The Distracted Wanderer

Recently I had the opportunity to wander up to the beautiful MidCoast region of Maine, my favorite area in The Pine Tree State aka Vacationland - take your pick on the nickname! Located about 26 miles north of Portland, the region stretches along the coast from Brunswick northeast to Searsport on Penobscot Bay and includes the classic New England villages of Belfast, Camden, Rockland, Wiscasset, Bath, Boothbay Harbor and Damariscotta. The region is loaded with world-renowned coastlines and beaches, art galleries and museums, lots of lighthouses and many a vibrant working waterfront where a delicious lobster dinner couldn't be much fresher if you had gone out and hauled it in yourself. Yes please! For this visit to a state that I had really come to love but had avoided for way too many years because I had read way too many Stephen King novels, my Distracted Sidekick and I were going to be hanging our hats at the Rockland Harbor Hotel for several nights. Presiding over the northe...

First and foremost let me just preface this post by saying that I'm generally the person who doesn't "get" contemporary art oftentimes having a hard time wrapping my head around what it is that I'm supposed to be looking at. Let's face it, I'm a Monet/van Gogh kinda gal who takes a hard pass at the artwork of Picasso, Matisse, Kahlo and the like. I'm pretty much vanilla in the flavourful world of art but every once in awhile, I'll come across something out of my comfort zone that really gets my attention and makes me think "WOW!" That's exactly what happened recently when I was visiting the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine where I turned a corner and saw what looked like a room where ginormous strands of wood had exploded as boardwalks ran amok through them. I was immediately entranced, intrigued and sucked in. Hubris Atë Nemesis by Maine artists Wade Kavanaugh, of Bethel, and Stephen B. Nguyen, of Portland, ...