Welcome to our 2021 Maine Art Annual and Fall Guide!

While we were curating images for our “Maine Artists at Auction” highlights, I was stunned by this painting by Marsden Hartley. It snuck up on me like a daydream.

Kurt Vonnegut might say the shell is “unstuck in time.” How could Marsden Hartley in 1929 (Tom Petty wrote “Free Falling” in 1989) have known the secret to connecting with me in 2021, when all of us feel like we’ve been cut from our moorings?

Because your shell knows a lot of my secrets, Marsden, if I may. I admit it was a guilty pleasure to feel comforted by a comprehensible universe growing up in Portland, Maine, when every Wednesday was Prince Spaghetti Night. Looking for the truth? We had the Press Herald in the a.m. and the Evening Express in the p.m. On TV we watched NBC on Channel 6, ABC on Channel 8, and CBS on Channel 13. You knew it was time to go to sleep when Johnny Carson or David Letterman said good night.

Now there are a zillion channels. Digital insomnia. We don’t have to be together as an audience to experience this. We stream through amorphous time, like the background of this shell.  Privately, this frightens me. Soothe me, Shell, don’t smooth me.

You knew all of this when Marsden Hartley painted you, Shell. So to me you are beautiful-scary, ahead of your time. You love to disturb, to keep us awake. To reward you, we have committed the rare—some say extreme—act of printing you on paper in a magazine and giving you to thoughtful readers who are trying to figure it all out as the universe rockets forward. 

To learn the price Shell fetched at auction this year, visit page 39.