Category: Titles

William Irvine: The Painter’s Journey
by Carl Little
Published by Marshall Wilkes
Hardcover, 108 pages
11.25 x 9.25 inches
Over 100 Color Plates
ISBN: 978-0-9839670-2-6
Price: $39.95

The painter William Irvine’s journey in art began in the town of Troon on the Scottish coast where he was introduced to modern art through the collection of whiskey magnate Johnnie Walker. After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art and serving in the Scottish army, Irvine came of artistic age in London where he was a part of a lively avant-garde scene. Moving to downeast Maine in 1968 proved a turning point: harbors, islands and boats, the sea and the sky, inspired bold work that combined Irvine’s abstract instincts with new pictorial concepts based on the landscape.

In the ensuing forty–plus years Irvine has established himself as a Maine and American master, known for his seascapes, as well as enchanting figurative paintings and still lifes. William Irvine: A Painter’s Journey features a stunning selection of his work, from early abstractions to an array of landscapes inspired by Maine but also by Scotland, England, and France. Writer Carl Little’s text covers the painter’s life in art from his formative years in Scotland to a visit to his new studio in Brooklin, Maine. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Richard Russo offers an affectionate appreciation of the artist.

Jeffery Becton: The Farthest House
Carl Little, Dan Mills, Peter Plagens, Deborah Weisgall
Published by Marshall Wilkes
Hardcover, 108 pages
12 x 10.25 inches
68 Color Plates
ISBN: 978-0-9839670-3-3
Price: $42.00

A pioneer in the field of fine-art photography, Jeffery Becton creates provocative montages, often playing with the borders between dream and reality, interior and exterior, abstraction and representation. As art critic Philip Isaacson observed, Becton’s images “begin with photography, sometimes add painting or watercolor, and metamorphose into a medium of their own.”

Author Carl Little offers a compelling account of Becton’s progress as an artist, from his studies in graphic design and photography at Yale in the 1970s to the creation of his signature digital montages over the past twenty-five years. He explores Becton’s fascination with vintage New England houses and their furnishings, and how the artist draws upon his surroundings on the coast of Maine and elsewhere to create surreal scenarios that hark back to René Magritte, as well as Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth.

Appreciations by art writer and novelist Deborah Weisgall; Dan Mills, director of the Bates College Museum of Art; and art critic Peter Plagens help complete this portrait of a master of photo-based art. Published by Marshall Wilkes, the book features 68 reproductions of Becton’s work—montages that invite you to explore his enigmatic world in The Farthest House.

Philip Barter: Forever Maine
by Carl Little
Published by Marshall Wilkes
Hardcover, 138 pages
11.25 x 9.25 inches
138 Color Plates
ISBN: 978-0-9839670-4-0
Price: $40.00

Philip Barter: Forever Maine When, in his twenties, Philip Barter (b. 1939) discovered Marsden Hartley, he felt a calling: to further the vision of the great American modernist. This was an ambitious undertaking for a brash, self-taught artist from Boothbay, Maine, but Barter’s passion for Maine and its fiercely independent people gave his work a unique, unencumbered vision. Barter was prolific, and he spent a half-century painting the landscape of his home state, becoming the “painter laureate” of the region.

In Philip Barter: Forever Maine, award-winning author Carl Little traces the painter’s life from a formative trip to California in the 1960s; to downeast Maine where Barter and his wife, Priscilla, made a life immersed in art and built a funky home and studio from driftwood and barn boards for themselves and their seven children; to critical acclaim for Barter in the 1990s and his most recent paintings from 2016 and 2017.

This book highlights a choice selection of masterful works that reflect Barter’s increasingly abstract inclinations in depicting Maine landscapes, from the coastal estuaries and blueberry barrens of Washington and Hancock counties to the western mountains and lakes, and north to Hartley’s iconic Mount Katahdin. Barter also explored the world beyond Maine, painting in Spain, Newfoundland, Greenland, the American Southwest, and elsewhere, employing a palette as bold as his vision of his surroundings.

Of his narrative paintings Barter says, “The narratives I paint are historical documents of the characters of Maine and the places they frequent, a roguishly, independent people whom I seek out, and try to be with, and who make this place I know the one-of-a kind place it is—forever Maine.

[Barter’s] reduction of forms to suggestions of elements creates a new shorthand which plays against vibrant color,” wrote Isaacson, who noted that the resulting work, had “a feeling of rightness.

Philip Isaacson, Maine Sunday Telegram

The appeal of Barter’s stylized renderings of trees and rivers, mountains and clouds, is powerful. His ability to extract the essence of the landscape provokes marvel. He sees the geometry of a peak, the jagged coursing of woodland streams, a snowfield’s curving contours. His palette, often not for the faint of hue, underscores his lively vision.

