Full Circle: Gail Spaien and Heather Wilcoxon at studio e

studio e gallery artists Gail Spaien & Heather Wilcoxon are life-long friends. Friendship between artists almost always produces extended conversations about art, about how to keep making art and what it means to be an artist. This gallery talk explores how both artists intimately address these questions in their own practice and how conversations arise between their physical paintings.
Gail Spaien’s rich, mosaiced scenes of Maine are each carefully spaced and richly patterned. She speaks of how her slow painting process, akin to embroidery or quilting, and her quiet observations of the seasons, give form to her meditations. Each painting tracks the passage of time and in turn, her contemplation during its creation. “As an observer of my surroundings,” she writes, “I selectively catalog - a cottage chair from the Hadden house on Cliff island, the car ferry motoring across Casco Bay in the winter... the birds fluttering in the willow tree in my yard. I unify the subject of my work around the cycles of nature, daily activity and routine.”
In contrast to Spaien’s quiet meditations, Wilcoxon’s paintings give form to raw emotions. Ladders pile up like wreckage, jutting out of the foggy water, reminiscent of the all-too familiar dusty rubble of disaster sites. The artist talks about a sensitivity in her painting, “I have to feel deeply about something in order for it to matter to me-whether it’s political, social, environmental or personal. Without an emotional reaction, I have nothing to say.” There is a hopefulness in the works though, anonymous figures step out of the Turner-lit mist to climb ladders and reach upwards; each ladder a symbol of self-actualized change.
These two approaches to painting complement and contradict each other, like any good friendship woven through with conversation. Both artists lived on houseboats for long periods and the point where the land meets the water consistently draws them both back to the same place. A repeated meeting of old friends on the shore.
on view at studio e through October 2023