In order to understand Amanda Hawkins, you need to know that she grew up next to a salt marsh in Newburyport, Massachusetts. As a child, she spent hours exploring the marsh’s channels and paths, until she knew it as well as the seabirds that nested there. Hawkins is connected to the marsh on a level that transcends easy understanding — it is both a favorite place and an emotional touchstone. The land itself contains layers of meanings and memories, a deeply personal sense of place that she attempts to evoke in her abstracted landscapes.

“I have to paint places that I have an emotional connection to,” Hawkins says. When she begins a painting, however, that relationship between emotion and landscape isn’t always logical or immediately apparent. “They’re kind of like puzzles for me,” she says. “A lot of times when I’m painting, it takes me a while to find the landscape, but then I’ll recognize the colors.”

Labeling her paintings as landscapes, Hawkins says, allows viewers to immediately orient themselves in the work. “It gives people a jumping-off point,” she says. “Every person in the world can relate to a landscape.” That familiarity allows viewers to engage more deeply with the abstract elements of the piece — the emotional content layered over the landscape. This tension between the literal and the abstract helps elevate her paintings beyond the typical limits of the genre. “I always want to make the argument that landscapes can be contemporary,” Hawkins says.

Marshscape, Summer Haze

Her creative process, then, requires a strong relationship to her environment, and Hawkins continues to draw energy from the New England coast. She is currently based in Portland, Maine, which she values for the city’s close proximity to nature as well as for the diverse color palette found in Portland’s working waterfront. “That’s driven a lot of my aesthetic, actually,” she says, “that contrast between neon buoys and gray fog. It’s beautiful yet still kind of grimy.”

She also values Portland for its vibrant artistic community. Having a nucleus of other artists in the area provides her with both a sounding board and a source of inspiration. “I find it really inspiring to see how other artists set up their studios,” she says. “Seeing their process in person allows me to bring something new back to my own practice.”

Pier.

But Hawkins has also increasingly become a part of the art community outside of Portland. Over the past year, she has worked hard at building her social media presence, which has sparked connections with artists and fans across the globe. “I see social media as a place to be honest and incredibly genuine with my audience,” she says.

This approach has not only yielded another group of artists for Hawkins to interact with, but has also provided new markets for her finished pieces. To date, she’s sold paintings to buyers in California, France, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Social media — particularly Instagram — has allowed her to amplify her reach more quickly and effectively than other, more traditional routes. “Trying to advance my career through the gallery scene was good,” she says, “but there are a lot of people outside of Boston who want to see the work too.” Hawkins’ direct-to-consumer model also makes her art more affordable. It’s a side effect she is happy to encourage. “They say that artists live on the doorstep of the rich, and I’m trying to change that,” she says.

At the same time, though, Hawkins is clear about her priorities. “It’s really important for me to keep putting the art first,” she says. “No matter if I’m shipping a piece of art to Boston or to Australia, I’ve got to make sure it’s the best possible work I can do. It’s a part of me on the wall.”

Amanda K. Hawkins–artist
Portland, Maine
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Top image: En Plein Air. All photos courtesy of Amanda K. Hawkins.

The post Heart/Land appeared first on Take Magazine.

This spring Mass Poetry, a statewide nonprofit committed to helping working poets and expanding the audience for poetry in Massachusetts, appointed its first executive director ever—Laurin Macios. Macios has been involved with the organization since 2013, but left briefly to work as a program director for the Poetry Society of America. A working poet herself, Macios with a deep commitment to expanding Mass Poetry’s long-term stability and impact. Take spoke with Macios about balancing her roles as poet and director, as well as what makes Massachusetts such a fertile place for poetry.

Take: You have a pretty full plate these days. How do you reconcile your creative work with your organizational work?

Laurin Macios: When I had my first interview at Mass Poetry with (Mass Poetry co-founder) Michael Ansara in 2013, he said, “I’m going to ask you this as like a false dichotomy question: are you more creative or are you more organized?” And I said, “one hundred percent I’m more organized.”

[Michael] is one hundred percent creative and has so many amazing ideas, so what Mass Poetry needs now is someone to build the structure around it so we can keep doing those ideas for 20 years and longer. […] I’m sort of coming in here and helping turn this beautiful, sprawling free verse poem into, I don’t know, like a villanelle. Hopefully an epic, actually. (laughs) Yeah, that would be better.

