Tag: Maine

Gallery shows Solo Shows

Alex Katz’s seas of orange

Contributed by Tena Saw / Ninety-eight-year-old Alex Katz’s current gem of an exhibition at Gladstone consists of eleven orange and white canvases, each ten and a half feet high, that wrap around the main gallery. All reference a road in Maine where Katz spends summers. Unlike most of his work, they lean heavily towards abstraction, treating the road like an opportunity to explore perspective or the light on the leaves. Particularly if you’re lucky enough be alone in the gallery – a single room of high white walls, industrial scaffold ceiling, and enormous skylights – it becomes a kind of meditation tank, containing a sea of optical orange. Natural light settles on the paintings like a mist. The effect is more akin to that of an installation than that of a traditional painting show. 

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Solo Shows

Tom Butler’s emotional twilight zone

Contributed by Mark Wethli / Technical drawing – the kind we see in plans, elevations, and orthogonal perspectives – is not the obvious choice to explore feelings of isolation, sadness, or loss. For over a century, the painterly gesture has been the primary signifier of these emotions, while drafting has been the province of the designer and the engineer.  Given this disparity, Tom Butler’s choice of this medium, in his show “I Became a Room” at Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich, Maine, is a surprising one; not for its own sake but the result of a creative process that transforms the art of technical drawing in unexpected and meaningful ways.

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Group Shows

You Don’t Know Me: Trompe L’Oeil and artistic illusion

Contributed by Mark Wethli / On a small shelf in a quiet corner of Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich, Maine, sits a dog-eared paperback copy of Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. With a growing sense of delight, we soon realize that the book is itself a trick, a trompe l’oeil sculpture by Justin Richel, convincing in every detail from its vintage 1990s graphics to its well-worn cover….It is a fitting overture to “You Don’t Know Me,” the four-person show currently on view. The artists – Carly Glovinski, Rachel Grobstein, Duncan Hewitt, and Richel – present kindred explorations of parallel realities, producing conundrums and contradictions that give rise to visual enchantment and philosophical contemplation.

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Solo Shows

Jay Stern’s psychological realism

Contributed by Mark Wethli / Jay Stern’s paintings of domestic interiors and landscapes, now on view in his solo exhibition at Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine, invite us into familiar worlds but take us there in unexpected ways. The first time I saw his work – a series of paintings of a wooden drying rack – I admired how he transformed this humble, intimate household object into something iconic and worthy of attention. On a formal level, I was impressed by how the diamond pattern of the rack’s design served as a strong compositional framework, not unlike a trellis for an array of color patches whose abstract shapes, painterly shorthand, and understated yet luminous tonalities amplify our sense of the paintings’ warmth, intimacy, and human connection.

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Solo Shows

Tom Butler’s cabinet of wonders

Contributed by Mark Wethli / Years ago I was fascinated to read about a theory that the grooves on ancient clay pots, like the grooves on a vintage music cylinder, might be playable. Given the right audio equipment, we might be able to hear the voices and sounds of the potter’s studio the moment the pot was being made. This beguiling notion came to mind while I was looking at the most recent work of Tom Butler at the Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich, Maine.

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