“Benjamin Hawley: All this and not ordinary” at Grant Wahlquist Gallery (through May 20), “A More Human Dwelling Place” at George Marshall Store Gallery in York (through May 28) and “Holdfast” (through June 8) at Zero Station Gallery are entirely distinct shows, but considered together, they demonstrate the richness and diversity of Maine’s contemporary art scene.

There’s something so formally elegant about Hawley’s paintings that they seem more typical of a mature sensibility and a well-seasoned artist’s commitment to uncompromising conceptual rigor. (He’s in his mid-20s.) The show’s title comes from the opening lines of a Gertrude Stein poem, “Tender Buttons.” To paraphrase her meaning, Hawley spins gold out of objects we often dismiss as quotidian – a bowl, steam rising out of an opening, a curve of counter – illustrating just how extraordinary they can be.

Consider “Collected Firmament.” It is ostensibly an oil painting of a bowl. But it seems otherworldly in the way it levitates in midair. You apprehend its shadow on the surface around it, but the surface itself doesn’t really feel like a “firmament” at all; rather, it is like some void. Its shape and contour are clearly defined, and its glaze appears glossy enough to reflect light. But there is no obvious light source.

Hawley, who hails from Boston, faithfully renders the bowl as an object, but it exists within an enigmatic space. Most paintings verge on abstraction, mere references to something – sometimes clear, sometimes not. A prime example is “Whenever I see it, I still think about what you said and laugh a little,” a painting that is little more than a line, upturned at the ends like a smile, floating in a deep cerulean ground.

What is this object that is advancing toward us? The rim of a disc or plate moving through nothingness? We don’t know. But, like the objects in “Sky Mound” and “Full,” it possesses a palpable sense of emergence, of forms manifesting out of some mysterious unmanifest infinity.

Strange as it may sound, Hawley’s paintings invoked Vermeer for me. Not that they are anywhere near as literal. But one of the astonishing – and most confounding – things about Vermeer is our helplessness to discern a single brushstroke in his work. Brushstroke iterates movement and energy and acknowledges the presence of the artist in a work. The lack of brushstroke in Vermeer’s oeuvre makes his subjects and interiors appear like apparitions somehow out of time or, because era and locale are identifiable, suspended in time and susceptible to instantly dissolving again into nothing but molecules of light. It’s what gives them their ineffable quality of silence and stillness. Time and space have paused to merely observe a very specific millisecond along a continuum.

Very occasionally, you can identify Hawley’s brush. But mostly somehow he erases it – with a roller, for example, or by blotting strokes away with cloth. This obliterates the paintings’ authorship and sense of fixedness in space. Look long enough at a painting like “Whenever I see it” and you may find yourself losing the sense of your own body, as if this unidentifiable object draws you inexorably into the cerulean expanse from which it’s emerging, swallowing your selfhood whole.

Absence of brushwork is particularly effective in “Into Thin Air,” which conveys vapor arising from a round opening. We can’t tell what the opening is. It could be a pot boiling on a stove, a steaming manhole cover in winter, a caldera spewing sulphureous fumes. This could variously imply something homey, urban or toxic. The power of this reductiveness lies in leaving you dangling somewhere between knowing and unknowing, clarity and conundrum.

Also like Vermeer, Hawley’s colors have an inner luminosity to them. I’m not sure what accounts for that, but they give the distinct impression that we are looking at light, not just a recognizable substance like oil paint. Many display airbrushed-like ombrés that ripple from top to bottom of each canvas, contributing to the ephemerality of what we are seeing, as if their forms, like a color’s saturation, can slowly fade out.

ARTISTIC GROWTH IN YORK

There’s a tremendous amount of wonderful work at the George Marshall Store Gallery, all of it curated by Myron M. Beasley, a professor at Bates College and board member for the Surf Point Foundation, an artist residency program whose alumni are featured in the current show. With 31 artists represented, including various works not for sale by one of Surf Point’s founders, Beverly Hallam, it seems disingenuous to single out individual artists.

A thorough review is impossible, since media and viewpoints are so wide-ranging and diverse. You will find many familiar Maine names here: Séan Alonzo-Harris and Cole Caswell (photography), Tessa Greene O’Brien (painting), Isaac Jaegerman (papercut), Barbara Sullivan (fresco technique on sculpture), Gregory Jamie (watercolor).

