Just Looking: New England Art from YankeeMagazine.com

Irish Travellers in Brattleboro

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Photographers have long been captivated by itinerant peoples. Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans photographed migrant laborers and sharecroppers during the Depression. Josef Koudelka became famous when Aperture published The Gypsies in 1975. Sebastiao Salgado is regarded as perhaps today's most distinguished documentary photographer based on the epic sweep of his photographs of the world's dispossessed. Steidl published Joakim Eskildsen's brilliant The Roma Journeys in 2007.

That same year, New England College Press published Dublin-born, New York-based photographer Alen MacWeeney's Irish Travellers, Tinkers No More, a collection of 61 black and white photographs of Irish nomads alas now out of print. Not to worry. Now (through August 2), the Vermont Center for Photography in Brattleboro is featuring an exhibition of Irish Travellers, Tinkers No More.

Alen MacWeeney, 70, got his start as a photographer as an assistant to legendary fashion photographer Richard Avedon. While his own work runs the gamut from fashion and editorial to portraiture and travel photography, it is this powerful body of documentary photographs of Travellers that most recommends him to view.

Irish Travellers were once known as Tinkers because many worked as itinerant tinsmiths, wandering the countryside, camping where they could, repairing pots and pans. Though they are a marginalized people similar to the Roma, or Gypsies, they are not related. In fact, the origins of the clannish nomads is lost in obscurity. Legend has it that they are descendants of a tinsmith who helped construct Christ's Cross and, thus, were condemned to roam the earth, homeless until Judgment Day.

MacWeeney first came across the Travellers camped in a field on the outskirts of Dublin while shooting a photo essay on poet William Butler Yeats in 1965. Over the course of the next six years, he visited the Travellers repeatedly, photographing them at work and play, at weddings and funerals, and recording their music and their stories. The photographs he made depict quintessential outsiders, resourceful, independent people living on the margins of society - which is just the way many artists like to think of themselves, hence the fascination.

Looking upon the incidental squalor and bleakness that surrounds these hardy people, you have to wonder whether Irish playwright Samuel Beckett had the Travellers in mind when he created the dispossessed souls of his absurd classic Waiting for Godot. There is about them a tragedy without despair.

In 2001, Alen MacWeeney returned to Ireland in search of the Travellers he had photographed almost 40 years before, and from his quest made a film that was shown at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center on June 6. While the Travellers still exist - perhaps 22,000 in Ireland, 15,000 in the United Kingdom, and 7,000 in the United States - they have tended to settle down, abandoning their caravans and blending in with the general population. Thus Irish Travellers, Tinkers No More does what documentary photography does best, stopping time to capture a passing way of life.

[Vermont Center for Photography, 49 Flat St, Brattleboro VT, 802-251-6051.]

Real Art Ways Keeps Hartford Hopping

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Real Art Ways, an alternative arts space founded in Hartford, Connecticut in 1975, is one of New England's liveliest contemporary arts venues, like Space in Portland, Maine, and AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island, presenting a heady mix of fine and performing arts.

This summer, Real Art Ways has commissioned four works of public art for Hartford's Parkville and Frog Hollow neighborhoods. Entitled Real Public 2009, the installations add to the vitality of the community and highlight its ethnic diversity.

Photographer Margarida Correia, a native of Portugal, worked with members of Hartford's Portuguese community to create a Parkville billboard display of Praia da Nazare, a famous beach in Portugal, and a series of street lamp banners featuring album covers of Fado singers. Stores in the neighbor play the mournful strains of this distinctive Portuguese music.

Satch Hoyt has installed his "Line Labyrinth" of white pillars and clothesline in Frog Hollow's Pope Park. Hoyt, a British artist of African-Jamaican ancestry, created the labyrinth, inspired by a 12th century labyrinth in India, as an embodiment of the migratory voyages that have brought people from around the world to settle in Hartford.

Sofia Maldonado, a native of Puerto Rico, erected a vivid mural on the façade of the four-story, brick Pelican Tattoo building in Frog Hollow. The mural features women Maldonado met on the streets of the neighborhood in a green Puerto Rican landscape. Feminism, Latin heritage, and skateboard street culture come together in this festive mercantile mural.

Matthew Rodriguez, a native of Austin, Texas, was commissioned to paint cartoon faces on 77 trees in Pope Park. These childlike paintings turn overlooked urban trees into druidical figures that should appeal to the child in anyone.

