MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR How we find ourselves at the end of 2022 is a mystery, but I am happy to have you all with us as we shift into 2023. This year we brought so much back to life, including Print Jam, our favorite summer community art event, as well as our Maine Craft Weekend 6x6 member show hosted by our friends at Belleflower, and our upcoming Holiday Market. On December 9th - 11th we open our studios once more to share the work, community, and inner sanctum with you all and we are so excited! Shop everything from hand painted ornaments to 5 ft paintings, clay food sculpture to beautiful everyday pottery, one of a kind jewelry, mystifying photos, prints of favorite places and those of dreamscapes, decorative painted wood working that will blow your mind, stunning portraiture, gift cards, teacher gifts and perfect stocking stuffers. Come find your favorites and gifts for your loved ones too. This year we have Three of Strong serving up some seasonal spirits on Friday and mother-daughter duo Oh, My Cookies! selling treats on Saturday and Sunday. We are also saying thank you and goodbye to our very first EMERGE Artists in Residency while preparing for the two incoming artists in January. Find a detailed write up of the program and this year's artists on our website and keep a lookout for the call for next year’s residents in mid - late winter. We know there are many ways to celebrate the end of a year and the coming of a new one and we hope that you choose to celebrate with us. Our lives are more full and rich because of the work artists do and I hope you will explore that truth a little more this year and next. However you celebrate, we hope you will also join us in supporting our neighbors Zero Station, Cove Street Arts, Indigo Arts Alliance, and Mayo Street Arts, as well as the many other creatives and East Bayside small businesses. We are so fortunate to be in a community with them all. Even though the end of the year has me mystified, I am looking ahead to 2023 with excitement and wonder–Running With Scissors turns 20! The power of all the lives that have touched our community is overwhelming and we will be celebrating this milestone all year long. Until then, we hope to see you at the open studios and wish you all a safe and happy holiday season! - Kate Anker, Director |
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HOLIDAY MARKET AND OPEN STUDIOS |
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250 Anderson Street, Portland Friday, December 9: 4-8pm
Saturday, December 10: 10am-5pm
Sunday, December 11: noon-5pm Peruse, shop, and taste your way through our 16,000 square foot makerspace at 250 Anderson Street in the East Bayside neighborhood of Portland, ME during the RWS annual Holiday Market and Open Studios, December 9-11th! Over 40 members working with diverse mediums, artistic goals, backgrounds, ages, and experiences will have their art on display and available for purchase. Shop handmade ceramics, ornaments, jewelry, paintings, small gifts and fine art among a welcoming community of local artists. On Friday night, our neighbors from Three of Strong Spirits will be serving sample cocktails from their new, ready to drink, canned cocktail line. Coupons for $1 off a 4-pk of the canned Maine Mojito and Stormy Night cocktails will be available all weekend. On Saturday and Sunday, mother/daughter Mainers, Oh My Cookies will be serving cookies so good you won't want to share. Available until sellout. Support local makers and give your loved ones gifts they will cherish this holiday season! This is a family-friendly and free event with onsite parking. RWS’s goal is to help artists reach their independent creative goals by providing access to shared equipment, tools, information, and community. For more information visit rwsartstudios.com and follow @rwsartstudios on Instagram. |
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Tag us on social media; on Instagram: @rwsartstudios, and Facebook: Running with scissors art studios! You can also use the location button or use #rwsartstudios, #rwsartsists, and #rwsevents on Instagram. Do you have an upcoming show, event, or art-related announcement that you would like to share with other members? Looking to loan, give, or sell your materials, tools or furniture? Want to collaborate with fellow artists, share a booth, and stay up to date with all RWS news? Keep an eye out for our monthly call for info email. |
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We are a group of makers working in diverse mediums - print, ceramic, metal, wood, and so much more. Please take a moment to meet a few of the makers around our studios! |
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Joe is a cinematographer and photographer. He started at RWS about eight years ago and shared a studio with his wife for a few years before moving to the space in which he currently resides. He is a visual storyteller who’s motivated by color, texture, and design and does a lot of freelance work for the television networks. He seeks out jobs that put him in intimate or precarious situations and loves to document people who are at a crossroads in their lives. When he was at a turning point working in TV an opportunity came along to work with a colleague who had found articles published online by a pig farmer who was having a crisis of conscience. For ten years the pig farmer had tried to be the most ethical, humane pig farmer and thought he was providing something good for his community. As he learned more about the pigs and spent more time with them the farmer started to see them as intelligent, social beings who take care of each other. He began to have ethical issues around slaughtering the pigs but didn’t know how to get out of the business. It’s these moments that interest Joe; when something someone has believed for so long suddenly feels wrong. “That’s where life is lived, in these