Guest Artists

July

Stew Henderson, July 1-20 2008

Opening Reception, July 4th

Statement for Graphica

The Graphica series started as a material driven idea. I had found several roles of commercially printed paper at the local transfer station. This paper with images is the by-product of the stretched fabric industry of Moss Inc. in Belfast. I rolled this paper out on the studio floor and began to cut sections and strips from huge images of corporate logos, car advertisements, abstract designs and other pictures. These fragments served as a background for my painting and linoleum block print designs. The resulting work in Graphica displays a tangible middle space between the my crude hand work and the highly polished imagery produced by a computer driven press.

Bio

Stew Henderson has been exhibiting his artwork since 1977. He has had numerous one person exhibits throughout Maine including at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Icon Gallery in Brunswick and Waterfall Arts In Belfast. He is represented by the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland and will be having a solo exhibit there this September. For additional information about Stew Henderson and his work please visit his website at www.stewhenderson.com

July - August

Doug Bell, July 22-Aug 10 2008

Opening Reception, July 25th, 2008

Here's a multimedia slide show of the Aarhus installation featuring comments by Doug and music by Manolo Camp.

Media: Wood, found and collected objects, paint, televisions and lights

Caption: I was invited to make a piece for the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

The exhibition was titled "Pretty Sweet: The Sentimental Image in Contemporary Art" and I chose to title my piece the "Pretty Sweet Stack". The piece was constructed on site, on a ten foot square platform provided by the museum. I reconstructed a corner of the basement where I grew up that included my original work bench and shelves of glass jars filled with found and collected objects. This workshop morphed into my studio when I went to college. The workbench side of the installation was open studded, unfinished worshop basement walls while the opposite side was a finished painted wall where I onstructed a formal still life of found and collected objects that were all white. The other outside corner was the open door to a broom closet where a long leather belt hung. I think the three distinct sides of the piece represented beauty, discipiline, and creativity. The formal, white still life represents beauty, the broom closet and belf could be discipline and the workshop for creativity.

Media: Found suitcases, tool boxes, wood boxes, briefcases, metal tins, cardboard, wood, paper, books ,glass, Plexiglas, glass negative boxes, plastic, fabric, acrylic, oil and enamel paint, old globes, glass jars filled with found and collected objects, a black and white TC playing static, and a 1950's vintage opaque projector projecting a drawing of the sculpture.

Caption: This piece was made site specific to mimic the interior shape of the gallery at the Grton School in Groton, Massachusetts. The project included over fifty small paintings and drawing studies for the sculpture. Also, a wall mounted, lighted, scale model of the gallery and sculpture which can be viewed through a small eyepiece and lens, was mounted to the adjacent wall.

August

Dudley Zopp, Aug 12-31 2008

Opening Reception, August 15th

Dudley Zopp's artist talk will be on Tuesday August 19th 7pm

Dudley Zopp, Bio

Dudley Zopp is a painter of abstract landscapes and an installation artist, with a strong interest in environmental and collaborative projects, most recently Walking in Time at Waterfall Arts in Belfast, Maine, and earlier at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. Her work engages mediums and forms from large scale installations to small works on paper, but always joins a fascination with geological formations to an obsession for locating image through process.

Among her awards are a 2002 Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission and a Studio Residency by the Pouch Cove Foundation, Saint Johns, Newfoundland. The Boston Athenaeum, University of Chicago Library, Farnsworth Art Museum and NoxBox (Mainz, Germany) own works by her.

A native of Lexington, Kentucky, she holds a B.A. and M.A. in Modern Foreign Languages from the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and did post-graduate work in Painting and Drawing at the Allen R. Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville.

Dudley Zopp, Artist Statement
Geologics and Erosion Paintings

The Geologics and Erosion paintings reveal my passion for paint and my deeply felt connection to the earth. I have always been willing to let process determine image, and over time, I have developed a way of moving and layering paint that mimics the slow build-up and precipitous shifting of the sediments and magma that form our planet. In the abstract patterning of the paintings, I am exploring the ways rocks are formed and distributed in the landscape.

These abstract patterns are also objects of meditation, reminders of place and of the geological forces that formed our contemporary landscape. They provide the viewer a way of penetrating layers of memory, of going deep into one’s psyche to examine our place in the landscape and our way of being in the world.