One of the best things about the four Real Art Ways public works is that they are temporary. This is not to say that they are not of lasting value, but communities (Portland being one of them) sometimes make the mistake of commissioning public art that insists on its own right to exist in perpetuity when a brief stay would have been better.

Maps of the Real Public 2009 sites are available. And if you visit Hartford this summer to see the sites, also stop by Real Art Ways' galleries where artists Jason Keeling, Chris Kaczmarek, Gelah Penn, Corey D'Augustine, Beth Krebs, and Chris Taylor are being featured.

[Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St., Hartford CT, 860-232-1006]

Folk Art Is Fine Art

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:00:00 +0100

In this pluralistic 21st century art society, the distinction between fine art and folk art is hardly worth making. An artist is an artist is an artist and art is anything an artist says it is. Art can be an object, an act, an installation, or just idea. It can be made of anything from oil paint to chewing gum. Anything goes.

Folk art, outsider art, na�ve art, whatever one chooses to call it, however, is the source material for The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art (through September 6) at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Old, Weird America, organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, was selected as the Best Thematic Museum Show Nationally in 2008 by the International Art Critics Association.

The exhibition, the largest the DeCordova has ever hosted, features art by 18 artists, most in their 30s and 40s, whose work "illustrates the relevance and appeal of folklore to contemporary artists."

Toby Kamps, curator of the exhibition, writes in the exhibition catalogue that "in this post-9/11 America of high-emotion and sweeping change, artists naturally look for inspiration in the forgotten and unresolved relics of our nation, the volatile and mercurial old, weird America of folk history."

This Old, Weird America (the show takes its title from rock critic Greil Marcus' book about the influences of folk music on that of Bob Dylan and the Band) is populated largely by cowboys and Indians, pilgrims, Civil War soldiers, and slaves. The narrative that runs through the diversity of media is one of poking around in the past both for ironic fun and revisionist fantasy.

The star of the show is Kara Walker, famous for her bawdy, bitter silhouettes of African-American history. To Old, Weird America Walker contributes a shadow puppet video entitled "8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker" that satires both black creation myths and white racism.

Race is also the subject of Deborah Grant's "Where Good Darkies Go," a grid of acrylic on birch panels based on the folk paintings of Bill Traylor. And the War of the States fought to free the slaves inspired Allison Smith's seven life-size Civil War soldier dolls, Barnaby Furnas' wild battle scenes and portrait of the rebel John Brown, and Greta Pratt's photographs of Lincoln impersonators.

Earlier American history is explored in Sam Durant's tableaux of pilgrims and Indians, Brad Kahlhamer's visionary watercolors evoking his Native American heritage, and apocalyptic paintings by Aaron Morse such as "The Good Hunt" in which a buckskin-clad Deerslayer seems to have gunned down every living thing in the forest, including the forest itself.

For comic relief from the history of American violence, there are the mechanically animated square dance dresses of Louisville artist Cynthia Norton, sometimes described as the post-modern Minnie Pearl.

Throw in a few bobbysoxers, greasers, and surfers and Old, Weird America pretty much distills the essence of America, a place of both great freedoms and magnificent faults.

[DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 51 Sandy Pond Rd., Lincoln MA, 781-259-8355.]

Indiana Is an Island

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Robert Indiana will be upstaging the late, great Andrew Wyeth as the featured attraction at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, this summer as Robert Indiana and the Star of Hope (through October 25) brings the artist's collection of his own work ashore from the island of Vinalhaven. The Star of Hope is the former Oddfellows Hall where Indiana has lived since 1978 and, having had the pleasure of visiting him there many times, I can tell you that Indiana is his own best curator and contents of his cavernous home is like a museum in its own right.

Robert Indiana, it almost goes without saying, was one of the stars of Pop Art in the 1960s along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. He is known universally for his stacked LOVE logo which first appeared in 1965 and over the ensuing years has been made manifest in everything from paintings to prints, sculptures to postage stamps.

Pop Art was a convenient designation for the art that followed 1950s Abstract Expressionism and tended to adopt imagery and techniques from popular mass culture - Warhol's Campbell Soup cans and Brillo Soap boxes, Lichtenstein's comic strip paintings, Oldenburg's sculptures of ice cream cones and hamburgers. Though Jasper Johns's target and flag paintings and Robert Rauschenberg's assemblages of debris such as mattresses and old tires initially defined Pop Art, both artists moved well beyond it. Robert Indiana did not.

