“Long-term isolation produces clinical effects that are similar to those produced by physical torture. It leads to increases in suicide rates, and even mentally healthy individuals find the experience extremely difficult to endure.”

—from Change is Possible: A Case Study of Solitary Confinement Reform In Maine, a 2013 report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine

It’s a numbing number: 100,000.

That’s the number of people in solitary confinement in US prisons on any given day. It is also the number of hand-sewn stitches artist Ed Epping uses to embroider the solitary figure depicted in his piece, Isolate.

100,000.

“How do you translate potent data into something that is also visually interesting?” says Ed, recalling his challenge when in 2015 he first began The Corrections Project, an ongoing exploration of overcriminalization and mass imprisonment in the United States. “You have to first catch a viewer’s eye, then—from that—trust curiosity leads them to want to understand what the art is about.”

He’s certainly done that with Isolate, starting with what we see: in jumpsuit-orange, the silhouette of a solitary female figure curled in the fetal position; the word “NUMBER” in prison-stripe black and white branded across the center of a vintage stained canvas cot cover, eerily reminiscent of an animal hide.

The visual alone is compelling.

And then the viewer learns it’s comprised of 100,000 stitches sewn in a basic tally-mark pattern suggesting the marking of time.

Then the story behind those stitches: 100,000 people in solitary confinement, experiencing all the trauma and suffering such incarceration brings.

And then that word: “NUMBER.”

“There’s this double meaning,” notes Ed. “Depending on how you see the word, it can mean a different thing.” An objective reader may focus on the data and see a numeric reference, but “some who have been in the position the work depicts may read it as about numbness. That’s why I am attracted to heteronyms; they don’t decree how they are to be read.”

The Corrections Project is part of a long tradition of art aimed at spurring social change: one thinks of work by such practitioners as Joseph Beuys, Jose Posada, Adrian Piper, or Peggy Diggs (who also happens to be Ed’s wife). In keeping with that tradition, Ed aims to catalyze his audience to care, and to act.

Though his project is oriented toward a social issue, Ed’s focus on imprisonment and its related topics is rooted in personal experience.

“In 1956, when I was 7 years old, my father was sentenced and convicted to 5½ years in prison for defrauding funds from the state of Illinois,” recalls Ed. “He was an accountant, and was clever and manipulative; he knew how to manage numbers.”

Within six months of entering incarceration, Ed’s father became the bookkeeper for the prison warden and within three years he began living in the prison greenhouse, removed from the general prison population.

“It was because he was white,” notes Ed. “And his privilege got passed on to me. While he was imprisoned we never had to leave our upper-middle class home; we never were hungry. We weren’t wealthy, but we were privileged.”

For decades, Ed’s formative childhood experience percolated. It was not until he approached retirement from years of teaching art that he focused on the implications of his privilege, and what he wanted to do about it.

His answer became The Corrections Project.

“Though the project is prompted by my relationship to my father’s prison experience, that’s not what it’s about. I wanted to explore incarceration and over-criminalization more broadly, and look at the populations most impacted by criminal justice abuse: Black and Brown people.”

Grim statistics—such as that Black people are five times more likely to be part of the 2.3 million incarcerated in the U.S. than white people, and Latinx people are twice as likely—are embedded throughout Ed’s project. We see this in pieces such as the Corrections Project Pamphlets, and Blanket, the project’s first undertaking and still a work-in-progress.

Ed believes in his work, and hopes to catch the public’s attention more widely, becoming a pebble in a pond and sending out ripples of change. But The Corrections Project is ultimately an art project. As such, it is a kind of spiritual endeavor—an act of faith, with Ed’s hours in the studio a vigil for the unjustly imprisoned, and each artwork a kind of prayer for the incarcerated.

In this way, Isolate may be interpreted as a gesture of love toward the 100,000 living in daily trauma in rooms no bigger than a closet and deprived of all we think of as humane, each of the 100,000 stitches a “Hail Mary” for another hurting soul.

Ed Epping is an imagist and activist living in New Mexico who taught art at Williams College for 40 years, retiring as the A.D. Falk Professor of Studio Art in 2017. More of his work including The Corrections Project can be seen at his website.

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“Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are very plentiful, the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right or left.”

—Paul Cézanne

“A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree being-looked-at.”

—John Berger

Ed Nadeau likes to walk in the woods near his Orono, Maine, home.