My paintings are about time and where we fit into this present moment, knowing that our lives are bounded by a past measured in thousands of millions of years of geological time, and by a future measured in the slow growth of organic life, an unknowable future of which we are the accidental stewards.

Here's a multimedia slide show of Dudley's Aarhus installation featuring comments by Dudley and music by Massive Attack.

An Interview with Dudley Zopp

By Chyrenheppa Diefendorf

Chyrenheppa Diefendorf is a noted lecturer and writer based in mid-coast Maine. She is the author of three books: Job's Daughters and the Logos Structure, Rocks and People: Their Similarities and Differences, and Arranging Paintings: How Not To. She conducted a virtual interview with painter and installation artist Dudley Zopp at the artist's studio in Lincolnville. Ms. Zopp has agreed to publish the interview in lieu of an artist's statement.

CD: Ms. Zopp, I'm honored that you've agreed to meet with me today. I've heard that you are reluctant to talk about your work and that in fact you grant very few interviews.

DZ: That's total fiction.

CD: Well, I'd like to begin by asking about the Erosions group of paintings currently being exhibited at Coppershed and Aarhus galleries. How and where did you begin?

DZ: I prefer to think of these as drawings rather than paintings, because of the immediacy of their making. However, I think most people understand them as paintings since the acrylic medium is what remains on the paper post-process.

CD: We do see evidence of drawing in the graphite lines that delineate rock shapes. It also appears that you've used a great deal of water. How is that important?

DZ: I'm interested in Time as revealed by the speed of Elements. For instance, sludge moves very slowly. Wind and Fire move quickly. Water generally moves quickly unless impeded by heavier materials, and it is this process of water being impeded that forms the imagery in these paintings.

CD: Sometimes the water seems to flow upward. I know that you practice yoga. Did you stand on your head to make these paintings?

DZ: No – I make them all so that the water flows down or out, but once they're done, I orient them according to the dominant compositional energy, and sometimes decide to present them in the opposite direction from their original orientation. When you think about it, this mimics plate tectonics, which accounts for layers of the earth having been turned upside down and sideways.

CD: Looking again at the graphite lines in the paintings, I'm wondering why you've left some of them unpainted, giving the whole an unfinished look.

DZ: As in the drawings, so also with the earth. It is not done yet. The plates are moving as we speak.

CD: Are there particular inspirations you'd like to mention?

DZ: Highway road cuts between Brunswick and Portland, and at the Verona Island bridge. Also Lincolnville and Jasper beaches.

CD: Thank you so much, Ms. Zopp. I'm fascinated by your process, and feel that though we'd never met until today, we are somehow kindred spirits.

DZ: Indeed, I think we share not only common interests but oddly enough, the same parents.

© Chyrenheppa Diefendorf, Lincolnville, Maine 2008

Dudley Zopp, Lincolnville, Maine 2008
Website: www.dudleyzopp.net
Blog: www.zoppnews.blogspot.com

September

Heidi Daub, Sept. 2-21 2008

Opening Reception, September 5th

"Never Better" 19*24 (unframed) acrylic on paper 2008

From her studio days in the 1980's at Montserrat School of Visual Art, in Beverly, Massachusetts, Heidi Daub has doggedly maintained an independent and individualistic approach to her art that reflects a temperament derived from a thorough knowledge of and an adherence to the vocabulary of Modernism, complemented with an imaginative and innovative approach to her art that has not been seen in Maine for a long time. Indeed the paintings of Heidi Daub are arguably some of the most distinctive and intriguing that have appeared in and out of Maine during the last ten years. Her style, with its unmistakenable identity, make her paintings a challenge both to the eye and to the mind. Yet the elements of her paintings are simple and familiar, appealing equally to adults and children. But the meaning of her paintings, paradoxically, are concealed within those same simple and familiar elements and elude immediate comprehension. And that for the viewer is the challenge of her art.

Daub's paintings defy easy classification. Are they landscapes or narratives or a meshing of the two? Are they painted metaphors, symbolic narratives or even surreal experiences? Clearly she combines elements directly taken from the natural world, but there are unexpected surprises too. She often includes elements in her 'landscapes' that are usually found in still lifes. An irresistible narrative quality also informs her paintings and her motifs fairly beg to be 'read' as personal statement.