Indiana, born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, in 1928, is an artist who invests a great deal of significance in signs and symbols, correspondences and coincidences. His contribution to Pop Art was to perfect a personal vocabulary of stenciled lettering borrowed from commercial sign painting. Indeed, the inchoate beauty of his work is that it is sometimes difficult to discern where signage leaves off and artistic symbolism takes over. Along with LOVE, he has created many other logo-centric works, among them EAT, DIE, and, for the Obama campaign, HOPE.

For its celebration of all things Indiana, the Farnsworth commissioned a sign company to erect the five-letter EAT sculpture Indiana created for the 1964 New York World's Fair atop the downtown museum. The lighted sculpture has not been seen since the World's Fair, at which the lights had to be turned off because so many fairgoers mistook the artwork for a restaurant sign.

There has always been an elegiac subtext to Indiana's use of impersonal means to express deeply personal meanings, whether the fact that "eat' was his mother's last word or the fact that his gorgeous series of Hartley Elegies, a suite of both paintings and prints, was inspired by Marsden Hartley, the artist whose stay on Vinalhaven was what first attracted Indiana to the island that has been his home and refuge for more than 30 years now.

Robert Indiana and the Star of Hope is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and a series of programs that include the June 19 premier of a new film by Dale Schierholt entitled A Visit to the Star of Hope: Conversations with Robert Indiana, a June 27 lecture by Farnsworth interim director Michael Komanecky on Indiana and the Star of Hope, a second Komanecky lecture on July 8 on Indiana's sculpture, and an August 10 lecture by distinguished art historian John Wilmerding entitled Indiana's Paintings: Quintessential Pop Art.

Robert Indiana is a most private man and a most public artist, part hermit and part hero. He is an island unto himself, yet his art is a pure expression of what it means to be an American. If you get anywhere near Maine this summer, see this show.

[Farnsworth Art Museum, 16 Museum Street, Rockland, ME, 207-596-6457.]

Call of the Coast

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:00:00 +0100

As fitting summer fare, the Portland, Maine, Museum of Art and the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, have teamed up to produce Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England, an exhibition of 74 paintings and prints by 48 of the artists who flocked to the coastal art colonies of Old Lyme, Cos Cob, Ogunquit, and Monhegan at the turn of the 20th century.

All of these venues still attract artists of a sort, but the quality and character of the seasonal art is nowhere near what it was a century ago when the sublime pleasures of summer on the coast were just being discovered.

Call of the Coast (in Portland June 25 to October 12 and in Old Lyme from October 24 to January 31, 2010) is drawn from the collections of the two museums and visually demonstrates the clear lines of aesthetic demarcation that separated the various art colonies.

The Connecticut colonies were populated primarily by Impressionists, while the Maine colonies tended to attract Modernists with a distinct fault line running through the Ogunquit colony, where the two camps existed side by side.

The reason for birds of a painterly feather flocking together was primarily force of personality. Each of the colonies had key figures who colonized the areas with their followers. Henry Ward Ranger, a painter of the bucolic Barbizon ilk, was the pioneer in Old Lyme. American Impressionists J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman were among the first to find the Cos Cob section of Greenwich.

When you visit the Griswold Museum, and now if you see Call of the Coast in Portland, it's almost embarrassing how similar American Impressionists such as Childe Hassam and Willard Metcalf were in their dappled sunlight approach to the gentle, leafy Connecticut coast.

Rugged Monhegan tended to appeal to New Yorkers of a Modernist bent with influential artist/teacher Robert Henri encouraging his followers, chief among them George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Rockwell Kent, to join him on this monumental little fishing rock in the sea.

The island's art was thus dominated by the muscular realism that flowed from the Ashcan School until later in the century when abstract painters of the New York School, such as Murray Hantman, Michael Loew, and Zero Mostel, moved in.

The most interesting social dynamic, however, took place in sandy Ogunquit, where the lyrical realism of Bostonian Charles Woodbury and the so-called Virginal Wayfarers of his nearly all-female Ogunquit Summer School of Painting and Drawing held sway until Hamilton Easter Field, a charismatic New Yorker, founded his Summer School of Graphic Arts there in 1911.

Field's followers included his protege, sculptor Robert Laurent, and painters such as Bernard Karfiol, Niles Spencer, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, each of whom practiced a form of Yankee Modernism that translated New England folk motifs and local color scenes into the blunt, expressive, urban language of Modernism.