“Not every day, but almost every day, I go on long walks,” he says. “Five miles most days. I’m always seeing so many things I could paint.”

A painting inspired by Ed’s habitual walks, The Recumbent Birch falls easily within a modernist tradition of Western painting, which includes Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, and Maine’s own Marsden Hartley. As with these influences, more is at play in Ed’s work than meets the eye.

Critic Bill Davenport wrote that Courbet “had a knack for making the random textures of messy paint convey the very different, but equally alive textures of the real world,” and the same can be said of Ed and his art. The Recumbent Birch is more than a picture of a recumbent birch.

When Ed was 15, his father died; themes of death and rising have infiltrated his work his entire career, including in The Recumbent Birch. A pine cone nested like an egg among needles directly above the fallen birch is no accident (from decay, new life will emerge).

“Ideas of memory and rebirth exist in my paintings as a whole,” notes Ed. “It has taken me these nearly 50 years since my father’s death to finally feel a truly symbiotic relationship with the land of his and my birthplace—to make what I think is my most powerful work.”

(The Recumbent Birch is more than a recumbent birch.)

This painting is not a direct copy from nature. Rather, Ed combines observation (he referred to multiple photographs in making it), memory, and painterly intuition to realize his work. As he notes, “My process is similar to that of a fiction writer in that my paintings are not always authentic depictions of actual people or places, but interpretations of ideas or events that develop over a period of time.”

Freed from fidelity to an actual scene, Ed indulges in the potency of color and texture, line and movement, mass and energy. His work is a feast of orchestration: colors pepper the surface in syncopated rhythm; diagonal lines short and long zing; sharply angled points stand against rounded shapes—his work is as much abstract song as it is a vision of nature.

Ed loves to paint, and his passion for his craft delivers two layers of pleasure—the whole of the scene itself, and the individual delights of his brushstrokes. Our eye is first mesmerized by the rhythmic pattern of yellows, greens, and blues, and then by the loveliness of the pine branches these colors depict; the dance of white, gray, and black brushstrokes are in themselves a thrill to behold, as is their perfect capture of the peeling birch bark with a fuzz of moss just beginning to take hold. Time and time again, Ed’s painting gives us something to notice and marvel at.

Mainers know the pleasures of a walk in the woods; for many of us, easy access to forest trails is a reason to live here. With The Recumbent Birch, Ed gives us not only a facsimile of what we might discover on a forest walk, but a sharing from his own daily roaming, every touch of brush to canvas a moment of wondrous exclamation: “Look at this!”

The pine needle floor. The moss-covered branch. The Recumbent Birch.

Writer and philosopher John Berger opens his essay Drawn to That Moment by noting that when his father died, he made “several drawings of him in his coffin.” Berger’s father’s death was a point of departure—in drawing his father, Berger believed he was carrying out an act that “refuses the process of disappearance.” Art-making for Berger became a transformative undertaking with spiritual overtones.

And so too with Ed.

In a world where fathers die, The Recumbent Birch is as much an ode to life’s perpetuity and return as it is a rendering of a moment in Maine’s fecund woods.

Ed Nadeau teaches art at the University of Maine. More of his work can be seen at his website.

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“Everything that passes me I can see only a little of, but I am always looking. And I see an awful lot sometimes.”

Willem de Kooning

Jaap Eduard Helder’s art has an urgency fitting for the times in which we live.

Jaap is an abstract artist—which is not to say his work is divorced from the natural world. His paintings, alive with gesture and energy, draw from the everyday.

“I am always noticing things, and they come into my paintings—the eroded character of a peeling wall; the color of the sky. They’re like visual fragments making their way into the work. I don’t put them there consciously, but they appear,” says the artist.

His approach to painting is intuitive. After laying down a ground of black gesso on a wood panel, he begins adding color, deploying a number of tools (paint brushes, palette knives, bristled brush cleaners, sandpaper) to place and remove acrylic paint. His process is similar to an artist such as Jackson Pollock, who described his relationship to a work-in-progress exactly as Jaap might: “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. I have no fear of making changes or destroying the image, because the painting has a life of its own.”

And so with Jaap, each painting becoming a kind of conversation with forces beyond easy comprehension—a dance with the mysterious on just the other side of daily sights.    

He puts it more simply: “It’s a lot of fun, these paintings.”

