“Echoes of Love: Alicia Ethridge” at The Parsonage in Searsport. Courtesy of the Parsonage Gallery. Copyright of the Artist.

Remember the old question our teachers asked us the first day of the elementary school year: “What did you do on your summer vacation?” It won’t surprise readers of this column to learn that my answer would be, “I saw some art.” What’s different this summer is that my travels led me to a weeklong summer rental on Deer Isle with friends, so the shows I took in were off my usually well-beaten track.

On the way there, I stopped into the opening of two exhibitions at The Parsonage in Searsport, which specializes in mounting shows that concern themselves with matters spiritual and environmental. Ergo “Echoes of Love: Alicia Ethridge,” the more spiritually oriented of the two. The other is “Weisses Gold: G. Roland Biermann,” which has everything to do with the environment. Both run through Nov. 24.

I also visited Cynthia Winings Gallery in Blue Hill, which was, unfortunately, taking down “Matinée,” a show wonderfully co-curated by Winings and Buzz Masters. Winings has closed for the season but watch out for the reopening in May. And if any of her exhibitions features the work of Gideon Bok, make a beeline. They were the most impressive paintings in “Matinée,” along with Anne Hebebrand’s works upstairs in the Project Space.

ART, CRAFT AND MORE

Morris Dorenfeld, “Tapestry 127, Boogie Boogie V,” wool weft and linen warp, 70” x 46”, 2007; right, George Hardy, “Seagull with fish in beak,” carved and painted wooden bird Photo by Katama Murray

I was luckier at Turtle Gallery in Deer Isle, which was hosting its final show of the season as well, “Textiles & Textures” (through Oct. 6). This title does not necessarily apply to all the work you will see at Turtle Gallery. Since opening in 1982, Turtle has drawn upon the rich legacy of nearby Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. So, its offerings include everything from weavings and woodcuts to ceramics, sculpture and jewelry.

Certainly, the vividly colored and meticulously woven works of Morris Dorenfeld (1937-2023) qualify for inclusion under this expansive umbrella. Dorenfeld studied painting but took up weaving when he moved to Midcoast Maine. We can see his painter’s training in these gorgeous tapestries, which feel like geometric abstraction more than just tapestry. His color sense was vivid and sumptuous, and his compositions share affinities with artists such as Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Mark Rothko and Yvonne Jacquette (the darker ones), as well as Native weavers in the American Southwest, whose work he greatly admired.

Barbara Putnam’s works seem less connected to this overall theme, but her woodcut prints of Monhegan Island are one of the standouts of the show nevertheless. Not only are these woodcuts incredibly complex, their blocks carved to within an inch of their lives, but their stark black-and-white palette and teeming undergrowth also appear eerily self-possessed, as though these highly resilient plant species might strangle any creature that strays into their path. They are dense, knotty, sinewy and, with their potentially lethal undertone, wildly beautiful.

Barbara Putnam, “Monhegan 12,” woodcut relief print, 2024 Photo by Katama Murray

There are lots of ceramics too, the most “textural” of which are, arguably, Sharon Townsend’s incredibly lifelike wall sculptures of cascades of rolled birchbark and grouped branches. Paul Heroux’s folded vases also create plenty of texture through pattern and use of decals, the latter showing some synchrony with the “textile” part of the title’s equation. Lynn Duryea’s glazes evoke tarnished or corroded finishes of industrial decay, even as her forms are sensual and gracefully curved, like stylized machine parts; and Sequoia Miller’s cityscape vessels also exhibit considerable texture thanks to the graphite-like appearance of their glazes.

There’s so much more: twig furniture by Wayne Hall, exquisite turned-wood vessels by Chris Joyce, hooked rugs by Mary Ann McKellar, et alia.

HUMANKIND, SPIRIT AND NATURE

The curatorial statement for Alicia Ethridge’s show downstairs at The Parsonage talks about the liminality in her paintings as a spiritual space where foreground and background “dissolve in an efflorescence of vibrant, intuitive brushstrokes.” Ethridge herself characterizes her painting practice as a “conduit to the spiritual plane.”

Whether you pick this up or not is not relevant to enjoying the work, which is painted in bright hues – sunny yellows, scarlet reds, flaming oranges, cobalt blues and so on – that are laid on as thick as taffy. They are so materially sensuous that you want to eat her surfaces, lick what looks like their candy-colored sweetness.

Alicia Ethridge, “Offering,” 2023, oil on canvas, 4 feet, 7.5 inches by 3 feet, 8 inches. Courtesy of the Parsonage Gallery. Copyright of the Artist.

Yet I’d be surprised if viewers did not detect at least some of their mystical content, particularly in the ubiquitous presence of wolves, which in Celtic stories, Ethridge says, “bring a sense of faithfulness, inner strength and intuition.” It’s clear that the wolf’s presence is spiritually significant for this artist, as are images of women and a rider with a horse (which reference her relationship with her deceased mother, also a painter at one time who depicted, unbeknownst to Ethridge, rider/horse imagery). There are deer, flowers and birds, all of them placed, we understand, with great intentionality and purpose.

Alicia Ethridge, “Animalia 3,” 2024, oil on canvas, 3 by 2 feet. Courtesy of the Parsonage Gallery. Copyright of the Artist.

Ethridge has developed a very personal visual lexicon based on her own spiritual orientation, which derives from wisdom traditions and contemplative practice. Once you’ve tuned into the spiritual dimensions of these paintings, you will find allusions to it everywhere. Which is a good thing, since without this depth the paintings might feel simply loud and jarring, with a childlike style that might seem more naïve than wise and grounded.

There is something very alive here that is not simply about color and texture. Soul, spirit, memory, life force, inner nature – it could be any and all of these things.

Upstairs, we’re in for something at once formal and a lot more thematically dire. “G. Roland Biermann’s visual vocabulary,” reads the curatorial statement, “often includes industrial materials, which offer a compelling minimalist aesthetic while also signaling ecological distress.”

G. Roland Biermann’s installation at The Parsonage. Courtesy of the Parsonage Gallery. Copyright of the Artist.

An installation behind a corrugated metal sheet suspended from the ceiling is a cry to action. Behind it, Biermann has piled plastic bottles in plastic bags and tires. It is hardly minimalist, but the installation does obviate the idea of ecological distress. About 800 million tires become waste annually. Their production and use generate heavy metals, plastics and toxic compounds that enter our environment via air, water and ground. Biermann wants us to consider our dependency on rubber tires and all the plastics that are polluting our oceans, atmosphere and soil. Hanging here, too, are a pair of photographs developed on tin, their metallic sheen perhaps implying something precious or referring, through their gold tint, to the King Midas-like greed that impels manufacturers to pollute for profit and gain.

G. Roland Biermann, “snow + concrete” Courtesy of the Parsonage Gallery. Copyright of the Artist.

Other photos around the space are more formalist in composition and developed on concrete or paper. They depict weird juxtapositions, as in “snow + concrete,” for example, where little mounds of snow appear incongruously inside a parking lot. What are they doing there? How did they arrive in this place? How might this natural phenomena and the human-built environment relate to, or contradict, each other? The images are enigmatic and odd. They seem to suggest an ever more present condition of our contemporary reality: the impossibility of reconciling or balancing the pristineness of Earth with humankind’s impact upon it.

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