difficult choices. It says so much about who a person is. How do you capture that and make a film about it?” Joe was able to capture how the pig farmer arrived at this moment and made it into a compelling story. The resulting documentary, The Last Pig appeals to wide audiences and has earned multiple awards. Joe spoke of the amount of equipment needed to make a film and how it is necessary. His favorite tools are lenses, “Some render images with an oil painting-esque quality, it's almost magical - and I find it really interesting to see the subtle differences in each lens.” Each lens sees things differently than our eyes see things, and Joe finds looking for these nuances interesting. Every lens contains many glass elements and each has a different chemical coating that creates these unique characteristics. Older vintage glass lenses add a unique touch of style that can breathe life to an image and, ultimately, to a story as vintage lenses can often be warmer and softer. Light is another top consideration for Joe when he films a scene. The quality and quantity of light and how it shapes things and how it can be shaped to affect how the audience responds to an image affects the camera angles and how a story might be filmed. He uses the tools that shape and control natural light and artificial light to achieve these effects and shape the storytelling. Nothing ever goes according to plan in filmmaking. It’s a collaborative process and every project is different. Joe will work with director’s who have clear ideas about how they want shots to look and feel and he works with directors who know the story they want to tell but appreciate a lot of input or feedback from him on how to capture it. He values the mentorship opportunities he’s had because he’s watched experienced cinematographers navigate and communicate with directors to creative problem solve. Joe was very moved by the documentary Rivers and Tides about the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy uses flowers, icicles, leaves, mud, pinecones, snow, stone–anything found in nature–to create site specific land art that becomes a meditation on the cycles of life and death. “I think it’s really interesting how video and still photography play a crucial role in his art due to the ephemeral state of what he creates. There is a process of decay, change, and coming apart of each sculpture. The recorded image is integral to show the different stages of each cycle fading away and going back to the land.” Joe has worked for National Geographic, Hulu, PBS, HISTORY, Smithsonian, BBC, CNN, and Discovery. An upcoming series he’s worked on about shipwrecks in the Bermuda Triangle will be on the History Channel starting in November. Learn more about The Last Pig and its acclaim at thelastpig.com. Contact Joe via Instagram @joseph_brunette or via email, brunoseph@gmail.com. |
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Artist Focus Susan Newbold |
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Susan is a printmaker and painter who likes to mix media and paint on her prints and print on her paintings. She also makes artist books–works of art in book form that are often one-of-a-kind objects. She has been a member since last January. When she paints Susan works in water-based inks, watercolors, and watercolor pencil and recently started doing oil pastels. She loves to work outside and works from sketches and journals. She starts with landscape imagery and sometimes the paintings become very abstract and sometimes more detailed and adapts to the medium which best expresses her ideas. She’s been drawn to the landscape of Maine for a long time and has had a summer house in Ocean Point on Linekin Bay for over thirty years, “It’s a really interesting part of the coast with big outcroppings of rocks in the water as with most of the Maine coast. There’s a lot of seaweed, a lock of rocks, and funky houses built in the 1850s–a lot of history.” Susan is drawn to places that have a sense of place and history, places with the feeling that things have gone on there. She loves to incorporate old photographs into her work, drawn to their nostalgia and memory. Travel is also very important to Susan because it pushes back against one's boundaries, “There’s always so much to learn being in a different culture and environment.” She’s energized by the landscapes she experiences abroad and views them as other sets of lines and color and compositions. She and her husband and two daughters lived in France for a few years in the ‘70s and for her France is the pinnacle of aesthetics, “I love the way they approach everything; their food, painting, colors and sense of style. When you walk down the street in Paris there’s something beautiful in every window, something thoughtfully arranged, something that catches your eye without you even wanting it to. It’s an aesthetic with a deeply-rooted thoughtfulness.” Art is very important to Susan, “It’s all about seeing and appreciating and being grateful for this incredible place we live. I want to share that vision.” She finds that making art is meditative and healing; whatever is bothering her is fixed the minute she walks into the studio. Susan had a long career in interior design and architecture, which was fun and had a mutually beneficial relationship to her art, but she couldn’t wait to do her art all the time. When Susan makes art she experiences a lifting of the spirit and that’s what Susan wants from her art, to make people feel the joy that she feels while doing it. Susan loves to teach because of the raw learning that goes on. She loves printmaking and has taught all levels. She especially loves the experience of watching those who’ve never tried it be excited by it. She teaches other mediums as well like pen and ink drawing, watercolor, and lettering and an artist book-making course called “The Illuminated Journal”, inspired by a class she took at Haystack. Susan’s class is a combination of writing and art, wherein she and her students create the pages, then create the covers through printmaking, and finally sew the book together using coptic binding, a method in which the pages are sewn together along the bind. The book lays flat with this kind of binding and allows the artist to work flat in the landscape. Susan has fun teaching it because everyone walks away feeling successful, “It’s not like drawing or painting where you think, Maybe in 25 years I’ll be good at this.” Susan is currently working on a presentation about her recently published book, Reveries: Journaling in Place and looks forward to teaching her journaling class again. Contact Susan via email at snewb4488@gmail.com and visit her website, susannewbold.com. |
