Thursday January 10 at 7PM. Lincoln Theatre, Damariscotta, Maine

TALKING ART IN MAINE with host Jane Dahmen and her guest, gallery artist, SAM CADY.

LOIS DODD: Selected Paintings, ALEXANDRE GALLERY, NY, NY. December 2, 2017 through January 27, 2018 – in conjunction with the publication of “Lois Dodd”, a monograph by Faye Hirsch.

Lund Humphries Contemporary Painter Series

Hardback, 144 pages, 100 color illustrations. Publication: October 6, 2017

The Camden Public Library welcomes Melanie Essex to the Picker Room Gallery for the month of November. Her dynamic and colorful paintings hold fascinating hidden detail. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, November 4 at 4:00 pm, with a chance to meet the artist.

“All of my work begins with looking at, then responding to the natural world,” says Essex. “As a young painter in New York, I worked in a life studio, drawing and painting from the model 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for 4 years. In the summers I would get out of the city, when I could, to work directly from the rural, waterfront landscape of my childhood on eastern Long Island. Painting in that low, bucolic bay setting had a huge impact on the way I developed as an artist. There were big skies over thin strips of land, barrier beaches or the distant shore across the bay. I often worked on wood panels, joining them together horizontally to span a vista, or vertically to emphasize events along the horizon.  I decided I was a landscape painter and that was that.”

A move to London in 1995 shifted her focus to urban landscapes – first exploring the view from her World’s End studio, then painting for several years from perches at the top of skyscrapers and finally from the banks of the Thames.

Though humans rarely appeared in this work, she kept drawing from the figure throughout. At first, Essex drew from paintings in the National Gallery. Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese were her favorites.  Going forward, she snatched opportunities where she could – taking a life class at the Royal College of Art, sharing a model with painter friends, joining groups in London and then in Rockland as well in Tenants Harbor and Thomaston. Those summer sessions were especially wonderful as they drew outside – amongst trees, unruly vegetable gardens, stacks of firewood, sleeping dogs, curious chickens – in the landscape.

“Then,” Essex continues, “About ten years ago figures began creeping into my work to compete for attention with the sky and the ground. The Field/Sky/Figure series was made in my last London studio – a converted greenhouse at the bottom of an overgrown garden. The Thames was in walking distance and supplied plenty of material – sky, clouds, tidal water, fog and the kind of dramatic sunsets enhanced by urban pollution. Increasingly figures began to dominate the painted fields beneath the skies. The Power Plant series evolved as a counterpoint – signaling the human presence in the form of silos, typical of post-war power generating stations in the UK.”

Melanie Essex graduated from Harvard in 1981 and after a successful career in film production – her work is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art – she studied painting at the New York Studio School from 1990-1994. Her work has been exhibited in London and New York and in Maine, and is in important private collections on both sides of the Atlantic, including several trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  After two decades in London she has returned to the US and lives and works in Cushing, Maine. She is represented by the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland Maine.

Camden Public Library

55 Main St.

Camden, Maine 04843

Review by Tatiana Istomina

May 23rd, 2014

Alan Bray could be a character in a Henry James novel: a New Englander who traveled to Europe and found himself profoundly changed by the experience. Born in Waterville, Maine, in 1946, he grew up in Monson, Massachusetts, studied at the Art Institute of Boston and the University of Southern Maine, and in 1971 went to Florence to enroll in a Masters program at Villa Schifanoia Graduate School of Fine Arts. According to the press release of the show now on view at Garvey Simon Art Access, Florence presented Bray with three treasures: a new painting medium (casein tempera), the examples of the Italian masters (Fra Angelico, Pietro Lorenzetti and Simone Martini), and a renewed and growing attachment to his native New England.

Wystan Hugh Auden referred to Henry James as the “Master of nuance and scruple”. The phrase appears to be an apt description of Bray: his small-scale landscapes at Garvey Simon suggest a highly sensitive, delicate and conscientious artistic disposition. The landscapes are the tranquil views of inland Maine: a footbridge over a small creek in the snow-covered woods, a field criss-crossed by diverging paths, a cloud sitting on the top of a hill. The paintings are made with casein on panel, and when viewed at a close range, their dry surfaces display intricate networks of closely-knit brush strokes. The depicted landscapes are highly simplified: all accidental details eliminated, all shapes reduced to their closest geometric analogs, organic chaos organized into geometric pattern. The apparent simplicity of the images, combined with the traditional subject matter and the unabashedly pleasing colors would have brought these works dangerously close to illustration – if not for the sophistication of Bray’s technique. The intense, slightly bizarre effect produced by these works is partly due to the dissonance between the ostensible prettiness of the images and the the formal austerity, even harshness of the method of painting used to create them.