Daub has assimilated the characteristics of Modernism so completely to her own artistic purposes; she seems to have come to it naturally. She is one of a small number of Maine artists who work with it convincingly. She has created a style that is personal, idiomatic, and singularly hers. Nature is always her starting point, always her vehicle for expressing and shaping her personal visions. Her imagery is thus always recognizable as belonging to the world of appearances, regardless of the particular configuration she may give them. And though she employs the vocabulary of representationalism, her painted language is conditioned by the grammar and syntax of Modernism and abstraction. One of her gifts is her ability to combine representational and abstract elements without making the former obvious or obtrusive.

The art of Heidi Daub is unquestionably a rare experience, the kind we are not likely to see again for some time. Her ability to translate personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings into artful images that are at once rich in poetic associations and probing in enigmatic content are what make the paintings of Heidi Daub memorable and worth seeking out.

~Lyle Roger North

Website: http://www.heididaub.com

September - October

Mike Silverton, Sept 23-Oct 19 2008

Opening October 3rd

"Un ballo in maschera"
The show's title, Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball), refers to two small works, and in a broader, metaphorical sense, to a taste for frivolity tempered by occasion and, of course, enigma.

When Lee and I moved from Brooklyn to Belfast six years ago, the urge to make art graduated from marginal to obsessive. An abundance of materials and the space in which to play with them, perhaps even my age –– if not now, never –– contribute to an explanation. Be that as it may, it’s mostly what I’m doing these days.

I was drawn years ago to Dada and Surrealism, especially to Marcel Duchamp’s insouciant aesthetic. I’ve written two cubic yards of poetry, some of which was published in magazines and anthologies, along with a tastefully anorexic chap-book, “Battery Park,” published by Russell Edson’s Thing Press in 1966. More recently, I narrate “Analogue Smoque” to Tom Hamilton and Al Margolis’ musical accompaniment on Pogus 21029-2, a two-CD production issued in 2003. The royalties to date are in the low teens.

In addition to having produced poetry readings for the New School for Social Research, New York’s municipal radio station, and the stations of Pacifica Radio, I’ve written reviews for the most part of modernist classical music on recording for print and Internet publications, including LaFolia.com, of which I am proprietor-editor. I also write about high-end audio.

As to what of mine occupies this fine little gallery, the art must speak for itself.

Brenton Hamilton

Oct 30 – Nov 18 2007 Opening: Nov 2

Brenton Hamilton MFA, a visual artist and historian who lives and works on the coast of Maine is a master of the 1840's cyanotype process, chooses this antique medium to render his one of a kind dreamlike visions in an equally unique and intense hue.

His palette that finds its corollary in Renaissance painting, Hamilton combines human anatomy, astronomy and botanical imagery to create intriguing and provocative arrangements. Referring to ancient Greece and Rome, as well as 15th and 16th century Netherlandish and Italian paintings, Hamilton appropriates symbols and visual elements for the history of art to arrive at a thoroughly contemporary vision.

Many of the works are further embellished with layers of white gouache, silver leaf and gum Arabic washes that add layers of complexity that blur the boundaries between painting and photography. Indeed Hamilton's work is an astonishing hybrid of media and a bridge between antique and postmodern that may defy classification.

Rebecca Rivers

The surprisingly twisted path that I am on, led me to Searsport, Maine 30 years ago. This path has included the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio, living near Madrid, Spain for 4 years, having three sons who are my delight, painting classes at UMO with Mike Lewis, a week on Monhegan Island with 12 of my art buddies every year, visiting both islands of New Zealand and skydiving as often as I can. My home has become my sanctuary. I find solace in the quiet peace that living off the beaten path offers. It has been a gift to have the opportunity to wander the Maine shorelines. I am drawn to water, salt or fresh, and my paintings are a joyful answer to that call.

The most recent mixed media and watercolor paintings represent a departure in attitude from what is most comfortable for me. Realistic watercolor has been my medium and style of choice, but within me becoming more insistent, is the urge to let go. My artistic path has led me to the edge. I have fearfully peered over the rim and have longed to step off that edge into the vast unknown. These most recent paintings are a part of the continuing effort of adventure and discovery to artistically step off the edge.