T: What qualities do you think unite poets in Massachusetts?

LM: What I love about the poets in Massachusetts and in New England overall is really the variety. And across that variety they’re always doing such engaging and unique and interesting work. I would also say that they want to come together and support each other. In a way, Mass Poetry was founded by communities of poets who came together to form this one community. I just love that these poets wanted that, and that’s what really makes the Massachusetts Poetry Festival so warm and wonderful.

T: Poetry in Boston got a huge visibility boost a few years ago courtesy of the Raining Poetry program, which places poems on city sidewalks that only appear when wet. Where did that idea come from?

LM: That actually came about during my time with Poetry Society of America, so I don’t know its origin story as well. But I do know that it came out of conversations between Mass Poetry and the City of Boston. Boston Poet Laureate, Danielle Legros Georges, selects the poems and manages a crew at Lesley University, where she teaches, to create the stencils.

That program really just makes me smile. It’s meaningful that you’re walking around and there’s poetry where you’re not expecting it. It’s literally taking poetry off the shelf and placing it at people’s feet.

We’ve been able to put poems up in different languages and engage different audiences, which has been really exciting, and we think about which poems and which languages would be best in which locations. It’s been a really great way to get poetry in front of people who we might not be able to reach otherwise.

Part of the on-going Raining Poetry installation, a collaboration between Mass Poetry and the City of Boston. Photo courtesy Mass Poetry.

T: Is there something about Boston in particular that you think allowed this idea to start and flourish there?

LM: I think it’s the city’s attitude towards the arts, really. We have a Chief of Arts and Culture, and the city is full of amazing, vibrant artists and people who want to bring art to the commonwealth and its citizens. I think that’s pretty unique.

T: What’s coming up that you’re excited about?

LM: We do this program […] called An Evening of Inspired Leaders. We bring together 15-18 leaders from myriad fields to one stage, and have them each read a poem that has inspired their success and then share a few words about it. [The audience gets] to see that not only writers and people involved in literature are affected by poetry. We’ve had Deval Patrick, actors, actresses, people from the medical field, religious leaders, chefs, all come together to read a poem. That happens annually—the next one’s in February, so it’s a ways off.

T: What poem would you pick to read onstage?

LM: Ooh, that’s lovely. Actually two come to mind right away, but I would say Mary Oliver’s poem “Dogfish” from her book Dream Work. It’s a really beautiful poem about pushing through. The lines that always come to mind are: “I think those little fish/better wake up and dash themselves away/from the hopeless future that is/bulging toward them/probably/if they don’t waste time/looking for an easier world/they can do it.” I always think of that—don’t waste time conforming to your world, just keep moving forward.

The other is Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” which more just inspires how I try to live my life: “afoot and light-hearted.”

Interview has been edited and condensed.

Laurin Macios – Poet, executive director Mass Poetry
Boston, Massachusetts
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Mass Poetry
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Top image: Laurin Macios at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, 2017. Photo by Creative Salem, courtesy Mass Poetry.

The post Poetic Structure appeared first on Take Magazine.

In his studio, Jason Werner is surrounded by stars. The walls contain his paintings of the night sky and deep space, subjects that have fascinated the artist for decades. Several of his latest works, entitled Starfield 3-6, were recently displayed at EBK Gallery in Hartford.

Werner has been drawing since a young age. From the beginning, he says, “the simple act of making black dots on white paper was fascinating to me.” Transfixed by deep field images from the Hubble Space telescope, he has worked to capture scenes at the furthest limit of human perception. Like the those images, his Starfield paintings at first seem deceptively simple: points of color on a dark background.

Yet it is immediately apparent that these works aren’t meant to reproduce photographs. These large, mesmerizing canvases possess an incredible depth of field and a subtle variance in color. More than simple documents of far-off places, they are human creations that capture a sense of wonder.

EBK Gallery owner Eric Ben-Kiki with Jason Werner, Starfield series

This quality was what attracted EBK Gallery owner Eric Ben-Kiki to the works. “There’s a pretty cool substance to them,” he says. “They’re very minimal, but very dense.” The paintings seemed to exert a gravitational pull in the gallery, frequently drawing viewers in off the street. Ben-Kiki, a pioneer in the Hartford gallery scene, amplified this effect by keeping the pieces lit until midnight each evening.