The best of the paintings on view are posed exactly in the midpoint between the figurative and the abstract: the regular shapes that look like Plato’s ideas of trees, logs and ponds are organized with the precision of a mathematical proposition, while a few details supplied by the artist’s sharp observation of nature link these shapes to the reality of the tangible world. Such perfect balance is very hard to achieve: a work that strays too far into the world of ideas tends to turn into an abstract pattern. On the other hand, if it moves an extra step into the opposite direction, it runs the risk of becoming an inert and somewhat mannered landscape. The best piece in the show, “Winter’s false start,” finds an exact equilibrium between the observed reality and the mental diagram. The effect is striking and slightly disorienting: like the duck-rabbit figure, the image is perceptually ambiguous, oscillating between a pond in a field covered with snow and an abstract composition in white, blue and yellow.

This is also the piece that makes the viewer stop and ask herself – what could be the meaning of this work? The visceral pleasure produced by the painting is baffling and demands explanations. Surely, a serious art practice, especially one that has been sustained for over four decades, is an expression of a vision, of the artist’s understanding of the world – but somehow it has become rather difficult today to think of landscape painting as a vehicle of meaning. Bray’s works are going against the grain of contemporary painting and perhaps even contemporary sensibility – but they have a strong quiet presence, which indicates that something important is being said. What it is exactly, is hard to put in words. Perhaps they suggest that there is some kind of innate order in the organic chaos of life, a deeply ingrained law of clarity and perfection. Finding a rational order at the heart of reality might have been a difficult task for Italian Renaissance painters, but for an artist working today it is an almost impossible feat. Moreover, this is the task that cannot be achieved once and for all: with every new scene and every new painting the artist needs to start over again – but when his search is successful, life has a bit more order in it.

Cicely Aikman Scherer died at Valley Cares in Townshend, Vermont, on December 6, 2013, eleven days after her husband Fred F. Scherer passed away. Born on June 4, 1923 in El Paso, TX, she was the oldest of three children of Duncan and Helen (Wyman) Aikman.

She attended the University of Chicago, but left in her sophomore year and went to New York City to study under Morris Kantor at the Art Students League, between 1942-1946.  Aikman reflects; “This was a serious art education -our only regret as students was that due to World War II, we could not go to Europe, in particular to Paris to see firsthand the works of Picasso and Matisse.” At the League she met her first husband, painter Paul Breslin.

Cicely was an avid traveler. She went to Florence, Italy by boat with her two-year-old son, Paul Breslin Jr., and lived the bohemian life with her many friends. She lived in Peru from 1956-1957, traveling all over the region, Ecuador, Chile, Cuzco and Lima, Peru, where she taught English.  Other trips included the Greek Isles and Turkey and countless journeys to France to visit her son Paul, who has made Paris his home.

Cicely worked as a librarian at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History. There she met Fred Scherer, fellow artist, they married in 1969. In 1972 they moved to Friendship, where they lived there for 32 years and adopted and raised Fred’s grandchild, Kim Scherer. In 2005, Cicely moved to Brattleboro, Vermont with her husband to be nearer to daughter Deidre Scherer and her husband Steve Levine.

Cicely showed her work in galleries in New York City including The Artists’ Gallery, Green Mountain Gallery, Pyramid Gallery, and Westbeth Gallery. She painted winters in NYC and Vero Beach, FL, and summers in Provincetown and Maine.  In 1972 she helped form a cooperative, the Waldoboro Gallery. Her work has been shown outside of NYC in numerous galleries and museums including the Maine Coast Artists, Round Top Center for the Arts, The Portland Museum, and The Farnsworth Museum. Since 2006, she has shown at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center and Robert Crowell Gallery, Newfane, VT. From 1990 to the present, the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, ME has represented Cicely’s work.

Among her many interests, Cicely loved classical music, reading and writing poetry, literature and the writing of her memoirs.  She also participated in numerous peace demonstrations during the 60’s and 70’s. Cicely will be remembered for her generosity, her love of animals, her liberal politics, and her poetic sense of form and color that made her such a unique and talented sculptor and painter.

Cicely is predeceased by first husband Paul Breslin; by second husband Fred F. Scherer and by brother Edward Aikman; she is survived by her sister Ann McQuade of Port Washington, NY; son Paul Breslin Jr. and his wife Catherine of Paris, France: daughter Kim Scherer and her husband, Paul Young of Seattle, WA; and four step-children; Janice-Ellen Scherer-Dufner and her husband, Frank Dufner, of Lyman, ME; William Scherer and his wife, Sitora, of Cold Spring, NY; Deidre Scherer and her husband, Steve Levine, of Williamsville, VT; and Gregory Scherer and his wife, Makhiruy, of Cold Spring, NY; 5 nieces and nephews; 14 grandchildren, and 8 great-grandchildren.

All are welcome to a memorial service that will be held on Sunday, December 15^th, at 2:30 pm at Valley Cares, 461 Grafton Road, Townshend, VT, with a reception to follow.

The family expresses their heartfelt thanks to the amazing staff of Valley Cares for their professional, unending care and compassion; to Susan Nelson and her wonderful group of caregivers; the hospice staff of Bayada Services for their sensitive support and Dr. Timothy Shafer for his compassion and understanding.

