“What stirs awe and wonder in people today is a sense of belonging and of participation in the great cycles of Nature, an awareness of oneness with life that does not shrink in terror from life’s natural completion in death. What inspires them is not the hope of a final separation from the realities of nature, life history and time, but a conscious and delighted participation in these realities — not the promise of salvation, but the reality of the homecoming.”
Tuesday 207: Sloop & Swimmer
Ahhh...summer in Maine!
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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on any 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.
Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.
Interiors exhibit at Waterfall Arts
I'm pleased to announce that artist and curator Abbie Read has selected three of my window paintings to be included in an exhibition at the Waterfall Arts in Belfast, Maine. I'm especially excited to show Looking Out, which hung in the offices of the US Ambassador to The Gambia through the Art In Embassies program. Please join me for the opening reception on July 28th and the artist panel on August 16th!
INTERIORS
July 28 – September 15
Opening Reception: Friday July 28, 5 - 8 pm
Artist Panel: Wednesday August 16, 7pm
INTERIORS focuses on representations of domestic spaces. Place and Belonging is the 2017 exhibition theme of Waterfall Arts. A curated collection of works by local well-known artists, this exhibition directs the gaze inward. The owner’s presence is clearly felt, but the human form is not the central idea; the work shows the interior spaces we occupy, rather than us in them.
Artists include: Alison Rector, Louise Bourne, Gideon Bok, Kris Engman, Sarah Szwajkos, David Estey, Jessica Ives, and Heath Paley.
Looking Out, 36 x 36 inch oil on canvas, 2006
Timbercliff Tabletop II, 8.5 x 11 inch gouache on mylar, 2007
Timbercliff Tabletop III, 8.5 x 11 inch gouache on mylar, 2007
Tuesday 207: Step Into Summer
Even though it's been a long, cold, rainy spring here in Maine, there's no stopping summer. It's coming -- and it's what keeps us going.
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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on any 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.
Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.
Words To Paint By
“The earth remains forever,
the eye never has enough of seeing.”
– Ecclesiastes
Just the other day I learned that all the blood in your body filters through your eyeballs every three hours. Why? The UV rays in sunlight kill pathogens that otherwise continue to cycle around in your bloodstream, leaving your body to find another way to rid itself of them. Crazy, right? The human body is just so amazing. The line above is a line that I've always inscribed on the back of all my paintings -- with the exception of the 4x4's because they don't allow enough space. I started doing this all the way back in high school. At the time I had my reasons, but now I continue to write this quotation more as a riddle and a tease, to both myself and others. This fact about eyeballs, blood, and sunlight though...it occurred to me that it's part of the mystery of this riddle, one of the many reasons renewed truth and vitality is being found in ancient wisdom and spiritual text through science. Seeing -- looking at the world, the earth, its woods and waters and sunlight, looking at it through our eyeballs, the physical act of seeing -- is a vital act. Now when I inscribe these words on my paintings I will smile at the wonder of it, at the wonder of what it is to be in this body and to see through these eyes.
“A painter should have a clear mind and a strait eye.”
– Josef Albers
Tuesday 207: Waiting On Monhegan
Waiting On Monhegan / 4" x 4" / 2017
Sale Price:$207.00 Original Price:$300.00
Soon the Hardy Boat will begin running its route from New Harbor to Monhegan, and soon I'll be atop the tallest coastal cliffs in Maine, perched and peering south toward Gull Rock, glad to start another summer season.
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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on any 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.
Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.
Instaglimpse: An Underwater Work In Progress
“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”
Delivery!
Earlier today I delivered these small works to Courthouse Gallery Fine Art in Ellsworth. Their spring season exhibition opens on May 26th. To see all of my paintings currently available through Courthouse click here.
Tuesday 207: Wading For Spring
The Sheepscot River is one of eight rivers in Maine that have Atlantic Salmon. These fish need the river’s clean gravel bottom to lay their eggs, and its rapids to aerate the water for their young. Because October is the month that these fish spawn, the Sheepscot and other rivers or streams with wild Brook Trout and Atlantic Salmon are closed to fishing after September. This prevents fisherman from accidentally crushing eggs as they wade through the river.
Smolt are the young, six-inch salmon that swim from these Maine rivers all the way to Northern Greenland, two thousand miles away! Over the course of two to three years these fish will wait in the Northern Atlantic Ocean growing in size up to ten and fifteen pounds. Then they will migrate back to the same river where they were once a small egg and begin the cycle again. If these fish can wait three years to return to the Sheepscot then surely we can wait until April, when fishing season opens and we can wade into the waters once again.
text by Jonathan Ives
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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on any 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.
Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.
Tuesday 207: Northern Whites
Northern Whites II / 4" x 4" / 2017
Sale Price:$207.00 Original Price:$300.00
As I sit here and jot notes about these, my two newest paintings, it is snowing, sleeting, and raining. The first day of spring has come and gone, but it is March in Maine and here we are with weather not quite fit for skiing, but also not quite tempting us to dress in lighter layers just yet. And so we wait and lean into spring, like a beginner hesitantly tilting his weight forward and trusting the mountain's momentum to catch him and carry him safely down the slope for the first time...the second time...and then again and again.
Here's to a wonderful winter of snowy adventures, including my first time riding at Sunday River. Boy, isn't that Northern Lights trail a beauty? Enjoy these last two winter paintings of the season as we all lean into spring together.
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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on any 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.
Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.
It Is The Love
It is the love that comes through when the mind gets out of the way....
Do not make a picture of something. Make something. It is not the something, it is the looking. Painting is looking slowed down....
Paintings are not finished, they are stopped....
When working from life you take a fragment of the world then attempt to make it whole by making sense of the loose ends left when it was torn from the world....