Starfield 3-6 may or may not contain identifiable parts of the night sky—though viewers looking for Orion or the Big Dipper will come up short. “I want people to kind of not know where they are in the sky,” Werner says. He believes this disorientation emphasizes the images’ abstract nature, which helps viewers focus on the spaces in between the points of color.

Although the subjects of the Starfield paintings are light years away, New England remains the center of Werner’s creative universe. He thrives on proximity to the natural environments that shaped writers like Emerson and Thoreau, and these places not only fuel his creativity, but also directly inform his landscapes.

Twisting Trees Rocks, Jason Werner

Unlike his long-standing fascination with the cosmos, it took Werner years to find his own path to painting landscapes. It was only when he began working on fully abstracted pieces alongside his landscapes that he felt a unique approach develop. The two styles began to gradually merge until, according to Werner, “I felt it was me on the canvas.” Thick underbrush and choked trails are palpable in his landscapes, which feature slashing, angular strokes and muted palettes. The scenes are often unruly, which Werner says is part of his goal. “I like chaos,” he says. Werner plans to exhibit some landscapes in November at a show at Northwestern Community College in Winsted, Connecticut.

It’s perhaps fitting that so much of Werner’s work deals with celestial and terrestrial themes, as his paintings provide an apt encapsulation of the artist himself—feet firmly planted in New England, but reaching for the stars.

Jason Werner–artist
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Top image: Starfield 4, Jason Werner, photo courtesy of Jason Werner

The post Hartford’s Star Painter appeared first on Take Magazine.

Usually, the Oasis Pub in New London, Connecticut, is about as southern as a snowball. But on the second Thursday of every month, it transforms into the kind of honky tonk rarely seen north of the Mason-Dixon Line. This happens courtesy of James Maple and Daphne Lee Martin’s Hard Luck Horseshoe Revue, an old-school Southern bingo night and concert series that offers a new way to connect musicians and audiences in New London.

Maple, a Mystic-based singer-songwriter, developed the event last year as a way to combat falling attendance at local concerts. “I don’t know what happened,” he says, “but now it’s hard to get people to pay five dollars for a band they haven’t heard of.”

James Maple, Hard Luck Horseshoe Revue creator, photo courtesy of James Maple

He took the idea to Sean Murray, the Oasis’ manager, who suggested involving Martin, a multi-faceted musician with deep links to New London’s arts communities. Maple and Martin bonded over their shared family ties to Appalachia and the South. As children, both attended community bingo nights, and they retained a fondness for the close-knit gatherings of friends and neighbors who attended those events—people who took life at a “slower, gentler” pace than most New Englanders. “We wanted to re-create that situation here,” Martin says, “where complete strangers could sit at the same table and participate in an evening together.”

Daphne Lee Martin, Hard Luck Horseshoe Revue co-host, photo courtesy of Daphne Lee Martin

To evoke an authentic feel at their own bingo night, Maple bought vintage bingo cards off of eBay, and players mark squares with old pennies. To further set the tone, the co-hosts sometimes perform classic country duets, even though both artists are formidable songwriters in their own right.

More frequently, though, the Revue showcases the region’s best Americana acts. This was a priority for both Maple and Martin, because “[New London] is so small but so jam-packed with artistic talent,” Martin says.

During the evening, the featured band or artist plays the equivalent of a full set in between rounds of bingo. This balance between music and games keeps all members of the audience engaged. Regular patrons have formed teams, made custom t-shirts, and banter back and forth with the hosts.

The format has also proved popular with musicians. Performers at the Revue have included veterans like Ian Fitzgerald, but newer artists have also used the event to break into the New London scene. Julie Rhodes, a Providence-based soul singer, made her New London debut at the Revue, where, according to Martin, “she just [took] over the room with her tremendous stage presence.” Rhodes played the Oasis again this month in a concert format, which drew in many people who had first discovered her at the Revue.

The event’s success is a testament to the charisma of the hosts and performers, but it’s also due in part to the DIY ethic of New London’s artists. For Martin, this spirit is exactly what makes small scenes like New London so attractive—artists have an outsize ability to shape their futures. Or, in her words, the chance to “build their own empire.” Bingo.

James Maple and Daphne Lee Martin–Musicians
founders of Hardluck Horseshoe Revue
Oasis Pub
New London, Connecticut
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James Maple
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Daphne Lee Martin
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The post Hard Luck, Good Times appeared first on Take Magazine.