Carver Hill Gallery Opens for Maine Artists

 

Carver Hill Gallery, 28 Bayview Street in Camden, Maine, will open for the season on Thursday, May 9th, with an artist attended reception open to the public from 5 – 7 pm.  This is the gallery’s second season in their new location in Camden, after 6 years in Rockport and 8 years in Rockland.

The season opening will feature primarily Maine artists including local Carver Hill artists Ingrid Ellison and Katie Wilson. Additional Maine artists include Lisa Noonis, Tom Flanagan, and Jean Jack, who are all new to the gallery. Three dimensional work by Philippe Guillern and Andre Benoit will also be exhibited.

Ingrid Ellison is a Camden painter and arts educator working in oil, mixed media and printmaking. As well as Carver Hill gallery, Ingrid has exhibited at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art and The University of Maine Bangor. Ingrid Ellison is a graduate of Skidmore College and earned her MFA from American University.

Katie Wilson, a Rockport painter, received her degree in fine art at the University of NH and worked as a graphic designer for a number of years while she continued her studies in painting. Her paintings have a softness to them, achieved through the bold brushwork. Through the collage the work makes passages into the abstract. Her figurative work and soulful portraits may hint at some emotional tension and have been described as solemn, wistful and haunting.

“ I am intrigued by the imagined drama or peace of a past moment. My desire is to translate that moment through my own interpretation of the subject’s inner being.”

Lisa Noonis is a painter from Kittery whose work approaches a wide range of subject matter from still life and landscapes to personal narratives. Her paintings are expressive with a strong use of color and materiality.

“In order to keep my logical brain out of the picture, I paint and draw with my non-dominant hand and often attach a brush to a 3-foot wooden dowel. This gets me back from the canvas and allows me to see the painting. My aim is to develop a visual story that contains unexpected marks and shapes that allow the viewer to enter into a conceptual space and create their own narrative. I paint what I know—figures, still lifes, and landscapes—but push these knowns into abstracted places. I combine my love of color, form, line, and design without fully abandoning representation.”

 

 

Tom Flanagan paints in a “room with a view” in a riverfront warehouse in Brunswick. The white noise is the rushing water, and the natural light in the space makes the bright colors seem electric.

“I’m interested in getting up close to experience and feeling by focusing on how sensations and sensibilities guide visual experience. My paintings are about how those things fit together and what happens with that moment. For me, the process of painting through improvisation is incredibly important. Not knowing where the painting will take me and accepting the concept of mystery are paramount.”

Finally, the beloved Jean Jack will exhibit a large selection of her well known farmhouses.

“Often it is on the fast moving interstate where I discover, quite by accident, the perfect simplicity of a farmhouse or a barn. I am not interested in the details as much as the abstractions – the way the afternoon sun falls off a slanting roof or tall forsaken grass cradles an old structure or stairs that once led to a seaside path and now lead nowhere at all. The challenge is to catch the image with my camera from this inconvenient backstage angle. Utilitarian structures that have a weathered history are a more hauntingly lonely expression than the congestion of suburban or city life. Shapes occurring by circumstance intrigue me far more than deliberate artifice.”

Carver Hill Gallery’s spring hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 – 5.