Rivers’ Edge Studio
136 Nickerson Rd
Searsport, ME 04974
207 338-4463
www.rebeccarivers.com

Kris Engman

Kris Engman , as a guest artist at Aarhus Gallery July 31st-August 12th, 2007, will be showing paintings, drawings and bronze sculptures. A reception will be held August 3rd from 5-8 pm as part of Belfast's Friday Art Walks.

Kris Engman, a dedicated and talented sculptor, and painter, is an assistant professor of art at the University of Maine in Orono and is also the founder and director of a Belfast based school and community service cultural exchange.

Ms. Engman's figurative sculptures are the basis for her exploration of social and psychological issues. Her work suggests the "... roles and circumstances that define the female place within her culture, community, home... Each is about internal balance common to everyone despite of the fact that the perspective is female". In painting, Ms. Engman places her focus on the relationships of color. This work is the result of a study of light conditions and its effects on color within specific natural environments.

The work of Aarhus artists Kevin Johnson, Mark Kelly, Annadeene Konesni, Richard Mann, Wesley Reddick and Willy Reddick will also be on view.

Ben Potter

August 13th-August 26th, 2007
Opening reception August 17th from 5-8 pm as part of Belfast's Friday Art Walks

Ben Potter , originally from Tennessee, majored in Art and Biology at Williams College, where he was awarded a Mellon Grant for experimental work in the arts, and a Hutchinson fellowship. He received his M.F.A. from the California College of Arts in 1998, and has since exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. Ben taught classes in sculpture, design, photography, drawing and painting in Vermont and Wisconsin before becoming associate professor of art at Unity College in Maine. Ben's art practice stems from his interdisciplinary background, and uses subjects drawn primarily from the sciences as the basis for his formal and conceptual investigations. These 'investigations' may include plastic shopping bags, tin foil or motorcycle helmets.

Dianne S. Hire, Belfast ME

August 28-September 11, 2007
Opening Reception- Friday August 31, 2007 5-8pm (Labor Day Weekend)

Artist Statement

Although enchantment with fabric seems to have always been a part of my life, I began my quiltmaking journey in 1985.

Today, I look back at the development and exploration of my creative process. Even in 1985, the adaptation of traditional time-honored designs & techniques was significant. Somehow, even then, I experimented, finding my own way, my own song, my own work within tactile dimensions. From that moment on, this became my Hard 'n Fast Rule: find out the rules and determine a way to break them.

I honor diversity.

I celebrate new approaches.

I challenge concepts.

To stretch the rules & locate fresh boundaries is my desire. By approaching quiltmaking this way, I embrace technical skills while not allowing techniques to overshadow image.

I am a colorist who intuitively responds to the joyful way colors intermingle. I require vibrancy to speak but never shout -- yet boldly sing. That song is interpreted in fiber, strings, strong design and intense vitality of color.

BIOGRAPHY

Dianne S. Hire, is known primarily as a quiltmaker and lecturer who speaks the language of vibrant color as she uses fabric to create painterly collages. Her innovative designs have been exhibited and awarded all over the USA at such venues as AQS (Paducah, KY), Dallas Quilt Show, Eastcoast Quilter's Alliance (Westford, MA), QuiltFest, JAX (Jacksonville, FL), Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival (Williamsburg, VA) as well as 2 Best of Shows for Maine Quilts in her home state. As an international exhibitor, her work appears in major publications and corporate collections. In 2000, she "group" curated a second traveling art quilt show and is editor of the book, Oxymorons: Absurdly Logical Quilts! (AQS Publishing) that coincides with that exhibit. Her book, Quilters PLAYTIME, is presently available (Spring, 2004). Dianne's lectures entertain and inform. Her love of teaching is reflected in workshops that students describe as uniquely fun and exciting; she encourages creative freedom bordering on fabric mayhem.

June 1985 to Present: She lives with her two best friends -- husband, Terry, and Maine Coon cat, Sir Hilary Hire -- both of whom love fiber and strings in quilt form. Before moving to Belfast, ME in 1981, she was a Couture Dress Buyer and never, ever considered quilting to be a possibility for her life.

David Estey

Showing September 13th-30th, 2007
Opening Reception: Friday September 14th 5-8pm

Biography & Statement

David Estey is an award-winning painter/printmaker in Belfast, Maine. He has lived, taught, and exhibited around Baltimore, MD; Philadelphia, PA; Charlotte, NC; and mid-coast Maine. His work includes paintings and prints in a wide variety of styles and media, as well as an abundance of strong, expressive figure drawings in charcoal.