Call of the Coast is accompanied by a beautifully illustrated catalogue (Yale University Press, $29.95 softcover) and is a perfect example of how art museums can make their collections more meaningful by combining them in thematic context. Had the Portland Museum of Art and the Florence Griswold Museum drawn the Provincetown Art Association and Museum into the act, they really would have had the coast covered.

[Portland Museum of Art, Seven Congress Square, Portland ME, 207-775-6148. Florence Griswold Museum, 96 Lyme St., Old Lyme CT, 860-434-5542.]

The Gary & Gerry Show

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:00:00 +0100

For its second Spotlight New England exhibition focused on contemporary artists working in the region, the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, is featuring sculpture, paintings, and drawings by Gary Haven Smith of Northwood, New Hampshire, and Gerald Auten of Norwich, Vermont and the Dartmouth College faculty. The exhibition (through September 13) pairs two artists who share an austere New England formalism, an aesthetic of the elemental and the essential.

Gary Haven Smith, a 1973 University of New Hampshire grad, has been a fixture on the regional art scene for decades, his stone sculpture and garden benches conjuring ancient civilizations and the geological past while remaining resolutely modern. The Currier show includes several of the abstract glacial granite sculptures for which he is best known, such as Coming Around, a 2008 twist of polished stone atop a rough column, and Lunar Marker, a 2000 work in which Smith has carved a square hole through the middle of a boulder balanced atop another. The artist uses computer-generated designs to mark the surfaces of his work, adding texture to form.

The Currier show also features a selection of Gary Haven Smith's "paintings," two dimensional wall pieces that are as about as sculptural as paintings get. Summer Tale, for instance, is a light and lyrical painted frieze of lead, slate and oil on plywood, while Quercus is 2007 triptych with a bark-like surface made of slate, white gold leaf, and oil on plywood.

"What is important for me in a painting is a relationship between the paint and the different materials such as lead, wood, and slate," writes Smith. "My interest is to create a tactile surface that interrelates with these unexpected materials in a balanced way."

Gerald Auten, a senior lecturer in Dartmouth's studio art department, is represented by 11 graphite drawings created between 1999 and 2004. There is a material correspondence between Auten's drawings and Smith's sculptures and paintings in that Auten builds up graphite on paper by rubbing it into the surface and erasing it, creating a glowing, polished look.

Auten earned a BFA at the University of Iowa, an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, and a masters degree in architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, so perhaps I am reading too much brooding New Englander into his Midwestern reserve. Drawings with titles such as Next New Thing, Jeepster, and Two-Line Frame have abstract geometric forms looming up out of and sinking into luminous clouds of graphite.

Taken together these two Granite State artists provide a visual experience at once cerebral and sensuous, reflective of the material world yet resonant with the world of pure forms.

[Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester, NH, 603-669-6144, x108.]

Abandoned Buildings, Manicured Grounds

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 29 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100

There is an old farmhouse on the edge of the town where I live that has stood forlorn and empty for as long as I can remember. It's shabby, but it has, as architects are wont to say, "good bones." Sometimes I think I'd like to buy it and fix it up. Other times I think I should get Brian Vanden Brink to photograph it.

Brian Vanden Brink of Camden, Maine, is one of New England's premier architectural photographers. His supremely tasteful and well-lit photographs of elegant new homes have graced the pages of Architectural Digest, Architectural Record, Metropolitan Home, Coastal Living, Down East, and Yankee for years. But Brian's personal passion is abandoned buildings. Wherever he goes in the country to make commissioned architectural photographs, he seeks out deserted homes, crumbling businesses, even derelict bridges.

Back in 1999, in the first contribution I ever made to Photo District News (PDN), I wrote about Brian's portraits of abandoned buildings. Ten years later, those photographs are the subject and content of a handsome new book, Ruin: Photographs of a Vanishing America (Down East Books, 2009, $65 hardcover). Ruin features 50 color photographs and 70 black and whites of abandoned homes, churches, stores, mills, bridges, grain elevators, and military installations, all captured in the same painstaking way and with the same appreciative eye that Brian Vanden Brink brings to new architecture. Ruin is like a visit to a ghost town that happens to be scattered across a continent.

While many of the weathered and woeful old buildings are located in Maine, Brian also documents mining towns in Colorado, farmsteads on Maryland, mills in Massachusetts, plantations and places of worship in Mississippi, sodbusters cabins in Nebraska, shotgun houses in Louisiana, and roadside diners in California, all empty, abandoned, lost and unloved except by a photographer with a peculiar penchant for old buildings.