Gifts may be made in Cicely’s name to Valley Cares, 461 Grafton Road, Townshend, VT 05353.

by Daniel Kany

John Goodman’s photographic prints are incomparably luscious.  The idea of an aesthetic texture such as Goodman’s exquisitely soupy grains is like brushwork.  In some artist’s hands — say, Van Gogh or Monet — style begins with the smallest bits in their pictures — the brush strokes — as opposed to artists like Andrew Wyeth whose critical textures are tied to the overal picture’s high focus.

In his 2007 silver print “Father’s Day/Coney Island,” Goodman present a young couple sprawled in a chaotically suggestive pose on a beach blanket, angled off with their feet away from the viewer.  A bikini-clad young woman is on her back, passive but sexually spalyed as her man lies on his side actively engaged as a paramour in hot pursuit.  Their faces are covered with a towel for a bit of ostrich-like privacy — which feels fully invaded by the seemingly stolen snapshot evidenced by the crooked-elbow shadow of the picture-taker.

But something is wrong.  The ostensibly-in-the-heat-of-the-moment couple’s beach blanket is covered by long-blown sand.  Its wrinkles belie a wizened artifact more than ephemeral passion. And the beach is the hard-tack, black-sealed, creement-solid surface of fine-sand low-tide.  It’s the grain of sand and photo.  It’s a young woman’s white knee pressing into the rich black upper left corner of the print.

This is no snatched kiss.  It’s an extraordinarily complex and well-composed photograph shot with the final print in mind.  It is the soft white of her body against his chiseled dark form, the shape of the lovers’ form on the sand, and the cacophony of textures and values that Goodman orchestrates into a symphony of formal brilliance.  It’s about relative time — as is all of “Black White + Blue.

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This is the subject of the high-focus “Emma Mahler,” an old lady standing in a weathered garage with a 1930’s car.  Here Goodman plays the idea of age against something dated.  The car is old-fashioned, but the woman — the undoubtedly sparky — is aged.  We see ephemeral fasion in the design of the car and in her patterned dress and heels.  The plants of the garage are past their prime and the way they block it reveals the car is a relic as well.  All this forces us to check the date of the photo — 1974 — and recast Emma and her accoutrements against the age of the print.  It’s an exciting process until you realize what 40-years-later means for Emma.  And then we see that Goodman isn’t just clever, but profound.

At his best, Goodman’s gorgeously grainy images play solidity and motion against each other.  In his “Dominoes/Havana,” we see two hands flying over a set of dominoes to mix them up. With increased motion, there is more blur – the lively vehicle of graininess.  So the textures of the hands and closest dominoes stand in contrast to the sculpturally solid volumes of the untouched pieces in the middle.  The table, too, plays this game since the paint has been worn away closest to the players’ hands. This is Goodman’s complete human-touch metaphor: We see the grain and the wear at the edges of human touch — in the objects as well as the photographs.

A particularly masterful print is Goodman’s 1993 “Summer Shower/Tuscany” in which a man and horse shower after a ride. The man stands arch-backed and shirtless (and with his solid lower body in dark pants, satyr-like) under an outdoor shower while holding a hose on his equine companion.  Because the strong sun is behind the shower-supporting building on the far left, the drops and spray are in white sparkling high-relief everywhere against the contrasty-dark and silhouetted landscape below the light-burned sky. We feel the textures of the dazzling water: drops on the satyr-man and spray on the horse, as though shaking itself dry from a bath.

This is so much more than seeing and grabbing a picturesque moment with a camera.  This print is a reminder that photography is a complete art when the person behind the lens is also a master printer.

The other part of “Black White + Blue” is a set of color images from slides shot in the 1970’s and 80’s and printed for the first time in 2010.  This technological disconnet is fascinating — since “archival pigment prints” (a digital process) didn’t exist when the slides were shot.  Once again, however, Goodman employs these as a master of time.  He shows us a red-soaked cinema in 1985 with a cigarette machine that would have us date it years before.  A mannequin (or isit?) stands away from us nude but for a square of butcher paper taped to the window — so contemporary but for the outdated “Bank Americard” placard.  In “Woman Driver, South Boston,” we see a woman in curlers driving a car that, on closer inspection, has seen better days; the car inspires us to think harder about the makeup she’s wearing: Is it there to make her prettier or to cover her nicks and dings?

“Black White + Blue” is a rich story of Maine photography.  At the Maine Media Workshops + College, Goodman (a student of major photographer Minor White) was an instructor of photographer/Pho Pa co-owner John Edwards.  But following a 2012 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it’s clear Goodman is also a player in the national photography conversation.  Moreoever, Goodman’s prices — $3,000 for a print — raise questions we don’t have time to visit here, such as: Is the reason we don’t have a functional photography market in Maine because of the disconnet with NYC bubble-market pricing?

Maine is soaked in great photography: not only through the MMW+C but Colby, Bowdoin, Bates, PMA and artists throughout the state.  This is the land not only of Berenice Abbott but Paul Caponigro and William Wegman, after all.  But the Maine photographic community has yet to connect with a local market.  Photography is here now; it just needs standards, leadership and time to find purchase in the market.  In a season when I have been writing about nothing more than photography, Goodman’s “Black White + Blue” is a high water mark.