Applying to art school typically requires a portfolio of ten to twenty images. This portfolio is usually completed in high school advanced placement art classes and should demonstrate artistic range, diligence, and an understanding of core compositional and observational skills. In 2013, I was serving as the Chair of the Foundation Program at Maine College […] The post Philip Brou – Baxter Koziol appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
My dreams hold a strong message from my ancestors to tell their stories. My maternal family line is Armenian. My grandmother survived the early 20th-century Armenian genocide in Turkey. Although I knew some stories about my relatives, they were laden with holes and inconsistencies. Encounters in my dreams push me to research both personal and […] The post Cynthia Motian McGuirl appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
Samira Abbassy’s personal and artistic odyssey began in Iran, where she was born in 1965, took her to England, where she moved with her family in 1967, and since 1998 has been focused on New York City and the United States. Though her paintings evidence a strong Middle Eastern influence, she brings a world of […] The post Edgar Allen Beem – Samira Abbassy: Encountering Cultural Identities—Iranian, British, and American appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
In lockdown, I became a room. I grew floors and walls, and sometimes ceilings. Mostly, I was a corner. People stood, ghosts floated, mice nibbled, and peepholes formed. Sometimes my walls and floors broke apart: wood splintered, joists groaned, and screws came loose. These drawings explore the interiority that was part and parcel of the […] The post Tom Butler – I Became a Room appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
Earlier this spring, I visited the Rabkin Foundation, at 13 Brown Street in Portland, to attend a small gathering. The event took place amongst an evocative exhibit of postwar American artist Leo Rabkin’s two- and three-dimensional works, paintings and sculptures. In the midst of conversations, I found myself drawn to a centering box sculpture, a […] The post Claire Millikin – Encountering Lucas Samaras’s and Leo Rabkin’s Post-traumatic Boxes appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal...| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
Five months after graduating from college, I’d saved enough money substitute teaching at my old junior high school to pay for my round-trip airfare to Rome. I had my backpack with the rigid aluminum external frame and was ready to join my friends in Europe. Welcome to the world of aerogrammes and American Express Travelers […] The post Stuart Kestenbaum – Breaking Free appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
When we walk out of the door, we seek encounters: the moments that might just change our minds, or change our lives! When walking through the city, I often choose paths with the most foot traffic. When Nancy walks through the familiar woods and beaches on Peaks, she is seeking encounters with nature that will […] The post Scott Nash and Nancy Gibson-Nash appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
There is, without doubt, a mysterious aspect to our individual destinies. The irrational but persistent sense that the design of our lives is somehow cosmically guided becomes more intriguing, and slightly plausible, in old age. Before that, we are too busy to bother with it, and too sensible to give it any credence. But life […] The post Alan Magee – My Berlin appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
In a city filled with graffiti, Amsterdam is the perfect setting for a museum dedicated to street art. STRAAT, which opened in October 2020, showcases the work of street artists from around the world, each represented by a large-scale work, many of them created on site. Housed in an 86,000-plus-square-foot former welding warehouse on the […] The post Carl Little – Encounter in Amsterdam: Graffiti and Street Art at STRAAT appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
While touring England in April, my wife and I stopped in at the Mill Bridge Gallery in Skipton. Housed in one of the oldest dwellings in this market town in North Yorkshire, the gallery specializes in photography and sculpture and hosts an artist in residence. As luck would have it, the current resident artist, sculptor […] The post Carl Little – Encounter: Mark Butler and the 100 Day Project appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
I never had any plans to become an artist. My passion was music. In 1980, I was Managing Director of the Public Access Electronic Music Studio at a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in Seattle. On a rainy night in December of that year, I was at home in my room at the Hotel Savoy. I […] The post Michael Winkler appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
An Encounter I arrived at Green Acre Baha’i Center of Learning in Eliot, Maine, about 5:45 p.m. on Saturday 3 May, thinking I was quite a bit late for the opening. To my surprise, the huge hall was totally empty, except for a flock of hundreds of multi-colored origami paper birds flying overhead among the […] The post Alan Crichton – Dreams of Reality: Gardens of the Heart—The Art of Joe, Lynn, and Max Ascrizzi appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. F. Scott Fizgerald, The Great Gatsby Encounters with art mean different things to artists, curators, and the public at […] The post Chris Crosman – Nicole Wittenberg: Cheek to Cheek appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
In Jared French’s Prose, recently acquired by the Colby College Museum of Art, we witness an encounter between a man and a mirror. A nude, muscular, male figure stands before a large ovoid mirror, which faces outwards towards our space. The man stares into the mostly opaque surface: we cannot see his face, though perhaps […] The post Christopher T. Richards – Encounter: Man Mirror, Medieval Modern appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
Encounters can be accidental or intentional. They can be consequential in mightily important ways for good or ill—or they can be of no matter at all. We all get to have a mix of both in life. To the extent we can control and steer our encounters, those are gambles we take to shape the […] The post Ann Zill appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
simply a cautionary tale for those left behind I have a small collection on a shelf—a wooden ear, a wooden finger, a wooden golf club, all the things that have come off my late husband’s left behind sculptures during my moves. Most of his sculptures were under two feet (though he did huge pieces for […] The post Peggy Muir – Bryce Muir: What Artists Leave Behind appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
I want to play a part in building a safer, more equitable, and empathic society—of that much I’m certain. What’s unclear to me is how exactly I should go about doing that. Where and how should I direct my energy? My inclination is to build a relatively small and meaningful community, predominantly here in Maine. […] The post Ian Trask – Between Two Truths appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly.| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly
Tanja Hollander is a photographer best known for her Are You Really My Friend? project in which she photographed all 430 of her Facebook “friends.” Neither pure portraits nor straight documentary photographs, Hollander’s Facebook pictures are conceptual images that explore ideas about human relations in the age of social media. Hollander’s latest project began in […] The post Edgar Allen Beem – Tanja Hollander: Art As an Act of Empathy appeared first on The Maine Arts Journal: The...| The Maine Arts Journal: The UMVA Quarterly