As an abstract artist, Jaap recognizes not everyone can relate to his work.

“A lot of people, they walk by this stuff and they see nothing,” he observes. “For me, I call them stories without words. There’s definitely a narrative, it’s just not linear.”

And so with Limit, a work he made as the world shut down and shrunk into itself with the onslaught of COVID-19.

What do we see in Limit?

A jumble of self-contained quasi-geometric forms—some rectangular, others more irregularly shaped—each textured in a patina of wear and tear; a riot of scrambled paint right in the middle, as if the ochre beneath is caught in collision with the darker forms above—a micro-explosion moment; white voids bounded-off in a painted world of containment all around. In the upper left corner, a sky-blue passage jumps, its hue brightened by contrast with the pentimento of orange beneath and patch of honeyed darkness to its right—this, a lighted cerulean passage lending itself to be perceived as an expression of hope in a world otherwise crashing in on itself; a promised dawn in a time of pandemic limits.

That, at least, is one read—one the artist is likely to accept; he welcomes the proliferation of meanings as people engage with his work.

“Everybody will see what they see, and that’s good,” he says.

Jaap is intentional in choosing his works’ titles: there is no accident to Limit being called Limit. Titling, for him, is an opportunity to honor and illuminate something of what he has expressed or found in making his art, while at the same time not over-prescribing how the work ought to be interpreted by others.

For Jaap, a painting is successfully complete not once a narrow and specific narrative intent is met, but rather once he is at the point of assessing the painting needs nothing more added or subtracted—when the painting has wholly revealed something true and real, even as meaning remains ambiguous.

Noted British abstractionist Howard Hodgkin, another artist with whom Jaap shares affinity, once observed, “When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising for me as for anyone else.” It is that surprise—the revelatory moment of discovery—that is the exciting part for Jaap and artists like him. It is a faith in and wonder at unearthing a larger something through the act of painting that propels him to his studio each day.

And for Jaap, it is urgent.

Four years ago, the artist faced a major health concern. “All of a sudden the fragility of life was right there,” he comments. “After that I developed more gratitude and wonder for the world we live in.”

“I have so much joy in my painting,” he adds. “After a serious issue, you appreciate life so much more.”

While Limit might suggest its own range of narrative interpretation, Jaap’s art as a whole since his medical crisis implies another, namely: life is short and full of wonder. His entire project as an artist is an ongoing celebration of the miracle of here and now—one long mighty cry of: “look at this!”

A visual hallelujah amid the hardship and transience of it all.

Born in the Netherlands, Jaap Eduard Helder lives and works in Maine. More of his art can be seen at his website, and his work is on view at Studio 53 Fine Art Gallery in Boothbay Harbor through August 3, 2020.

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Nancye Hesaltine is a Baltimore-based artist with a daily practice any of us might also pursue.

“Once the pandemic had really settled in with all its stresses, I began drawing a flower a day,” she says. “I draw the lines and shapes I see with a pen, sign and date it, and sometimes add a note about the day.”

So simple—as simple as the King’s Macc Rose drawing shown here, drawn in June.

“With so many hard things happening in the world,” she adds, “this is a calming activity.”

Nancye, who lives with anxiety and depression, has previously turned to art-making as an aid in coping with emotional distress. Several years ago, she made the decision to stop using Klonopin, an especially strong psychotropic drug she had been taking as prescribed for 20 years. Tapering off the medication over a two-year period, Nancye experienced a variety of harrowing withdrawal symptoms. She remained grounded by creating watercolors through it all—examples of which we share below.

“My artwork was a lifeline, a way to feel better as I navigated anxiety and hard physical and mental side effects,” she recalls.

Today, her art is again serving as a balm in what she calls “the upside-down world of COVID-19.”

As we all feel the stress of coronavirus lurking, Nancye’s current art practice offers a model to any of us. That’s especially true here in Boothbay, where we have the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, a treasure where for a small price (and for free on certain days) we might find comfort wandering down paths rich with flowers, sketchpad and pen in hand, peace abounding.

Nancye knows firsthand the power of art-making for healing; in our own gardens, we can too.

“My mind wandered like the lines in this painting,” says Nancye of the work on the left from 2019, made while experiencing symptoms related to withdrawal from prescribed medication. She made Return of Memory (right) the year before, after beginning to taper off of Klonopin. Nancye’s art offers a clear example of how beauty might arise from hardship.

