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We are also pleased to announce that Courthouse Gallery Fine Art will represent sculptor Kazumi Hoshino, who will also be featured in the Farnsworth exhibit.

Two of Salisbury's mammoth granite sculptures will be on display at the Farnsworth. This is a very exciting opportunity for both artists, and a testament to their fine work and artistry. We hope you will join us at the Farnsworth reception. Courthouse Gallery will provide hors d'oeuvres.

Hope to see you there!
Karin and Michael Wilkes
Courthouse Gallery Fine Art

Related Programs
Wednesday, July 14, 5:30pm
With Kazumi Hoshino and Jesse Salisbury
Museum Auditorium
$8 members, $10 nonmembers
Limited to 70 people
Call 207-596-6256 for reservations

Jesse Salisbury Catalog Now Available
Courthouse Galley has produced a catalog of Salisbury's sculpture:
Jesse Salisbury: Breaking Form
Order catalog online now:
Price $16.00 (postage paid)
Click to view or order catalog
or, pick one up at the Farnsworth Art Museum Gift Shop, or at
Courthouse Gallery Fine Art in Ellsworth

Pace artwork at the gallery includes oil paintings, drawings and watercolors with subjects such as Maine scenes, abstracts, horses and nudes.

Gallery owners Karin and Michael Wilkes met Pace and his wife Pam in 2007 when they hosted a farewell-to-Maine exhibition for the artist. The Paces, who spent summers on Deer Isle, left their Maine home to live in his home state of Indiana.

Pace became a prominent member of the New York group of abstract expressionist painters in the 1950s, and he became friends with Franz Kline, one of the leading abstract expressionists. His paintings are included in many prominent private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and National Museum of Art.

Pace first came to Maine in the early 1950s with a small group of artists. After that initial visit, the Paces frequented the state and finally bought a house in Stonington in the 1970s.

The gallery at 6 Court St., Ellsworth, is open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday to Saturday and from noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Call 667-6611 or visit www.courthousegallery.com.

Dunham received three awards from the Rockport Art Association in Massachusetts, one in each of its first three 2009 summer exhibitions:

• "Swim Beach Skiffs, Monhegan" was awarded the Lydia & Chester Roberts Award for an outstanding traditional work of art in the first Rockport Art Association exhibition.

• "Up for Repairs, Gloucester Marine Railway" won the Amee B. Davis Memorial Award in the second exhibition.

• "Fish Beach, Monhegan" received the John F. & Margaret Kieran Award for landscape painting in the third exhibition.

“Invariably, somebody will say, ‘How long did it take you to do that painting?’” the Hampden writer and artist said. “And right off, I say, ‘All my life.’ That’s the honest answer.”

Hennessey’s sporting art flows from the mind and imagination of a man who has spent his entire life enjoying traditional Maine outdoor pursuits.

Whether a scene of anglers sharing an Atlantic salmon pool, a hunter waiting with his dog for a flight of ducks to get within shotgun range, or a wily deer bounding away from his would-be demise, Hennessey’s art has long resonated with Mainers and those “from away.”

From Oct. 1 until Oct. 30, the Courthouse Gallery of Fine Art in Ellsworth will stage “The Hennessey Collection,” a show that will feature samples of the longtime Bangor Daily News writer and artist’s work. An artist’s reception will be held on Oct. 4 from 4-6 p.m. at the Court Street gallery.

Included in the show will be about 30 graphite and pen and ink drawings, 15 small watercolor paintings and some larger watercolors.

Karin Wilkes, the co-owner of Courthouse Gallery of Fine Art, said Hennessey’s work appeals to a broad audience.

“There aren’t many figures like him in the Maine landscape, that reach the audience he reaches,” Wilkes said.

And Wilkes said that Hennessey’s paintings are accessible to those who might not even know they’re art lovers.

“The nice thing about Tom’s work is, you don’t have to know anything about art to know that you like it,” Wilkes said. “[His work] has a nostalgia for a lot of people, especially if you’ve hunted and fished around Maine.”

Hennessey said he had long considered painting some small watercolors — 5 x 8 inches or 6 x 9 — and a suggestion from Wilkes gave him the impetus to do so. They later decided to add some drawings, many of which appeared in national sporting magazines.

Both Wilkes and Hennessey said showing the smaller paintings and drawings made economic sense as well.

