Homecoming at Camden Harbor

Camden Falls Gallery is honored to open its 2018 season with Homecoming , opening Friday, June 8 from 5-7 PM with an artist’s reception. Homecoming features the works of celebrated mixed media artist Ann Trainor Domingue and other house artists.

“The title resonates on various levels,” says Howard Gallagher, owner of Camden Falls Gallery. He and his wife Margaret have run year-round retail businesses in Camden for 37 years. This year they embraced partial retirement and have adopted a seasonal business profile.

Like migrating waterfowl, the Gallaghers have become ‘snowbirds’. Homecoming is personal to them. “I don’t want to say it’s like migrating fish returning to their place of origin, but there’s something really special about coming home to the gallery on the edge of Camden Harbor,” said Gallagher. “The schooners shed their winter covers and the harbor just explodes with activity in anticipation of the summer to come. It’s like that in the gallery as well, we have shed winter, and the gallery is bursting with new and exciting work.”

The interplay of family, work, and home are at the core of coastal community life. They can be seen in Trainor Domingue’s playful, overlapping layers of texture, color, and repetitive forms.

In The Best Part of the Day , a school of simplified fish arch overhead and tumble in a torrent across a fisherman’s midsection, suggesting primordial forces cascading from a burst dam. Negative rectangular shapes created by the dockside piers act as anchoring counterpoints. It is the title, however, that leads us into the heart of the painting. A bell-shaped woman stands, back lit, in a doorway. The fisherman turns his head toward what surely is his home, with all the richness and heartache that connotes.

Icons are visual images, usually rendered in strong, simple compositions, that lead the viewer through the realm of the senses into a more contemplative state. Trainor Domingue’s iconic imagery transcends a particular time and place, capturing our imagination with archetypal human beings and their mysterious lives. The imagery is intricate, yet free-flowing. Her work reminds us of the delicate ecosystems that thrive in the Gulf of Maine and Penobscot Bay, which are sometimes threatened by the intersection of human industry and enterprise.

Trainor Domingue was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and raised in Barrington, Rhode Island. Summer holidays spent on Cape Cod deepened her affinity for coastal estuaries, harbor towns, and the doughty New Englanders who earn their living from the sea.

“My work has transitioned from a focus on coastal structures and architecture toward incorporating the humanity of the working waterfront by bringing meaningful relationships between people, work and the landscape together in paintings that visualize this idea in uncommon ways,” said Trainor Domingue.

After graduating from Rhode Island College, Trainor Domingue had a successful career as an illustrator and art director. Two artist residencies from the Copley Society in Boston enabled her to return to Provincetown to paint after her escape from the corporate world.

Camden Falls Gallery is located at 5 Public Landing, Camden, ME. For more information, call (207) 470-7027 or email info@camdenfallsgallery.com .