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Artist Focus Devin McDonald |
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Devin is a clay artist who has been at RWS for almost two years. Devin’s process is complex and intuitive and mirrors other creative practices like monotype printmaking and writing poetry. She starts by pinching out a collection of bases that will become forms she calls ‘collage pots’. The collage aspect comes from Devin’s process of creating multiple layers of slip that she pigments by mixing in different Mason stains and then prints onto a slab of clay. The layers include some drawings and words inspired by dreams and poetry. When she sits down she has a loose idea and begins a conversation with the clay, “It’s like stretching a canvas and asking it ‘What do you want now?’.” To create the layers, Devin paints a thin coat of slip on a plaster board, carves into the surface, adds another layer of slip, then carves some more. This process is repeated several layers deep until a clay slab is placed on top and adhered to the slip. When the slab is lifted up from the plaster board, the layers come with it, creating a printed surface. The drawing and painting steps are intuitive as she builds one layer on top of another like a monotype print. The resulting clay slab is anywhere from four to seven layers deep. The slabs then become like paper in a collage, built into different forms. Devin has been practicing this layering technique for some time. When she moved from Colorado to Maine she switched from atmospheric firing (soda firing) to electric kilns and changed her clay body. These changes have allowed her to dive deeper and continue to develop this process. She often thinks of poetry while she’s making. She thinks of what she’s taking in, where she’s at in the day or moment, and continues where she left off with the last slab. Devin pushes a little bit deeper with everything she makes. “What have I learned? What can I add to it and how can I go deeper?” She stays curious and likes to see what else can happen when she tries something a little different or builds upon something in a different way, by changing the way she puts a layer down or making more or less marks. Poetry is a theme in Devin’s work because she admires the transformation in meaning of a word between the first time you see it and when you come back to it later. “It’s this never ending unfolding of what’s possible. I think about that a lot when I’m making marks and textures and building up those layers.” As the stratified clay thickens, the slip surface starts to form organic rips and tears and wrinkles caused by air bubbles, dry spots, or places where the clay sticks when she scrapes and wiggles the slab off the board. She can always put more clay on top and carve into it. There are a lot of unexpected results, and discovery is a part of the process that Devin embraces. These surfaces remind her of an old brick building facade with paint that’s chipped and painted over. She calls these spots of texture ‘moments of history’ and finds the history of surfaces intriguing, “I wonder what happened to this thing to create this surface? There’s such a story that’s happening there.” Devin works a lot with plants (she works on a farm) and thinks about their life cycle and the decay of things, how they go back into the earth, and how to recreate the feeling of that surface or form. When the layers are bonded and the slab has reached its final state, Devin attaches the slab to its base. As she assembles the forms she thinks about how you put words together in a poem. She’s currently inspired by Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik and American nature writer Annie Dillard. She appreciates poetry because “it’s heady and short; it’s easy to come back to and look at.” For Devin, making art is a way of asking questions without language, “You can keep asking questions forever with clay. There’s always another turn down the road that you can take.” The work she creates is her tactile way of interacting with the world around her and within. The work creates an opportunity for the viewer to slow down and wonder about the history of the object, to inspect these dynamic surfaces with curiosity, to hold each piece and pause like it’s something to be read. Devin will be participating in the RWS Holiday Market and Open Studios, and currently has work for sale at Jordan's Farm Hands of the Harvest artisan market that runs through December 17th. Contact Devin at dmcdonaldceramics@gmail.com. |
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SPECIAL SHOUT-OUTS Congrats to our members on their recent accomplishments! |
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Ceramic artist, Adrian DeLucca is included in the current issue of Decor Maine for the special feature, "Maine Makers"! Read about his "almost Orwellian" ceramics: |
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SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES Support fellow artists in the wild! |
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Expand your membership and tell your friends! |
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