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A Critic’s Eye on New England Art
Take a look at art in New England with Edgar Allen Beem. Read his recent interview on contemporary art in New England with the Abbeville Manual of Style.
He's been art critic for the Portland Independent, art critic and feature writer for Maine Times, and now is a freelance writer for Yankee, Down East, Boston Globe Magazine, The Forecaster, and Photo District News.
He's the author of Maine Art Now (1990) and Maine: The Spirit of America (2000). In 1988, he won the Manufacturers Hanover Art/World Award for Distinguished Newspaper Art Criticism for his coverage of the 1987 auction sale of Vincent Van Gogh's Irises.
Ed says, "My credo as an arts writer has long been: 'The work of art is the search for meaning.' I believe art is not only a form of personal expression but also a form of inquiry, every bit as much a quest for truth as scientific research."
Ed Beem's newest book, Backyard Maine: Local Essays, has just been published by Tilbury House, Publishers, of Gardiner, Maine. It's not about the meaning of art; it's about the meaning of family, community, and life in general.
Sacred and Profane Portsmouth
Who knew there was a Portsmouth Museum of Fine Art?
February 4, 2010 at 9:28 AM | Post a Comment
Frankly, I had no idea what to expect when I drove down to Portsmouth yesterday to check out the Portsmouth Museum of Fine Art. I had only heard about it a week before from one of the 35 artists in Sacred and Profane: Eye of the Beholder, the museum's current (through April 24) exhibition. I must say I was pleasantly surprised both by the institution and the art.
Divide and Conquer
Frederick Lynch in Connecticut & Maine
January 27, 2010 at 8:41 AM | Post a Comment
Fred Lynch is one of my favorite painters. He is a painter's painter, rigorously disciplined about his work and primarily intent upon pleasing himself.
In the catalogue of his 2005 Form & Counterform 20-year retrospective at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, Lynch wrote as succinct an artist's statement as I have ever read: "I like to paint. I like my studio. I spend most of my time there, combining things that I remember and imagine with things that I see and feel, translating all this into images that I want to look at. My intention is beauty - my goals, pleasure and joy."
Two of Maine's Most Popular Painters
Jill Hoy and Eric Hopkins at Thos. Moser
January 22, 2010 at 8:51 AM | 2 Comments | Post a Comment
At first glance, Jill Hoy and Eric Hopkins: Elemental Rhythms seems an odd pairing, not because the artists have so little in common but because they have so much. The occasion of their joint exhibition at the Thos. Moser Cabinetmaker gallery in Freeport, Maine (January 28 to March 31) provides an opportunity to consider their aesthetic coincidences.
Painterly Sleight of Hand in New Britain
John Haberle: American Master of Illusion
January 14, 2010 at 4:04 PM | Post a Comment
John Haberle once painted a $10 bill with such verisimilitude that a critic of his day insisted it was real currency affixed to the canvas. That painting, "U.S.A (The Chicago Bill Picture), ca. 1889," is one of some 20 paintings and drawings currently assembled as John Haberle: American Master of Illusion at the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut (through March 14).
Practicing What They Preach
Art Teacher Art at the Saco Museum
January 6, 2010 at 7:31 AM | 1 Comment | Post a Comment
When I was in public school in the early 1960s, art education was a redoubt of nonconformists. And that seemed to me a good thing. In a school system where everything was about the system - rank, class, grades, discipline, standards, dress codes - art class was about freedom and individuality. Our male art teacher was obviously gay and our female art teacher was something of a bohemian, given to wildly colorful scarves and ostentatious hair ornaments. Their mere presence in the midst of so much buttoned-down conformity suggested to me that there was life outside and after high school.
