Highlights from of an expansive and informative exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts celebrating the work of Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore. The focus is on organic abstraction, and simplification of form. These famous contemporaries never met, but explored similar subject matter and themes, as laid out in the room titles: The Space Between,” “Looking Within,” “Nestled Forms,” “Flowers,” “Holes,” and “Looking Through.” The exhibit includes recreated studios of O’Keeffe’s home studio in Abiquiú, New Mexico, and Moore’s in the farmlands of Hertfordshire, UK. This exhibit, which contains roughly 90 works by Moore and 60 by O’Keeffe, is a must-see.

Who are some of the most promising emerging Maine artists, and how do they and their work relate to one another? These connections – whether it is common artistic themes of identity, kinship, and ecology – or their shared artist community - are at the heart of As We Are at the Portland Museum of Art. The show features 15 artists with connections to Maine, including those who live here, went to Maine College of Art (MECA) or have attended artist residencies in Maine.

This blog covers some of the highlights of the permanent collection of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, including paintings by Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley, Russell Cheney, and Lynne Mapp Drexler. This gem of a museum hosts the only collection devoted exclusively to American artists. The museum has an outdoor sculpture garden with sweeping views of Perkins Cover. Ogunquit Museum is a delightful way to spend a few hours while visiting Ogunquit Maine. The museum is part of the The Maine Art Museum Trail, which offers an art-guided journey across Maine, covering 9 museums and more than 80,000 works of art.

Does AI also have the potential to help artists save time with marketing-related tasks, so they could spend more time painting? I had a little fun playing around with an AI writing assistant named Theobot that claims to help artists with all of their art-related writing tasks, and wanted to share my results. I used the AI tool to generate name suggestions for painting, write a brief description of each painting for marketing materials, provide artwork critiques, and analyze the consistency of my portfolio of uploaded images. There are additional Theobot capabilities with a paid subscription, but I focused on the free features.    

Boston Art Review: Claire Van Vliet’s Pulp Paintings at the Boston Athenaeum

This exhibit of Vermont artist Claire Van Vliet’s paintings showcases her pioneering work in pulp painting and innovative book formats. Most of the paintings on display are created using pigmented paper pulp as a medium, so the pigment is embedded in the layers of pulp, rather than applied to the paper’s surface. The exhibit also includes 3D, sculptural pieces and handmade, collaborative books that typically feature poetry by well-known poets such as Denise Levertov and Hayden Carruth. The pulp paintings have the soft, luminous glow of watercolor paintings, with heightened atmospheric effects and depth of color. Van Vliet’s cloud paintings are particularly powerful. In writing about her choice of medium, she wrote: “I know of no other way of achieving the ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ subtlety in the transitions….The colors emanate and the fibers float.”  

It is fitting that this exhibit is hosted by the Boston Athenaeum, one of the country’s oldest libraries, which has an extensive lending library as well as over 100,000 rare books and manuscripts.  If you live in the Boston area, there are several docent-led tours of this wonderful little exhibit on their event calendar for October 2024. The exhibit runs through December 30^th, 2024.

This blog is about my first piece of political statement art ever, which was just accepted into the international competition "Global Warming is Real” at the Museum of Encaustic Art outside of Santa Fe, NM. The painting depicts the loss of the iconic fishing shacks at Fisherman’s Point near Willard Beach in South Portland, Maine during the January 2024 storm surge. The painting depicts one of the shacks as it is being swept away. I embedded navigational charts of Casco Bay into the walls and piers to symbolize the structure being claimed by the waters.   

I also talk about my early days fishing on the waters of Buzzards Bay, off of New Bedford, Massachusetts.  

Maine art review. My take on why the Lynne Drexler exhibit at the Farnsworth is a must-see, for artists as well as Maine art lovers. Drexler’s abstract paintings from the 1960s are lyrical, joyful compositions, and we could all use a little more joy these days.