a machine-based aesthetic with construction allowing evidence of the human hand. Yet, my two-dimensional investigations allow far greater looseness. This is the counterpoint to my designed and fabricated process, while all my research is informed by an architecture education. In a world filled with conflict, my work celebrates the peace that artistic duality can achieve.

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Greenhut's 26th Annual Holiday Show. This exhibition includes new work by our entire roster of artists. With styles ranging from realism to colorful abstraction and everything in between, there is something for everyone!

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