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Green Men seem apt for COVID days.

John M.T. Seitzer with his wife Lynne (featured in the April 18 Art Spot) own Joy to the Wind Gallery. For more than 20 years, they have filled their gallery walls with their own eclectic art: seascapes and abstractions, bird portraits and genre scenes; one year, John created an entire exhibition comprised of appropriated master works.

Then came the Green Men.

“The first one appeared very naturally a few months ago, and has been followed by many others in quick succession,” says John, who has now made dozens of these playful pieces.

That the Green Men emerged at the same time as the onset of COVID-19 seems no coincidence. The doubts, disorientation, and anxieties that have come with the pandemic demand some sort of antidote; this project has been just that for him. “Creating these three-dimensional pieces has been cathartic,” he observes.

John has not only found the meditative practice of making the sculptural objects centering, but he also finds layers of meaning in the Green Men.

“In Celtic folklore, the Green Man is associated with rebirth, representing the cycle of growth every spring,” John notes. “And these Green Men are even more ‘green’ as they are created from cast-off materials. I love recycling and repurposing things that others may not see potential in.”

John makes his Green Men first thing in the morning. Over the years, he has amassed odd and sundry things (“treasures”) from thrift stores, tag sales, and recycling centers—material from which to create assemblage sculpture. “After a somewhat random selection from my collected materials, I compose, shape, design, assemble, and reassemble them,” he says.

Each studio session becomes an upbeat jumpstart to another day in a pandemic world.

“I hope they will take their place in other people’s homes and bring comfort and solace there,” he says. “With the time we have just experienced in isolation, it seems as if a little renewal might be in order for all of us!”

Green Men seem—indeed—an apt visitation for COVID days.

John and Lynne’s art can be seen by appointment at Joy to the Wind Gallery (soon launching its new website), and the Green Men will be on display July 3, 2pm to 4pm, at an outdoor open house at the gallery.

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Though created by Priscilla May Alden (Cilla) more than two years ago, Journey II is joltingly relevant today.

“It is about one’s life journey—the twists and turns along the way. COVID-19 has been one big twist.”

(As have the protests over the killing of George Floyd roiling the country.)

Cilla’a tapestry designs are mostly abstract, however, her work includes representational references. “The power, rhythm, and beauty of the rugged coast of Maine as well as the colors and weaving traditions of the American Southwest have a strong influence on my artwork,” she says. “My images speak to landscape, and my spiritual connection to ancient cultures.”

In Journey II, the blue form down the middle may be understood as a river—two branches come together in jagged, winding flow (Cilla identifies the red diamond shape caught in its eddies as “probably me”).  

As with many abstract artists, Cilla cedes license in how her work may be understood by others: there is not necessarily one right answer to what something is or symbolizes. Journey II may not have been created with pandemic or protest in mind, but it is especially apt for these unsettled, winding times.

The artist herself is unsettled: Cilla admits she has experienced a creative dry spell of late.

“I have a studio that I haven’t been to as much as I wish,” she says, reflecting on the impact of the pandemic over the last few months. “I find it just drained me of energy and inspiration.”

But as Maine begins loosening lockdown requirements, Cilla too is beginning to re-open creatively: she recently made designs for tapestries based on several small paintings she had created prior to COVID-19; her loom  is now warped for four new tapestries. 

Her energy is returning—another twist in her river.

As Cilla goes back to the inward work of her studio, one wonders: what emblem befitting our tomorrow might arise? Without knowing the answer to that question, we may trust that art—in all its unexpected surprise— carries the promise of affirming who we are and what we experience.

Lest you have any doubt, just look at Journey II.

See more work by Priscilla May Alden by visiting her website.

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You do not need to consider yourself an artist to make art—just ask Alice Mutch.

“I am not an artist,” she says outright. “I am simply a person who is determined to keep my corner bright by finding inspiration for myself and others.”

Alice painted They Shine the Light as a gift to her step-daughter earlier this year. The image shows three rainbows, each symbolizing the spirit of a deceased loved one.

“Turning grief into hope is my mission,” says Alice.

Alice moved to the Boothbay Region four years ago following a career as a lobbyist, most recently in Annapolis, Maryland. Although she has an artistic heritage (her great grandmother and grandmother were artists in Nova Scotia), Alice did not pick up a paintbrush until she moved to this area.