In most cases, the useful lives of these man-made structures are over, but among my sentimental favorites in Ruin are Vanden Brink's suite of nine fine black and white photographs of the old Bowdoin Mill complex in Topsham, Maine. I wandered through these cavernous buildings myself in the 1990s when I was on the staff of Maine Times, then housed in the administration building of the Bowdoin Mill. Today, the mill on the Androscoggin has been lovingly renovated as office, studio, and commercial spaces.

Here in New England, we all inhabit the past. That point is graphically made in another new book, Designing the Maine Landscape (Down East Books, 2009. $50 hardcover) by landscape architect Theresa Mattor and writer Lucie Teegarden. Designing the Maine Landscape almost seems a companion piece to Ruin, the preservation of historic landscapes standing in counterpoint to the neglect of the buildings.

In text, photographs, vintage prints, postcards, and plans, Mattor and Teegarten survey great private estates and gardens, public parks, college campuses, golf courses, cemeteries, and planned urban settlements all over Maine, exploring and illustrating how the landscapes we tend to take for granted were created by designers past such as Beatrix Farrand, Hans Heisted, Frederick Law Olmsted (both Senior and Junior), and Charles Savage.

Published jointly by Down East Books and the Maine Olmsted Alliance for Parks & Landscapes, Designing the Maine Landscape is a lovely armchair stroll through the past on its way to becoming the present. I recommend both it and Ruin highly to anyone interested in the built environment and man-altered landscape.

Edward Steichen's Manual of Style

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Tue, 26 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100

For many years I had a postcard propped up on a bookshelf in my office, a portrait of actor Gary Cooper looking suave in a suit and tie. Though I'm a fairly disheveled sort myself, this picture of a casually elegant Gary Cooper was the apotheosis of style to me.

I see now that the photograph was taken in 1930 by Edward Steichen, but I probably couldn't have told you that until I saw the announcement for Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Cond

An Elegant Ensemble of Encaustic

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Tue, 12 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100

First, let me confess that in 30 years of writing about art in Maine and New England, I had never visited the Saco Museum in downtown Saco, Maine. My guess is that you haven't either. If not, you should. In recent years the Saco Museum (known as the York Institute until 2000) has been mounting some superb exhibitions that warrant putting it on your museum trail map.

Currently (through May 30), the Saco Museum is featuring Heat Stroke: New England Wax Artists Working in Encaustic, a wonderfully rich and satisfying exhibition of some 77 works by 25 artists replete with an accompanying didactic display of encaustic history, materials, tools, and techniques. Heat Stroke was produced in collaboration with New England Wax, an affinity group founded in 2006 by Maine encaustic artist Kim Bernard, and was juried by Katherine French, director of the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, Massachusetts, and known champion of the medium.

Encaustic is a beeswax-based painting medium that produces work with appealing depth, density, and texture as artists paint with it in its molten state, embed objects in it, and scrape and carve it once it has hardened. The exhibitions dominant aesthetic is one of chromatic abstraction punctuated by collaged and buried bits of found imagery. Frankly, I was most surprised by what these contemporary artists did not do with wax, which is sculpt it in the vein of the lovely wax flowers displayed as an historical adjunct to the show.

That said, Heat Stroke features artists using a wide variety of techniques to produce works of great diversity with the seductive, translucent medium as the unifying element.

New England Wax founder Kim Bernard of North Berwick shows a series of classically-inspired geometric abstractions that look almost as though they were done in stucco or plaster as well as a handsome, freestanding sculpture of encaustic, plywood, and lead. Both the wall pieces and floor sculpture seem to take their concentric form from Roman hippodromes, places of sport and of healing.

Patricia Gerkin of Greenland, New Hampshire, treats encaustic almost as a medium for the display of artifacts, embedding discrete bits of rusted screen, wire, and hinges in blocks of neutral colored wax.

Gregory Wright of Lowell, Massachusetts, makes bold, fluid organic abstractions that might actually be underwater seaweed beds, dripping and daubing wax.

One of the most unusual and restrained uses of encaustic is by Deborah Kruger of Florence, Massachusetts. She creates festive, feathery wall hangings out of fiber, encaustic, oilstick, paint, waxen line, and in some cases beads. Her works have a tribal, ceremonial look and feel.

My favorite piece in the show was "Snowstorm in July" by Jeanne Griffin of Holliston, Massachusetts. Like several other of the artists, Griffin created a multi-panel piece, hers a grid of twelve panels, each dappled with pink, black, and white encaustic in patterns that suggest various stages and intensities of a natural event, in this case apparently a snowstorm.