Having painted awhile there is more to unlearn than to learn....
What is created is the real thing. The rest is the world. What is a picture of the world? Nothing.
Tuesday 207: Two Thin Blades
Two Thin Blades / 4" x 4" / 2017
Sale Price:$207.00 Original Price:$300.00
There’s always that first step in skating, from dry ground to slick ice, when it just seems impossible. Impossible that two thin blades of metal will support you, impossible that because its molecules have begun to dance a little slower water will hold you up.
- Carol Goodman
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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on any 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.
Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.
Tuesday 207: Come Hellgrammite Or High Water
The winter is the hardest time of the year for fly fisherman. Freezing temperatures mean frozen fingers while handling wet line. Since there are no insect hatches, trout feed on bugs like hellgrammites that are always swimming in the deep waters year round. These large black fly patterns can produce fish even in the coldest winter months because, like the die hard fisherman who use them, they are always there.
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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on any 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.
Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.
Tuesday 207: Run Before The Wind
Jonathan writes about sailing with his dad, Bobby Ives: This painting is from a day that Jessica and I went sailing with my dad and his wife Phyllis on the 26 foot Pierson they keep in Pemaquid Harbor. We sailed around John's Bay and anchored off the northern side of Thrumcap Island, where the thread of life ledges blocked the winds and waves so we could eat a picnic. As we ate, I was distracted by the white caps that were building and recommended we get going. Jess is new to sailing and feels nervous when the boat really lists over. By the time we weighed anchor the winds and waves, which were from the southwest, had built up and it was a bit hairy running with the wind back into the harbor. Steering a straight course with a large following sea takes serious concentration to prevent an accidental jib. The mainsail would luff from time to time and we all waited for the boom to swing across, like a batter swinging for the ball.
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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on a 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.
Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.
#exploregon
In two weeks we say goodbye to Bend, Oregon and point our car due east, Maine-ward. It's been just ten short months but we came, we saw, and we adventured. Boy-oh-boy did we adventure -- and boy-oh-boy do I have a lot of paintings to make so you can see all about it!
In the meantime, enjoy these few small glimpses at the beauty we've experienced here in Central Oregon. Pictured: Alder Springs, the McKenzie River, Waldo Lake, Steens Mountain, the Little North Fork of the Santiam River, Bend's whitewater park, Smith Rock State Park, Devil's Lake, the Blue Pool, Farewell Bend Park, fishing the Deschutes River, Opal Pool, the Metolius River, Steelhead Falls, Crystal Crane Hot Springs, Smith Rock again, and Farewell Bend Park.
Farewell, Bend. For now...
Tuesday 207: Fly Guys
Fly Guys / 4" x 4" / 2016
$300.00
I look into my fly box, and think about all the elements I should consider in choosing the perfect fly: water temperature, what stage of development the bugs are in, what the fish are eating right now. Then I remember what a guide told me: "Ninety percent of what a trout eats is brown and fuzzy and about five-eighths of an inch long."
- Allison Moir, A Different Angle: Fly Fishing Stories by Women
There he stands, draped in more equipment than a telephone lineman, trying to outwit an organism with a brain no bigger than a breadcrumb, and getting licked in the process.
- Paul O'Neil
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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on any 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.
Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.
Tuesday 207: Walking Water
A human being is a container invented by water so it can walk around.
- from Job’s Body
Popham Colony was a short-lived English settlement founded the same year as the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. Over the course of its first and only year of existence in 1607 and 1608, settlers built the Virginia of Sagadahoc, the first English-built oceangoing vessel in the New World.
When Jonathan and I were at Popham Beach last summer we played in the waters at the mouth of the Kennebec River. This was the river by which Popham's settlers explored the land that would become Maine, seeking communication and trade with the Abenaki who lived along its banks. Later colonists to the area, building on the experience of the original Popham Colony, settled further up this river at the site of present-day Bath where winter storms and tides were not as severe. Bath, of course, became a renowned shipbuilding capitol; in the mid-19th century it was the fifth largest port in America and sent clipper ships criss-crossing across the waters of the world.
In the fall, after our late August swim at Popham Beach, Jonathan and I fished the headwaters of the Kennebec, the "long quiet waters" of the Abenaki. We waded in and walked the waters, just as we had at the beach.
Water is how we move in the world. It shapes our stories, our experiences, our histories. Rivers and oceans move us. Our ships, our paintings, and our bodies are all vessels.
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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on any 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.
Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.
How One Woman Overcame Her Fear Of The Ocean And Learned To Surf
Back in 2010 I wrote a piece about winter surfing at Higgins Beach for The Maine. Earlier in September the Bangor Daily News republished it in their Outdoor section. You can enjoy it here -- and come January when I've returned to the coast of Maine, I'll be teaming up with BDN to bring you more writing. Stay tuned!
Tuesday 207: Many Men Go Fishing
Many Men Go Fishing / 4x4 / 2016
Sale Price:$207.00 Original Price:$300.00
Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
- Henry David Thoreau
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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on any 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.
Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.
Tuesday 207: Full Participation
Full Participation / 4" x 4" / 2016
Sale Price:$207.00 Original Price:$300.00
My challenge to you here, is to journey into a deeper intimacy with the world and your life without any promise of safety or guarantee of reward beyond the intrinsic value of full participation.
- Oriah Mountain Dreamer
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207 Paintings post everyish Tuesday around 5:30am EST on both The Maine and jessicaleeives.com. Save thirty percent on any 4x4 inch oil on panel painting by making your purchase within the first week of its posting. Instead of $300 pay just $207, a number which just happens to be the Maine state area code.
Tuesday 207 Paintings are exclusive to The Maine. They depict the land, the light and the people that make this state a state of wonder. Jessica is editor of The Maine and writes occasionally as The Outsider.