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.

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On Saturday, January 21st, humans of all ages, colors, nationalities, and orientations marched in hordes to form the largest inaugural demonstration of disgust in American history. In DC and 500 cities across the United States, more than three million folks banned together to express myriad messages—and damn, did they bring some good signs. The creativity and cleverness displayed across the board was almost as inspiring as the messages themselves; that’s why art museums and organizations across the country are collecting the signs to put on display. Maine Historical Society is collecting them, too, but with a different goal in mind: The folks at MHS have recognized the reverberant potential of this event, and deemed it worth archiving for both its cultural and historical value.

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

The idea to collect leftover signs and protest material was a no-brainer for Kate McBrien, chief curator at Maine Historical Society, and Tilly Laskey, the center’s outreach coordinator. “Protests like this are obviously going to play a really important role in the next few years,” says McBrien. “They’ve been building and I can only see that growing over the next few years. So we wanted to be able to collect all the protest material we could find and document that grassroots movement, with the idea that it may play a big role in shaping future politics.

“As a historical society,” she continues, “we tend to look more at the human history of the state of Maine, and the political history of the state and how it relates to the nation. Protest is a huge part of that human history, and how Maine citizens and American citizens have made their voices heard within the political process. We wanted to document that citizen voice in the political process; that’s our goal in collecting them.”

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

At the Portland and Augusta marches, Maine citizens brought up a number of statewide concerns, one being water rights. “One of the speakers at the Augusta March was a woman of Wabanaki descent.” says McBrien. “She spoke about water rights and water access in reference to the Dakota pipeline, but she was also talking about water rights in Maine and how the Penobscots have had a long legal battle with the state of Maine for rights to the Penobscot River, which they believe is their ancestral home.”

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

“I don’t know if the Women’s March will become a movement,” McBrien speculates, “and that’s actually the wonderful thing about history: it informs us a bit, it helps us to expect what might happen in the future, but it’s still our future to create. So we’ll just have to kind of wait and see.”

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

The Women’s March signs are evidence that those who participated were the artists, the creatives, the lovers, the empathetic, and the passionate—a community that has faith in the power of unity and resistance. Come hell or high water (or tiny orange hands), these people are ready to make a decidedly yuge impact, and I’m mean absolutely yuge, you wouldn’t even believe how yuge. It’s incredible.

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

Photo courtesy of Maine Historical Society

Maine Historical Society will continue to collect signs from the Women’s March, as well as from marches to come.

The post #TakeAction: Sign of the Times appeared first on Take Magazine.

“Imagine you’re about to have a little one, the love that you have for that little one. Imagine somebody outside of your family you don’t even know making claims on your little one. They don’t like the way you live and they’re going to take your little one by force. Imagine what the loss is when this is not just your family, but your entire community.” gkisedtanamoogk

This is is the subject of First Light, a short documentary by Adam Mazo in collaboration with the Upstander Project. The film examines how the native Wabanaki people of Maine were subjected to discriminatory child welfare practices and how the state, through The Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission, worked towards acknowledging those practices as wrong, quantified the effects of the discriminatory practices, and created space for people to share their stories.

Director and producer Adam Mazo delved into this film after hearing about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Maine Public Radio. After much time and interfacing with community groups, Mazo was invited by Maine-Wabanaki Reach and the TRC to document what the commission was doing. Mazo and his team spoke with tribal leaders, academics, members of the commission, and filmed Wabanaki people, who chose to share their stories of trauma and displacement with the commission.

The film is quiet and informative, carried by testimonials from tribal leaders, academics, and survivors of these culturally oppressive programs. The interviews and testimonials are broken up with quotes from descriptive texts such as excerpts from senate hearings. One of these quotes in the film came from Col. Richard H Pratt, a founder of one of the early schools where native children were sent after the state of Maine forcibly removed them from their communities, “Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit.”

Still from First Light

The story of the Wabanaki people and their many solemn battles with the the State’s misguided welfare practices is long and nuanced. Adam Mazo fully understands the breadth, complexity, and importance of this history and plans to release a full-length documentary called Dawnland in early 2018. Dawnland will act as a sort of companion piece to First Light and provide, according to the filmmaker, “…more testimonials. That’ll be the heart of Dawnland, people telling their personal stories about being taken from their families, or what the really deep impact and trauma they experienced from losing their culture or having that culture taken away and trying to reconnect with that culture as a child or as an adult.”

Dawnland 2018 poster

First Light is a documentary film by Boston-based filmmaker Adam Mazo. Follow the progress of the Upstarter Project on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vimeo and YouTube. Be on the look-out for First Light screenings near you and the release of Dawnland in 2018.

Top image still of Georgina Sappier Richardson from Dawnland | All images courtesy the filmmaker

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