"My work often involves abstracted images that I want to be aesthetically dramatic from afar and equally compelling up close," Estey says. "In this exhibit, I'm exploring new forms of things that are personally meaningful. I expect they will also speak to the discerning few."

Estey was born in Fort Fairfield, Maine. He has a BFA degree in painting from Rhode Island school of Design and a MSA degree in public administration from George Washington University. He studied painting a year in Rome, Italy, extensively at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and at many other places.

After illustrating for the U.S. Army and a career in public affairs with IRS in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, and retirement in Charlotte, NC, he returned with his wife Karen to live and work in their newly renovated home/studio at 16 Pierce Street in Belfast.

He is on the Board of Directors and teaches at Waterfall Arts.

Boat Show Artists

July 17 through the 29th, 2007
Opening reception July 20th 5-8pm as part of Belfast's Friday Art Walks

Stephen Florimbi

Stephen Florimbi is an abstract painter, who for the past nineteen years has been building traditional wooden boats of classic design, from full rigged ships to commuter yachts to small dinghies. He has taught wooden boatbuilding at Atlantic Challenge in Rockland Maine as well as been foreman and finish carpenter for Cannell Boatbuilding in Camden.

"Boatbuilding is like my alter ego," says Florimbi. "It speaks to my sense of order and form while painting expresses my emotions and spirit. Hopefully somewhere in there they overlap," he says pointing to his heart.

Currently Florimbi's boatbuilding interests are in light, fast, seaworthy rowing vessels. "I love bicycling. Rowing is like bicycling on the water. I like the idea of fast efficient boats that don't require a lot of resources to build, maintain, or operate. A boat that can improve body mind and spirit, that's what I'm after." Stephen Florimbi has a studio in Rockport and can be reached at wdnboats@midcoast.com

James Strickland Bio and Statement

Born at Fort Sill, Ok in the fall of 1945. An army brat with all the attendant advantages and disadvantages of life in a military family in which young men were expected to become officers of the next generation. Moved to California in the mid sixties to attend Episcopal seminary.

Whilst studying for the ministry spent summers working as a skipper delivering sail boats to several Pacific islands and Hong Kong.

After receiving a doctorate in Theology and becoming an ordained minister, ran a small parish church until the early 70's at which time left the ministry and returned to school to study architecture. The years that followed found several paths that included apprenticeships under Paolo Soleri, Charles Eames and a stay in Japan under the stern eye of Hiroshi Hasinawa studying temple architecture, with side roads into kendo, mountaineering, and ballooning......after living and teaching art in the southwest (Arizona and New Mexico) moved to the east coast (New York City and Cape Cod) and finally settled in Maine (Belfast) where he now works ina studio built in 1888 with a quiet view of Penobscot Bay. He spends his time painting (landscapes, portraits and icons) and building large and small scale sculpture for municipal, corporate and private commissions.

"In my work I would like to convey the sense of the voyage of ideals, the arrival of a dreamworld. To hover between the real and the spiritual world. to call up 'stories' from our collective past, still points around which our private memories revolve."

Paul McEvoy

Paul McEvoy is originally from New York and lived in Boston for many years before making Maine his home. His work deals primarily with issues of tradition and change. He's currently working on a project documenting traditional music cultures in the United States. In addition to being a photographer he's also a boatbuilder and musician.

Norman Tinker

July 3rd-15th, 2007 Opening Reception July 6th from 5-8pm

Norman Tinker is a sculptor's sculptor. His expressive work is marveled at daily by Miller St. travelers, but it should by all rights be in the Museum of Modern Art. It is that good. Mr Tinker is the real deal; "It is rare I set out to create beauty," he says " but sometimes that happens." Yes , sometimes that happens with work that can be as dogmatic as a dumpster but with a subtle sense of eloquence that creeps in and won't let you go.

Mr. Tinker will be a guest artist at Aarhus Gallery from July 3rd-15th, showing a selection of his collage, assemblage and sculptural work. An Opening Reception will be held July 6th from 5-8pm as part of Belfast’s Friday Art Walk Series.

The work of Aarhus artists; Kevin Johnson, Mark Kelly, Annadeene Konesni, Richard Mann, Wesley Reddick, and Willy Reddick will also be on view.

Read more about Norman...