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Patrick Plourde by Ric Kasini Kadour

Patrick Plourde studied art at the Maine College of Art and received his Masters of Fine Art from Washington University. For over twenty-five years, he has used vintage steel and found objects to express natural forms: various plants, flowers, seeds, and birds. His sculptures play with form, color, and humor to engage the viewer. Plourde converts everyday objects, like croquet balls, into sculptural elements that evoke classical forms and industry. In his depictions of birds, there is also an element of drawing, using the metal to make the lines of a heron’s back in a manner that resembles the bird’s plumage.

Joan Miró once explained the success of his sculpture, “A rich and vigorous material seems necessary to me in order to give the viewer that smack in the face that must happen before reflection intervenes. In this way, poetry is expressed through a plastic medium, and it speaks its own language.” Plourde’s sculptures achieve success in a similar way. The various pieces of steel and other found parts come together to form a Vulture. What was once a tool or a spoke or a gear, becomes a neck, a talon, or tightly held pair of wings.

His work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Log Home Designs, and Maine Home and Design. Collectors include Ralph Lauren, Robert De Niro, Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, Toucan Corporation (Florida), The Portland (Maine) Museum of Art, and Payson Art Gallery (Maine). He has completed a number of public and private commissions, including Untitled-Armillary, on Commercial Street in Portland, Maine near the Casco Bay Ferry terminal.

BIRD shows at Maine Art Shows at 10 Chase Hill from August 8th to September 7th.  We are open from 11-5 every day.  You can also see the show in its entirety on-line at BIRD.

If you like Patrick’s work, Maine Art Paintings and Sculpture has a lovely collection in the gallery on 14 Western Ave in Kennebunk and on-line on his Artist Page.

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Abbie Williams by Ric Kasini Kadour

Abbie Williams paints from her studio in a lush wood in Nobleboro, Maine and regularly from Monhegan Island, Maine and Taos, New Mexico. Her subject is often the rich landscapes she finds “while painting outdoors, painting in my studio or while I’m prowling around Maine’s uncommonly visited corners with my camera.”

The appearance of birds in Williams’ paintings is a natural extension of her approach to painting. In works like Moody’s Barn and Seagull Cyclone II, they are as much a part of the landscape as the yellow fields or boulders on the shoreline. She renders the birds in Seagull Cyclone II as a blur of white, allowing details to take shape as individual birds break away from the flock. When birds are her subject, like in Goose Taking a Gander and Black Jack Flagg and His Gang, Williams paints with the same attentiveness she gives to flowers in a field. She paints the back feathers of the subject of Goose Taking a Gander as a patchwork of light brown and white stripes and the bird’s reflection in the stream as a dreamy collection of lines. “Using rich color and employing the dramatic light of the coast and the high desert, I work to capture the extraordinary way the light changes moment to moment which infuses my response to the colors that are often too subtle for the casual observer,” said Williams.

One can see this color work in the painting, Small Cove, Maine, which shows a gull perched on a dinghy moored in a cove. A wall of rock forms the backdrop of the scene. A round pink buoy floats in the water. The buoy’s reflection begins an expanse of wild color play: pinks trickle out from the buoy, glitters of orange catch the tips of ripples in the water as a strip of brilliant sunlight illuminates the rock. The lonely bird quietly takes in the moment.

Please visit the show BIRD at our gallery at 10 Chase Hill Rd. in Kennebunk or on-line at BIRD. Abbie’s Artist Pagehas our entire collection of her work.