July Art Show Artist Information
Katie Heckel
I have lived on this island for 22 years. The journey has been long and short, joyful and sometimes sad. But always, always exceptional. The happenings of everyday life have become meaningful experiences, shared with remarkable people. We live in an world of water and rocks and trees and horizons and so I paint.
KM HeckelBA and MFA
State University of New York
Brita Holmquist
July 2022
The visual arts are the universal language to be interpreted by every viewer as they see fit. The same could be said for music, but the response is not as immediate. When presented with a painting or sculpture, there is an immediate reaction.
There is no real reason to explain the work, just an urge to share interpretation. The more knowledge is brought to the viewing, the deeper the response can be, but anyone and everyone can have the pleasure of looking at a piece of art and experiencing it.
Frederic Kellogg
Frederic Kellogg was born in Boston, Mass in 1942. Influenced by his father, an avocational watercolorist and friend of Andrew Wyeth, Frederic began painting as a watercolorist at age 13, and later studied oil painting at the Washington Studio School under Jack Boul. He works in Washington DC and Maine, and is represented by the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland Maine. The Cosmos Club of Washington DC exhibited Kellogg’s work in 2006, “Twenty Years of Painting in Washington DC.” The Katzen Art Center of American University exhibited a retrospective of works in oil and watercolor in 2017, curated by E.A. Carmean, former Founding Curator of 20th Century Art at the National Gallery in Washington DC.
Artist Statement
“ As an artist, color, form, composition, and innovation are important to me, and I have great respect for artists that explore them without representative content. But I get the greatest resonance from works that make me see something about the time, place, and human characteristics that define the artist. There is something about them, the tracing of the human hand over more than just the canvas, that makes me better able to see and understand my life. I admire Fairfield Porter for having kept those issues alive during the period when pure innovation was predominant. Innovation remains influential today, even while representative realism has seen a revival in photorealism."
Helen "Sunny" Ladd
Why I paint.
Many years ago, I received a copy of Winston Churchill’s book chapter, “Painting as a Pastime". One of the chief delights he gained from painting was “a heightened sense of observation of nature”. That spoke to me given the opportunities I have had to spend summers in Islesboro and on a lake in New Hampshire and to travel extensively internationally.
I also resonated with his call to those of us whose professional careers required us to use the left sides of our brains to join him in the joy of painting. He wrote:
Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and colour, peace and hope will keep them company to the end, or almost to the end, of the day.
I started by learning how to draw from the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I then chose watercolor as my medium and have been taking lessons for many years from Luna Lee Ray in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Now that I am retired from my left-brained academic career, I look forward to spending more time observing the natural environment and experimenting with color.
What I paint.
Most of the paintings I have included in this show feature aspects of Penobscot Bay, either the natural scenery itself or the boating activity it inspires. I have also included a few whimsical paintings.