“These Boats are Good Friends,” ink and gouache on canvas, by Christina Thwaites.

Artemis Gallery will open on May 26 for its 11th season with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. All are welcome to celebrate the first exhibition of the season featuring the work of Don Carter, Mallie Loring Pratt, Deborah Lawrence Schafer and Christina Thwaites.

“Climb In,” oil on canvas, by Mallie Loring Pratt.

Mallie Loring Pratt’s paintings explore memory, history and sensory encounters in the natural world. They are meant to feel active and layered, representing the ways in which we breathe, walk, run or drive through a landscape. What do we notice? What has been there for 300 years and what is just emerging? Each painting is an attempt to piece together the emotional, nostalgic and sometimes problematic aspects of change in the natural world, as mimicked in our own lives and bodies.

Deborah Lawrence Schafer’s artwork conveys an ethereal quality. Her primary interest is in the capacity for weather and environmental conditions to transform landscape and its relationship to time ­— and how this reflects life’s transience.  Mainly, she draws inspiration from the ever-changing land and sea of coastal Maine, the San Francisco Bay Area and coastal Mexico. Her early kinetic sculptures, discrete technological systems that presented classical elements, were also concerned with the ephemeral. She is a Mexican National and U.S. citizen and currently lives and works in the Bay Area and coastal Maine.

“Botanical Offshoot XV,” oil and gold over digital archival pigment print on cotton, by Deborah Lawrence Schafer.

Christina Thwaites grew up in Derbyshire in rural England. She has run art workshops and community projects and has exhibited and lived all over the world. In Italy, she ran an international art residency program near Rome. In Palestine, she ran workshops in a refugee camp. She lived in an artist squat house in Amsterdam and in a remote village in Indonesia. She currently exhibits with galleries in Italy and the U.S. and works from her basement studio in Orono, where she lives with her husband and two children. She often works with historic photographs, making fast and spontaneous drawings before painting. “Painting is like a conversation,” she says. “I want to talk about something, but I don’t know what will be said until it happens … and often what is not said explicitly is the most important part of the painting.”

The full schedule of summer exhibitions is available at https://artemisgalleryme.com/2022-exhibitions.

Artemis Gallery is at 1 Old Firehouse Lane, Northeast Harbor. Call 207-276-3001 or email info@artemisgalleryme.com for more information.