In all, there are 11 artists each from Maine and Massachusetts, two from New Hampshire, and one from Connecticut in this thoughtful survey of New England encaustic artists. And in keeping with the Saco Museum's recent strategy of partnering with arts groups to arrange exhibitions, Heat Stroke will be followed by For Pastel Only (June 5 to June 28), the 10th International Juried Exhibition hosted by Pastel Painters of Maine.

As a small regional museum with a focused mission to promote and present the fine and decorative arts, the Saco Museum would be hard to beat.

[Saco Museum, 371 Main St., Saco ME, 207-283-3861.]

The Afterlife of Art

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Thu, 07 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100

When painter Carlo Pittore died in 2005 at the age of 62, he left behind a lifetime of art in his Bowdoinham, Maine, studio. Artists naturally want their art to live on after them, but the fate of most posthumous art is to be packed away, scattered to the four winds, or even disposed of. Fortunately, Carlo, a consummate artist, activist, and teacher, was well-loved in the Maine art world, so his estate has been more well cared for than most.

The Carlo Pittore Foundation for the Figurative Arts has been busy in the four years since Carlo's passing with the exacting tasks of inventorying, documenting, moving, and storing some 1,000 paintings and 50,000 drawings and sketches. Now, in an effort to find good homes for Carlo's art, the Carlo Pittore Foundation is preparing to sell some of it.

On May 16, the foundation is holding a gala Carlo Pittore auction at 51 Deering St. in Portland. Cocktails at 6, live auction at 7. There will be two oportunities to preview the work, on Friday, May 15, from 5 to 7 and on Saturday, May 16, from 1 to 3. A handsome auction catalogue (suggested donation $15) has been printed. Online, proxy, and telephone bidding is welcome, as well. The foundation requests an RSVP (503-686-4621 or info@carlopittorefoundation.org) in order to get a head count as the auction is being held in the board member's home. The proceeds from the auction will further the work of the Carlo Pittore Foundation, which, in addition to preserving and promoting Carlo's work, is to support "a living community of artists" through juried exhibitions and grants to individual artists.

I was blessed to count Carlo Pittore as a close friend. Over the years, out of the goodness of his heart, he created watercolor sketches of all three of my daughters. I plan to be there on May 16 in hopes of giving something back by purchasing a little something. These are not times conducive to the sale of contemporary art, however, and Carlo's work has always been a difficult sell, so I dearly hope that discerning buyers with more means than mine will turn out in droves to take advantage of this auction opportunity.

Carlo Pittore was born Charles Stanley in 1943. He took his new name in the 1970s after living and painting in Monticello, Italy, where the local children called him Carlo Pittore (Charles the Painter). After establishing himself in New York as one of the pioneers of the international mail art scene, Carlo settled in rural Bowdoinham, first in a yurt, subsequently in a studio apartment fashioned from a former chicken processing barn.

While he was perfectly capable of producing the naturalistic landscapes (a few of which are included in the auction) that are the coin of the realm in the Maine art world, Carlo was a thoroughgoing humanist devoted to the human figure. He drew and painted just about everyone he knew, which was thousands of people. His nudes and portraits are very much like the man himself -- bold, boisterous even, frank, sensuous, and uncompromising.

The works in the May 16 auction include representative samples from distinctive categories of Carlo's oeuvre, among them paintings of boxers, carnival performers, modern takes on classical paintings, portraits, self-portraits, nudes, landscapes, mail art, and his comic drawings. I have my eye on a whimsical pen and ink drawing of an artist sketching a nude on a pedestal. The estimated values run from a couple of hundred dollars for drawings to as much as $12,000 with most oils in the $2,000 to $3,000 range.

Had Carlo had the success of a Lucian Freud or an Alex Katz, his figurative paintings would have been snapped up long ago, but as he struggled all his life to make his art and to make ends meet, he left behind an estate populated by hundreds of intimate and expressive portraits, self-portraits, and nudes. My worry is that much of Carlo's art will prove too powerfully personal to appeal to collectors beyond his wide circle of friends. But then that may well be enough. And if there are collectors out there as bold and fearless as Carlo Pittore was as a painter, let's hope they show up in Portland on the evening of the 16th.

[Carlo Pittore Foundation for the Figurative Arts, PO Box 613, Brunswick, ME 04011, 503-686-4621.]