Then there are lesser known, non-local artists such as Bryana Bibbs (Illinois), Tyrone Mitchell (New York) and Antonio McAfee (Indiana). Interestingly, the former two would have been perfect for inclusion in the Zero Station show.

Hallam’s work ties the salient theme together in that it is literally all over the place. She experimented with acrylic paint, printing and collage, mica paint and tissue on Masonite, charcoal. Experimentation is the key. What Surf Point Foundation has offered since 2019 is a haven – the former home of Hallam and her friend Mary-Leigh Call Smart on 47 seaside acres in York – to disconnect from daily obligations so they can connect with other artists and explore new territory in their work.

On view is evidence of the valuable results these three-week residential stints yielded. It’s a fascinating assessment of the artistic diversity Maine has harbored for centuries.

HOLDING ON

“Holdfast” is about the determination of nature to stay affixed amid the perpetual movement and change of the oceans. A holdfast is a root or stalk that attaches to coastal formations, a connection so tenacious that not even the tides can dislodge it. But this is a metaphor extending far beyond a particular marine biology, prompting meditations on eternal struggles between permanence within the context of the infinitely shifting universe.

Amy Ray writes in her artist’s statement, “Trace the taut line back to your authentic self, feel bones beneath skin, listen to the beat, tune into your understanding of the world, get back to the holdfast, find the heart of the matter.” In “Bouquet,” the attachment to her Maine home takes on an actual persona, the central stalk appearing almost figural and endowed with breasts.

Los Angeles-based Molly Haynes (the only non-Maine artist of the five in the show) presents three works that are more generally about the eternal tension between flow and stasis. The flow is represented by synthetic or hand-twisted cords that vertically snake along the weft of her weavings. The warp, which incorporates monofilament (some harvested from salvaged lobster lines in Maine and Massachusetts) attempts to bind these in place. Yet the ends of the cords splay out, unbounded and free. Sometimes bits of other material (cactus in my favorite, “Cholla”) are caught up in this web. But one senses they will eventually work themselves free and return to the flow.

I haven’t always related to the paintings of Sarah Faragher. Her statement characterizes them as “memoirs of my experiences with nature.” Yet their almost simplistic representation often reduces rock formations in particular in a way that, for me at least, can feel inhibiting and prescriptive. Her flat, almost cartoonlike depictions can become, in a sense, structured experiences of nature that deny their rugged beauty.

The works here, however, from 2018 and 2020, eschew flatness, bringing modulation of color and brushwork to these outcroppings in a way that imbues them with immediacy and life. A painting like “Goodell Brook Falls – After the Rain” transmits the sense of Faragher actually in the landscape, experiencing it with all her senses. We can smell the forest and hear the rushing water.

Eric Stark trained as an architect, a fact that confirms his abundantly apparent understanding of structure and organic flow through space. He weaves – astoundingly freehand – sweetgrass constructions around black rocks he collects along the shore. A piece like “Topo” can certainly feel, when viewed from above, like a topographic map come to three-dimensional life. But it might also be read as mimicking the currents of seawater around a stationary rock. The way “Fold” perches around a pointed rock reminded me of the way barnacles and mussels stubbornly cling to rocks or wharfs. These are infinitely wonderous sculptures that both hold fast and undulate freely.

Jeannet Leenderste’s approach to “holdfast” has everything to do with belonging, with feeling actually “of a place.” Born in The Netherlands, she now lives on the Blue Hill peninsula, a coastline similar to the one near which she grew up. She manipulates dried seaweed, specifically rockweed, to create baskets with swelling and receding forms that evoke the fluid movement of water. The forms are responses to driftwood, which become handles for the baskets that the seaweed captures in its sinews, much like Haynes’s cactus is caught in the monofilament.

These are voluptuous, sensual forms that, once thoroughly dried, Leenderste coats in beeswax. They are beautifully poetic in their embodiment of the constant tension the show deals with, as well as innovative in their materials (which can also be said of Haynes and Stark).

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

This story was updated at 10:03 a.m. May 8 to correct the year that the Surf Point Foundation residency program began.

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