“I took lessons from a lady in Bath,” she says. “But this winter is when I really started painting. I’d had two knee replacements so I had time.”

Though They Shine the Light relates to Alice’s and her step-daughter’s particular losses (Brandon, R.W., and TARA), its resonance transcends the personal: during these COVID-19 days, we all grieve to some degree loss from a world transformed—we all long for rainbows to break in the aftermath of this storm.

Alice gave They Shine the Light to her step-daughter on Mother’s Day. “It went very well; we had a beautiful day together,” she says.

Such is the way with art—a gift of healing and hope from the heart.

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Helen Farnham is an artist living in the Boothbay Region. She has recently been focused on needle felting, delighting in the art form’s vibrancy.

“The colors of wool are so bright and beautiful that I immediately fell in love with this medium,” she says.

A somewhat uncommon art form, needle felting involves using barbed needles to mesh wool fibers together. As we see with Spring (shown here), the results can be spectacular.

Spring is the third piece Helen has made in what eventually will be a series representing the four seasons. She began working on Spring just before the coronavirus pandemic made its way to Maine; carrying on with the piece during COVID-19 days became something of a salve for the artist.

“When I started Spring, I had no idea of the turbulent times ahead. This piece allowed me to find peace, working on it a kind of meditation as I intuitively added everything that appears—the love between a woman and her dog; the flowers and their world of color. My mind became filled with springtime thoughts—a wonderful escape.”

Helen finds these days that needle felting allows her to more freely express herself than other media she frequently uses, including oil paints and watercolors.

And what could be better than finding joy and creating beauty using a method that you love?

Helen Farnham‘s work is scheduled to be on display at The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in July. You can see more of her work at Helen Farnham Designs.

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Ed Parker is an artist of sunny optimism.

For more than 30 years, he has worked as a painter and illustrator. A master of Americana (his art borrows richly from folklore and history), Ed makes images both nostalgic and playful.

Ed has spent summers in the Boothbay Region with his family since 1967. As an artist, he is represented by several galleries, including Boothbay Harbor’s Gleason Fine Art, where he is scheduled to have an exhibition this August.

“I hope that we’ll be able to go ahead with it in one form or another,” he says.

Despite uncertainty around his own upcoming show, Ed holds more concern for his fellow artists than he does for himself. “My artist friends have had exhibitions cancelled, galleries have closed, and workshops have been postponed. They all are in a very difficult situation.”

Which is where an upbeat attitude helps.

“I was recently asked by a good friend if I had a painting depicting courage,” he says. “So I posted Round Our Skiff on Facebook in March.” A work from 2016 and based on a Scottish prayer (which frames the image), Ed acknowledges “it is more about faith and hope than courage.”

Waves crash against the lighthouse isle; white caps peak across the open water; wind fills the sails of the flat-bottomed boat. Yet you would not sense the hinted-at peril of the moment by looking at those in the boat: mother and child in calm delight, dog and cat briskly alert, the helmsman at smiling ease, confident in his own competence—up for the moment in every way. 

Ed’s art, shiningly bright with positivity, is a bolster to our spirits, for riding together our COVID-19 storm, we may take courage from our own fortitude, steady as the helmsman’s hand.

Learn more about Ed Parker and see his work at his website.

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Lynne Seitzer has been painting birds.

“This year is so unlike anything we have ever known. I feel reassurance and a sense of normalcy when I hear birds sing—they carry on; they are preparing for new life. It is such a joy to experience.”

Joy is also conveyed in paintings such as the one reproduced here, Bright Eyes, a work by Lynne showing a Baltimore Oriole.

“Each bird painting is a bit of a portrait,” she says. “I thought I would just paint one or two but ended up doing fifteen this spring.”

Lynne has particularly focused on migratory songbirds, only recently beginning to arrive to the area for annual nesting (Baltimore Orioles typically return here in early May).

Finding her own joy and offering it to others is central to Lynne’s work—especially now.

“Everyone on the planet is feeling uncertainty; there is a sweetness to the presence of a feathered friend,” she notes. “These little bird paintings make me happy.”

“From this place of joy, I believe I am more likely to offer joy to others.”

Lynne Seitzer and her husband John are both artists who have owned and operated Joy to the Wind Gallery in Boothbay Harbor for more than 20 years. They look forward to having exhibitions again as soon as COVID-19 allows.

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