“His bigger watercolors are an investment and not attainable for everybody,” Wilkes said, pointing out that the small watercolors and drawings are much less expensive. “[This show] is a perfect thing for this economy, a perfect thing for a gift for your outdoorsman or woman.”

Hennessey said offering more affordable paintings was one reason painting small watercolors appealed to him.

“I’ve had something like that in my mind for awhile because a lot of guys say to me, “I’d like to have one of your paintings, but I can’t afford it,’” Hennessey said.

The 72-year-old artist and Hampden resident said he’s been drawing since childhood, but never thought much about painting until the early 1960s.

“I was working at the NEWS as an apprentice in the composing room for 37 bucks a week and my wife was a beautician,” Hennessey recounted. “She came home one day and had been at the Bangor House or something and the Bangor Art Society had an art show in the lobby and the corridor.

“She said, ‘They’re selling those paintings down there. You can do that.’ So I went down there and looked and said, ‘Yeah … I can do that,’” he said.

Hennessey went out and bought some watercolor paper, paint and brushes, and ever since, He has been “doing that” … and doing it very well.

He didn’t realize quite how well he was doing it until a few years later, however. That’s when a friend, Dr. Frank Gilley, was heading to New York City and asked Hennessey for a couple of paintings that he could take to a gallery.

Gilley took those paintings to the Crossroads of Sport gallery, and the director was impressed.

Hennessey’s career was about to get a huge boost.

“Crossroads of Sport was like Carnegie Hall,” Hennessey said. “That was the gallery of sporting art.”

Not long after, the director wrote Hennessey a letter.

“He said, ‘I can sell your paintings,’ I think for $150, and that was like $5,000 now,” Hennessey recalls. “That was 1964, something like that. [The director wrote] ‘Send me five more watercolors.’ I ripped them off real fast. That’s the way it went.”

Hennessey says he never planned on becoming an artist — “Things just fell into place” — but his growing reputation as an artist opened doors he never imagined.

He has traveled around the world because of his painting, doing commission work for patrons who wanted a Hennessey-painted version of their own special outdoor places.

“I often think, if it hadn’t been for painting, the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met. It all came through painting,” he said.

That’s not to say that the journey has been without its pitfalls.

Hennessey may have quit painting altogether after an incident early in his career. Only a well-timed trip to the Bangor dump changed his mind.

While working on a fishing scene, Hennessey became frustrated when the paint ran together on the water he’d been laboring to get just right.

“I took everything and just drove it into a metal trash can, the brushes, the paint, everything,” Hennessey said.

The next day, he headed to the dump to dispose of his painting supplies.

Luckily, it was a very windy day.

What happened next, even Hennessey can’t believe.

“I was turning to get back in [to his car after dumping the brushes and paint] and a piece of paper came rolling across the dump. This was unbelievable. It slapped right up against the side window on my station wagon.

“It was a reproduction or something of a watercolor painting done by Gordon Grant. He was a famous marine painter,” Hennessey said. “It was water. It showed how he painted that water. And I could see what he did.”

Hennessey quickly got out of his car and retrieved his brushes and paint, vowing to try again.

While Hennessey resorts to his stock answer when art reception attendees ask him how long it took him to complete a certain painting, he’s not shy about explaining the inspiration that fuels his work.

“I just paint what I do,” Hennessey said. “I can’t imagine sitting down and painting a flower pot or something like that. When I’m out fishing or hunting or just out around with the dog, I’ll see something, something will happen, and that will inspire it.”

And for more than 40 years, the artistic byproduct of Hennessey’s trips afield have inspired sporting art fans around the world.

Not that the accolades and art show openings are what drives Hennessey, of course.

“I would paint even if I never sold a painting, because art is its own reward,” Hennessey said. “Doing it is rewarding whether anybody wants it or not.”

Karin Wilkes never met Emily Muir, who survived her husband by nearly 40 years and died in 2003 at the age of 99. But as the owners of the Courthouse Gallery Fine Arts in Ellsworth, the Wilkeses had been interested in the Muirs for some time.

So Karin Wilkes started reading “The Time of My Life,” published by the Island Institute in Rockland. Wilkes found herself drawn into the Muirs’ story.

“She was such a vibrant, contemporary-looking woman. They have a love story,” Wilkes said. “They were a couple. We had been interested in the Muirs before, and we actually went to an auction and bid on a piece but the price went too high for us.”

