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.

Artist Ethan Hayes–Chute thinks a lot about the spaces we inhabit and how we experience them. His three-dimensional installations, built from salvaged wood and other materials, reflect his thoughts on self-sufficiency, self-preservation, accumulation, and nature. “I’m enchanted with working in different mediums, at different scales, and offering different entry points for people to encounter my work,” he says. His current work, a photographic series called Beacons, is part of We Might Climb a Tree, at Least, an exhibition celebrating naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau at the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts (MMPA) through January 27th, 2018.

The photos in Beacons, shot in the woods surrounding Hayes-Chute’s family camp on Lake Sebec in central Maine, juxtapose the familiar (ordinary household lamps) with the ominous (a dark forest). Each lamp, pictured hanging from a tree, creates a small, familiar circle of light. “My inspiration for the series happened by accident,” Hayes-Chute says. “I was working outside at the camp with a lamp and was really taken by the light’s interaction with the leaves against the darkness.”

A builder and maker during his childhood in Freeport, Maine, Hayes-Chute became fascinated constructing small sculptures and miniatures as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. His family (his father, James Chute, is an artist who recommended the Beacons series to MMPA Director Denise Froehlich) and experiences growing up in Maine are reflected in his art. “The settings and similarities I create or recreate from imagination and my family history creep in quite often in my work,” says Hayes-Chute. “I’m always happy to have those moments.”

From the series Beacons, 2015, Digital C-Print, 18 x 27 inches. Photo courtesy of Ethan Hayes-Chute. 

Last year, Hayes-Chute used his maker skills to explore familiarity in a space, building a room-size workshop — complete with with workbench, tools, and assorted odds and ends — in an installation at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. More recently, with collaborator and Finnish performance artist Dafna Maimon, he combined large-scale installation with performance art by creating Camp Solong. It’s an immersive three-day summer camp for adults emphasizing play, community, and the universality of saying “goodbye,” whether to others or to one’s emotional baggage.

Camp Solong, Dafna Maimon and Ethan Hayes-Chute, 2016 – (ongoing), as seen in the garden of Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, 2016 Photo by Mike Terry

Hayes-Chute and Maimon built the camp, a one-walled cabin with a roof, platform, and eight bunk beds with a table and benches, which pops up each summer in different locations, including Finland and Germany (Hayes-Chute hopes to bring it to Maine). “I always wanted to integrate performance in to my work and activate my own structures,” Hayes-Chute notes. “Dafna and I came up with the idea of summer camp through discussions about how people need to learn how to empathize and communicate with each other.”

Hayes-Chute is also experimenting with video. His “New Domestic Woodshop,” a humorous riff on popular do-it-yourself television shows and YouTube videos, was developed for CONGLOMERATE TV, a collaborative project in Berlin. As the host, Eth, Hayes-Chute uses the many materials he has in his workshop to solve minor problems (for example, in this video, how to create a lap desk that enables him to work from bed). His next project is creating an experience around making customized cooking spices, a theme touched on in his installation at the List.

Whether it’s video, performance art, or large-scale installations, Hayes-Chute is still tinkering. “I want people to see these collections of objects and have the experience of seeing something familiar,” he says.

Ethan Hayes-Chute, Artist
Freeport, Maine/Berlin, Germany
Website
Instagram

Top image: List Projects: Ethan Hayes-Chute, 2016, installation view at MIT LIST Visual Arts Center, wood, found objects. Photo by Peter Harris Studio

The post If You Build It appeared first on Take Magazine.

Scott Kelley is an artist who enjoys telling stories. Kelley, who lives and works on Peaks Island, Maine, creates meticulously-detailed watercolor and gouache paintings of animals, birds, and other objects from nature. His work mixes fact with fiction, from woodland animals wearing Native American garb to portraits of children juxtaposed with 19th century whaling images. “I’ve always thought of my gallery exhibits as operas complete with a cast of characters from a libretto,” he says.

Kelley’s “characters” are the often unseen (or forgotten) objects that are emblematic of New England and the shoreline—beach stones, quahog shells, herons, fish. Born in Binghamton, New York, Kelley knew at age five that he wanted to be an artist. Although he was naturally drawn to the style of American realist painters such as Andrew Wyeth and Rockwell Kent, Kelley was schooled in minimalism at The Cooper Union in New York City (he also attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London and did post-graduate work at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, in Houston). “Realism was frowned upon when I was in college in the 1980s,” he says, although he believes his minimalist training enables him to add multiple layers of meaning to his work. “I find that my paintings have meanings that aren’t apparent to viewers and I can still tell stories,” he says.

Living on Long Island in the early 1990s, Kelley was inspired by the natural world around him, on the beach and in the water. He created highly detailed, straightforward paintings of rocks and shells. One day, when he and his wife Gail were out sailing, he saw a pair of blue herons and was moved to paint them as well, generating a whole series of works about birds. In 2003, he was artist-in-residence for a month at the Palmer Station in Antarctica, painting penguins and local wildlife.

Diamond Beaver, Watercolor and gouache on paper, 55” x 48”

Concepts for Kelley’s works can take years to develop, shaped by his love of history and nature. Maine, in particular, strongly influences his work. “To me, Maine is a specific mindset,” Kelley says. “It’s a place with a number of personalities that are hard to attach to. It’s intriguing.” The state‘s personality is evident in his whaling series, which started as a group of paintings of whales and morphed into an eight-year project based on the history of American whaling. It includes scrimshaw of whales on reclaimed ivory (old piano keys) and portraits of Peaks Island children in period clothing or holding whaling artifacts.

Chaos Bear, Watercolor and gouache on paper, 22” x 30″

Kelley’s most recent work is Birch, a limited-edition children’s book adapted from a Wabanaki folk tale about a birch tree who protects the forest. The project was inspired by Kelley’s portraits of animals, depicted as Wabanaki tribal elders. “I wanted to create a story the animals in my studio could inhabit,” he says (the book will be released nationally as I Am Birch in spring 2018). “I love places where nature rubs up against modern-day civilization.” It’s a story that, true to Kelley’s inquisitive nature, he’s explored in-depth.

Scott Kelley’s art work is on view at Dowling Walsh Gallery, Sigrid Freundorfer Fine Art, W.M. Brady & Co., and John H. Surovek Gallery.

Scott Kelley, artist
Peaks Island, Maine
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Top image: “Whale,” watercolor and gouache on paper, 57” X 84”, by Scott Kelley. All images courtesy of Dowling Walsh Gallery.

The post Mixing Fact with Fiction appeared first on Take Magazine.