Carl Little, director of the Bates College Museum of Art

From a virtual unknown artist in 1966, when he began painting at 26, Philip Barter has emerged as one of Maine’s most imaginative, diversified, and prolific artists… his reputation as an innovative stylist and eye-wowing colorist borders on wizardry.

Lyle Roger North, Philip Barter: The Maine Experience

…One of Maine’s leading regionalist painters. A prolific artist, his paintings, nearly two thousand in number, are scattered throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, in both individual and corporate collections… A leading regionalist folk-art painter and interpreter of Maine’s Down East experience.

Davistown Museum, Maine

William Irvine: At Home
Published by Marshall Wilkes Publishing
Publication Date July 2018
Hardcover, 100 pages
9.75 x 8.75 inches
86 Color Plates
ISBN: 978-0-9839670-5-7
Price: $28.95

William Irvine: At Home William Irvine believes that every artist is born with a small set of poems to express, and this unique collection of narrative paintings explores his signature motifs. Lending grace and delight to daily activities, his paintings show women celebrating spring with forsythia, calling in their cats at dusk, gossiping, planting trees, or sunbathing sans clothing. Men sip their morning coffee, repair windows, gather fishing gear and wait for the fog to lift. Mermaids, sheep, and sleeping sailors populate rugged, elemental scenes. And always, soaring overhead in the seascapes for which Irvine is best-known, there are gulls, whose cries, soaring flights, and calculated stillness captivate the painter. Irvine moved to Maine in 1968 and was immediately drawn to the fishing villages of Corea and Jonesport, whose tidy houses reminded him of the white farms dotting the green hills of Scotland, where he grew up. William Irvine: At Home joins William Irvine: A Painter’s Journey in establishing Irvine as a Maine and American master.

Philip Frey: Here and Now
by Daniel Kany and Carl Little with introduction by George Kinghorn
Published by Marshall Wilkes
Hardcover, 100 pages
10.25 x 9.25 inches
104 Color Plates
ISBN: 978-0-9839670-6-0
Price: $28.95

Philip Frey: Here and Now In the past twenty years, Philip Frey has developed into one of Maine’s finest landscape painters. Known as a brilliant colorist, Frey paints Maine’s harbors and islands with a bold palette that captures the light and moods of his home state, from the streets of Ellsworth and Portland to Monhegan and Acadia National Park.

With an introduction by curator George Kinghorn, and essays by art critics Daniel Kany and Carl Little, Philip Frey: Here and Now presents the first in-depth look at Frey’s body of work. Kinghorn highlights Frey’s remarkable ability to render complex motifs by way of dynamic planes of color, while Kany and Little place the artist in an art-historical context. In response to Frey’s role in Maine’s evolving contemporary art scene, Kany sums it up best: “Frey’s art occupies the nexus between contemporary painting and brushy traditionalism. If there is a focus to this new direction in Maine painting, his art is it.”

This book offers readers thoughtful commentary and a glorious, full-bodied color representation of Frey’s work, much of it created over the last decade. His paintings are imbued with an immediacy that reflects his commitment to being “in the present”, whether responding to a panoramic view from the summit of Cadillac Mountain, a working waterfront, or an intimate interior.

Frey: Here and Now is a gift to aficionados of Maine art. Here is a painter whose sense of place is profound and whose art is a feast for the eyes.

Mary Alice Treworgy: A Maine Painter
by Carl Little with foreward by Frederick Stecker
Published by Marshall Wilkes
Hardcover, 108 pages
10 x 10 inches
104 Color Plates
ISBN: 978–0–9839670–7-1
Price: $35.00

Mary Alice Treworgy: A Maine Painter follows the artistic career and life of Mary Alice Treworgy, a modern-day precisionist who found inspiration on Monhegan Island and elsewhere in Maine and New England. Author Carl Little traces Treworgy’s journey in art, from a childhood infatuation with paint to studies at the Massachusetts College of Art, a career in graphic design, and critical notice as a painter.

Born in Baltimore in 1936, the great-granddaughter of board game creator Milton Bradley, Treworgy lived for much of her life in Brunswick, Maine, where she raised her family and maintained a studio. Treworgy studied with noted painters, including Joseph Nicoletti, Thomas Cornell, and Wolf Kahn, and attended the Vermont Studio Center on several occasions.

In 1991, Treworgy discovered the work of the American precisionists, which further sharpened her geometric approach. Her work was shown at Maine Coast Artists and numerous galleries, reviewed by critics Philip Isaacson and Pat Davidson Reef, and juried into three biennials at the Portland Museum of Art.

An introduction by Episcopal minister and author Frederic Stecker offers a personal account from his perspective as a member of the Monhegan summer community and as a collector of Treworgy’s paintings. “Mary Alice has taught us well,” he writes. “She paints the object’s essence; there is really more to see and to understand if you remove the distractions.”