Colin Page: SONG OF SUMMER
July 6 - 29, 2023
Artist talk, Wednesday, July 26 at 6pm
Featuring Dean McCrillis in the side gallery
Artist Talk: Wednesday, July 26 at 6pm
Photo by Polly Saltonstall
Song of Summer is an exhibition of new oil paintings by one of Maine's masters of plein air painting, Colin Page.
Painting is a way for me to dive deeper into how I experience the visual world. When colors harmonize together or have an interesting discordance, or a certain light knocks my socks off, or I see an arrangement of shapes that sings. Painting lets me hold on to the feeling I get in these moments. It’s a way for me to try to understand how it works and why it’s striking. Painting is an attempt to share that excitement.
When I first moved to Maine, I painted everything I saw because of its newness. After 20 years here, now I paint the landscape, my children, and our home life through the eyes of familiarity. I know the people who live in the houses and some of the lobstermen who drive the boats. I’ve walked the rocky shore with my children. This history with the subject brings an intimacy of shared experiences.
As I continue to paint around my home in midcoast Maine, I find ways to make work more about the experience of a place than a straight depiction. Colors can be saturated, edges blurred, and juxtapositions emphasized, all to add to the emotional story of a painting. I play with how the painted image can be an exaggeration of what you see but not an exaggeration of experience. ~ Colin Page
Colin Page was raised in Baltimore, MD and attended the Rhode Island School of Design. He graduated from Cooper Union, New York with a concentration on painting. Upon graduation he lived in New York City for three years where he was an active member in a large and thriving art community. In search of a more diverse landscape, Page moved to Maine. In Maine, Colin paints the coast en plein air and focuses on capturing the atmosphere and light of a scene.
(Click on image to enlarge, hover over enlarged image to see details)
Featured in our side gallery this month is a fantastic young artist, Dean McCrillis. McCrillis’s Surfacing is a collection of new paintings inspired by his upbringing in Western Maine.
The central focus of this work is human interaction with wild places. I often think of an ecological term called an Ecotone: a transition area between two biological communities, where these two communities meet and integrate. The Western Mountains of Maine, where I grew up, are full of spots like this. There, zones of domesticated space and wilderness often overlap. I think of painting as an intersecting space like this. These paintings are a bridge between natural history and personal history and, at their core, are compelled by both memory and discovery. It is a confluence of sorts, and I am persistently adapting and learning as I go. ~ Dean McCrillis
Dean McCrillis is a BFA graduate with disciplinary awards in painting and sculpture from the University of Southern Maine. He maintains a studio practice in South Portland, where he lives with his wife.