A few months later, Carl Little of the Maine Community Foundation came calling.

Little, a well-known Maine arts writer who serves as the foundation’s director of communications and marketing, was wondering if the Wilkeses would be willing to manage the Muirs’ estate, which had been in a gallery in southern Maine the last three years without one sale.

The Wilkeses jumped at the chance, and their first show of the work, “Emily & Bill: The Muir Estate,” went on display at their gallery last month.

The collection numbers hundreds of paintings, sculptures and drawings — so many that the Wilkeses built a shelving system in a storage room in one of the buildings on the Courthouse property.

So far, seven pieces have sold.

“We’re having good success to start with,” Karin Wilkes said. “People know who [the Muirs] are and are familiar with the work and excited to see some on the market.”

That was the reaction Little and MaineCF, also located in Ellsworth, were hoping the work would have. Emily Muir had left the estate to the foundation, establishing the Emily and William Muir Community Fund, which seeks to promote community-based efforts in the Penobscot Bay area. Sales from the estate go toward the fund.

“The Courthouse Gallery seemed to us to be the perfect partner for handling the Muir estate,” Little said. “They are committed to the art and have the capacity to manage and promote it.”

All of the work is for sale with the exception of William Muir’s sculptures, which are slated to go to museums. Not all of the pieces are signed or dated, but the Courthouse Gallery created an estate stamp to verify the source of each piece.

The Muirs settled in Stonington in 1939. They painted (Emily in oils, both in watercolor), sculpted (William did large-scale work, Emily did smaller pieces), designed homes (Emily is said to have worked on more than 40 homes in the area) and created mosaics (Emily again).

“Emily dabbled in everything, the ceramics, the architecture, the painting, watercolors, oils,” Karin Wilkes said. “One of her best-known works is the beautiful mosaic in the entryway of the Farnsworth Art Museum.”

They became active in island life and beyond. They helped the internationally known Haystack Mountain School of Crafts find a home base in Deer Isle. Emily Muir was appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to serve on a presidential council on the arts. She was the first woman to do so.

Although the Courthouse exhibit reveals the breadth of the work, the variety of which is familiar to those who have seen it in Maine, William Muir is recalled primarily as a sculptor while Emily Muir was known for her paintings.

In fact, William Muir had a national reputation as a sculptor. In 1953 alone, Karin Wilkes said, his sculpture was displayed in shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Pennsylvania Academy, the Detroit Institute and at Bowdoin, Colby and Dartmouth colleges in Maine and New Hampshire.

Yet the estate collection includes many of his watercolors, most of which were painted during the couple’s travels outside of Maine, such as his “Old Faithful,” and sketches, such as a series of drawings of daily life at the Brunswick Naval Air Station. And Emily Muir may have painted extensively, but the estate also contains some of her small ceramic sculptures.

The Emily Muir paintings in the estate are of interior scenes and landscapes and portraits of daily life. She painted typical Maine scenes as in “Getting Bait Aboard,” a loosely constructed image of men loading a lobster boat, and quirky Maine scenes such as “Stonington Christmas Parade” in which a line of adults and children, including one child dressed as a goose, seems to wait in anticipation of the big winter event. In the background of the parade painting is what appears to be William Muir’s real-life stonecutter monument in Stonington.

Emily Muir seemed to love color, using oranges and purples not often seen in Maine landscapes. William Muir played with different woods and textures. Both were considered naturalists at the time.

Emily Muir’s oils are also remarkable for their take on cubism, as in “Island Off Stonington” with its faceted rocks and fractured ocean.

Although this is the Courthouse’s first full-scale show of the Muirs’ work, some appeared earlier this summer in other shows, or have been on display in other places in the gallery. The rest of the work will provide fodder for future shows. Wilkes envisions an exhibit of the Muirs’ Gauguin-esque tropical island scenes for later this year.

Aside from the practical matter of the Courthouse Gallery having the space and ability to host the Muirs’ estate, it seems appropriate that the work is in a gallery owned and operated by a Hancock County couple active on the Maine scene.

“It’s nice to see these loving couples in the art world, because so much of our perception of the artist is the [loner],” Karin Wilkes said of the Muirs. “They were together, they were prolific, and they supported each other’s art.”