A Short Trip to Brunswick

Many of the small art museums in Maine are gems, including the Bowdoin Art Museum on the Bowdoin campus in midcoast Brunswick, Maine, the gateway to Highway 1 going up the coast and Downeast.

I was lucky to catch the final days of an amazing exhibition of drawings by Josefina Auslender, an Argentine artist who now lives here. I went to a friend of mine who was unmoved by the work. I had to agree with her that the work is technically spot on but I think that spending more time with the work might have resulted in something firing emotionally for her, or maybe not. Art is so subjective and there is much art that I love that doesn’t elicit an emotional response, but more of an intellectual and visual thrill.

But here are a couple of drawings that I really liked from 1972. It’s interesting to me how she uses the dark and light fields in these pieces.

It’s so frigging hard to get decent photos of work under glass… grrrr… but that’s a rant for another post one day. What was interesting was my response to her later work in ink, which I liked much better.

I wished I had taken more (better) photos of these four pieces… the upper right one is my fave, and there is something going on emotionally in that piece for me. But different strokes as they used to say. Unfortunately there is no way for me to take a better photo as the show is gone now. But I do believe the exhibits that the following came from are still up there. However, I would go to the website to check on that before making the drive.

I had not known of Hung Liu before and was glad to make her acquaintance.

I had never heard of this artist either… a young man from Cameroon, Herve Youmbi

I was glad to see two other of my favorite artists at the museum Jaune Quick-To-See Smith and Daniel Minter.