Maine has a long and rich history of art.  I was fortunate to grow up here in a home filled with great images and sculptures.  My father, his artist friends, my uncle, Bob Solotaire, and my earliest friend’s Dad, George deLyra, were all dedicated painters who reveled in the visual world and strived to capture what they loved on canvas.  As a child, I assumed nearly everyone grew up in a cliffside, sunlit, modernist home whose walls were lined with paintings and whose yard housed sculptures and to which was attached a wondrous studio with tall, north facing windows and the constant aroma of oil paint and turpentine.  I now know how fortunate I was.

I developed my own love of the visual early on manifesting itself in the pursuit of photography purely for the joy that can come capturing a fleeting image as well as you are able and that it hopefully carries some depth beyond the magic of the technology and chemistry involved.

As a means to learn the craft and develop my eye I often found myself in used book stores thumbing through photography monographs.  Convincing myself that some were a bargain, I would spirit them home.   I was drawn to some of the greats who took us within artists’ studios and lives and allowed the world to glimpse the same sort of wondrous space that my father spent so many hours in Harpswell. 

David Douglas Duncan’s books on Picasso’s exotic life and work first entranced me.  Others followed: Alexander Liberman, Ugo Mulas, Hans Namuth, Gianfranco Gorgoni, Peter Juley, Arnold Newman, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Duane Michals, Rudy Burckhardt, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and of course Bernice Abbott.

In the early 1990’s it dawned on me that my home state had as fine a stable of artists as anywhere in the world and that to my knowledge photo essays chronicling the same had never been undertaken.

I regret that I did not document my father’s painting life while he was still with us.  I then decided to capture the creative personas and spaces that some of Maine’s most inspiring painters and sculptors possessed.
I ventured to eighteen studios in1993 and honed my technique and vision by amassing photographic records of some of the amazing artists of that time.

Fast forward to March of 2022 and a visit from Bruce Brown.  After carefully studying a number of my images he found himself drawn repeatedly to those artist and studio photos of the early 1990’s.  “Why not revisit this project?” he’d said.  It was a good idea then and again now.  Within days I had created a new list of those Maine painters and sculptors whose work I was drawn to.  And within weeks I was revisiting one of my earlier subjects: Joel Babb in Sumner.  Joel, along with Alan Bray and Dozier Bell were all painters I had photographed before.  But now I no longer possessed “real film” cameras let alone a darkroom.  I finally and somewhat reluctantly made the move to digital cameras and an inkjet printer.  How that move would affect my abilities and style was yet to be determined. 

Within the Explorations and Generations exhibits are many of the images that resulted from my time spent over the past year with sixteen of Maine’s finest contemporary artists.  I consider this body of work to be photo essays as well as portraits.   I have valued the documentation of creative lives.

I hope that these photos serve to capture some small portion of the ongoing vibrant and strong visual arts history of our great state.

In closing I want to expressly thank all the artists involved who so graciously and generously allowed me into their lives and studios and often homes.  Your creative spirits have inspired and I will not forget your kindnesses.

I also wish to sincerely thank Bruce Brown and Carl Little for their knowing nudges and ongoing support and to my friends and fellow photographers Lou Davis and the late Jim Marshall for your inspirations and insights as photographers over the years.