You would be well-challenged to name another art museum anywhere in the world blessed with the beauty of location possessed by the Ogunquit Museum of American Art (OMAA). This absolute jewel of a museum is so strategically positioned on such a picturesque piece of coastal Maine property that visitors are often torn between whether to continue mindfully appreciating the exhibited art or allow their senses to be irretrievably seduced by the beguiling kaleidoscope of coastline magnificence surrounding that art. Sun glinting off of salt water. Slick and craggy rocks. Lobster boats entering and leaving Perkins Cove. Stone-strewn and rugged coastal ravines where effervescent waves splash, sizzle and gurgle. All of this natural splendor — and more — is part and parcel of the experience of visiting the OMAA. Indeed, the Southern Maine coastline is an extension of the museum property itself … [Read more...] about VISUALLY ARRESTING, PROFOUNDLY CONTEMPLATIVE

Jennifer Jean Okumura is a lot like her paintings: inviting, precise and composed of a soft power. We speak one sunny morning in her Harrison Avenue studio, where she has been creating art for the past 10 years. Across the room from a few of her dreamy works, we launch into conversation about the artist’s earliest influences. Though a visiting artist during her junior year of high school offered a decisive push to pursue art, from a young age she was compelled to create. When her mother decided the backs of math tests were not adequate surfaces for her daughter’s doodles, she hung large sheets of paper on the wall for Okumura to mark with drawings. There must be tens of them, rolled up, still in her childhood home outside Philadelphia. Okumura has always been an observer and an explorer, unafraid of (and perhaps drawn to) the unknown. As a teen she spent many afternoons venturing … [Read more...] about TRANSMIT. TRANSCRIBE. TRANSFORM.

Featuring vessels by Jennifer King and paintings by Gyan Shrosbree, the Boston South End-based LaiSun Keane Gallery will present the exhibition “Lashing Out” from June 2 through July 16. This pairing of rich narrative styles relates a strong sense of female empowerment. In a recent conversation, Keane remarked that she finds it interesting to explore contrasts spark- ing a synergy of dialogue, a potential that she recognized with these two artists that caused her to develop this show. “When I planned this exhibition, my goal was to showcase 2D and 3D artworks by women artists,” Keane said. “I was thrilled to discover Jennifer King on Instagram and learn that she and I share common friends in California’s ceramics field. Artist Gyan Shrosbree was recommended to me by an artist I was working with, Susan Metrican. I was impressed by the way [each] used color and materials to explore … [Read more...] about A SYNERGY OF DIALOGUE

Award-winning, nationally acclaimed artist and member of the American Watercolor Society, Andrew Kusmin’s watercolors show a scalpel-like precision, and are as intense as oil paintings, as he merges the past with the present in composites of northeastern United States subjects. He was 46 when an art class changed his life and he knew he was meant to master watercolors, promising himself to do it within five years. He’d always used his hands, when he was in the Navy buying legal whale teeth for two bucks a shot, scrimshandering them; restoring houses, making furniture. Paintings were portable creations he could take with him. He liked that. Using the proceeds from his dentistry practice and sale of his house and a barn he’d rehabbed, he managed to send his children to college and keep enough to start over. “It was a whole new world,” he recalled. Teaching art at first, he … [Read more...] about UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Adam O’Day may be best known for his colorfully unique cityscapes, especially those of Boston’s skyline. So much so that in 2016 his painting, “Transit,” won Boston’s “Portrait of a City” contest. The Mayor’s Office purchased his work and gave prints to visiting diplomats and distinguished guests as gifts. What sets his cityscapes and landscapes apart is his use of lush, thick, bold skylines, often including pastels, like pink, purple, turquoise and burnt oranges. Often the buildings are darker or more solid in color — but the streetscapes, including cars, and the horizons — are wistful, emotional, offering both a vehicle for light and warmth. “I love painting in oils,” O’Day said. “But I’ll use anything, really. Oils have that traditional feel and look that no other medium comes close to having. Oils are the gold standard in visual art and painting. For me it’s their depth and … [Read more...] about A VEHICLE FOR LIGHT & WARMTH

With the transcendent energy which exists behind the real world emerging onto her canvases, Sky Power’s paintings seem almost to be vision quests, dreaming the real world into another realm, filtering that so-called “real” world into a dream, or that space in which Crazy Horse was alleged to have lived — the dimension beyond what we see, what allegedly, “is.” Somehow what she captures in her light and color-filled abstractions is very moving. Such works as, “Passing Through,” oil and charcoal on canvas, 24” x 30”, which pictures a floating piano, an entry to crypt, a flower, what could be desert and mountains and sky, with an arroyo or wash nearby, pulse with a vital urgency of mortality. Or “Shelter,” oil and charcoal on canvas, 24” x 30”, vivifying the earth and sky colors of pink and green, with strange, almost birdlike shapes emerging from the mating of sky and earth. Or “Last … [Read more...] about TRANSCENDENT ENERGY