Maine is not polished, but weather-beaten. It is glacier-ground, storm-buffeted and wizened by unrelenting Nature and her moody brood of seasons. Maine’s artistic legacy may be inextricably bound to the great landscape painters irresistibly drawn here, but its painterly voice — plaintive, practical and well-worn — reaches past landscape. Amongst Maine artists not based in […]

The summer tourists have departed, and Rangeley-area locals have The Red Onion to themselves again, except for the occasional leaf peeper, hiker or fly fisherman. Come winter, the place will bustle with snow sport enthusiasts. Above our table is a mirrored map of the snowmobile trails ranging miles in most directions, no doubt a conversation […]

Art “William Wegman: Hello Nature,” photographs, videos, paintings and drawings, Bowdoin College (Museum of Art), Brunswick. bowdoin.edu/art-museum. Through Oct. 21. “Weatherbeaten: Winslow Homer and Maine,” 35 major oils and watercolors, Portland Museum of Art. portlandmuseum.org. Through Dec. 30. “Between Past and Present: The Homer Studio Photographic Project,” contemporary photography made with historic processes, Portland Museum […]

Jeff Kellar works on the severe edge of geometric abstraction. On first impression, his pieces are so chaste that thoughts about sensual qualities are a concealed form of leering. They seem so plotted, so engineered, so exquisitely achieved, that any potential for sensory delight has been squeezed out of them. His pieces appear to sit […]

We have the White Mountains to thank for giving us Will Rhys. Rhys, a veteran New York actor, relocated to Maine more than three years ago, in part because of our proximity to the White Mountains. He and his wife, Nancy Kluck, are avid outdoors people. They like to bike, camp and kayak. But mostly, […]

Young performers energize the crowd as Portland Ovations Presents! holds its annual auction to support community arts programs.

A technique developed in Sweden for curing wood to be used as decking is advancing the art of building acoustic guitars at Bourgeois Guitars in Lewiston.  The decking was developed too late to compete successfully against synthetic products, but the process, called Torrefaction, is now finding use in electric guitars and violins. Bourgeois is the […]

It is a sign of our maturity as an arts city that in a week’s time, Portland will host an avant-garde chamber music concert at an alternative arts venue, an early-music festival in a long-established church, and a pair of orchestra concerts featuring music by a leading contemporary composer in the city’s most prestigious concert […]

Since the 1960s, we have generally thought of conceptual art as art whose primary vehicle is an idea rather than aesthetics or its physical medium. It is art with concepts worked out completely in advance of its perfunctory fabrication. Maine hasn’t typically been associated with conceptual art, and yet I think many of our most […]