The people who make the art often get our attention, but who stretches their canvases and who makes their frames? Meet a husband-wife team that creates gorgeous frames, and a pair of talented canvas makers.
Since opening its Portland, Maine, office several years ago, the Icelandic company Eimskip has been shipping more and more goods to and from Maine in its container ships. Two artists recount their ride from Portland to Reykjavik on one of those vessels.
A new wave of young craftspeople and farmers are setting down roots, starting up businesses, and promoting sustainability on Blue Hill Peninsula and in other Maine communities.
Artist Ed Nadeau taps into his Franco-American heritage and a sense of Maine to create stories of life lived near the edge. In the spectrum of Maine artists, Nadeau is something of a rarity: a narrative painter who mixes fact and fiction. Many of his canvases conjure stories, some drawn from family and personal experiences, others “ripped from the headlines.”
Charles Eliot was a noted landscape architect who helped create the land trust model that led to the formation of Acadia National Park. Sailing vacations to Maine with his family when he was young helped inspire his later work.
Painter Joel Babb is a consummate realist. His landscapes of Boston, sometimes based on photographs and sketches made from the air or tall buildings, are considered among the finest achievements of their kind. In recent years, he has turned this same attention to detail onto natural settings in Maine.
The 2014-2015 Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland’s exhibit “The Shakers: From Mount Lebanon to the World,” featured works from the Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon, the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, and several major museums. Some 200 objects were on display, including the minimalist furniture, boxes, and other household items for which the Shakers are renowned.
Who doesn’t want an exact model of their boat? A besotted Concordia owner describes how he was able to track down a miniature replica of his yawl, built by one of the country’s finest model makers, Rob Eddy.
As letter carvers, the bulk of the work of the father-daughter team of Douglas M. Coffin Lettercutter is creating headstones—beautiful, hand-carved life markers with letters that flow into each other, creating words that call out to be read. They consider their work to be among the most caring of human endeavors.
