This big, handsome book presents the work of American artist George Wardlaw (b.1927) in over 180 full-color plates and illustrations.The critical essays in this book characterize Wardlaw’s work, placing it in context with the significant art movements of his time, beginning in1947 with non-objective painting and tracing his journey through six decades of art making.Never confined by categories, Wardlaw explores medium, form, scale, and color on his quest for creative and spiritual resolution. From his Baptist and Native American roots to Judaism, from the rural south to the urban northeast, from painting to sculpture and back again, Wardlaw produced series after series of profound artworks―an exploration across geographical, physical,intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual boundaries.Wardlaw was a member of the avant-garde art scene in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s and went on to become an important figure in American art, driven by his passion and desires rather than popular trends. His significant and impressive body of work reveals a unique story, both personal and universal, weaving one man’s perspective into the larger canon of twentieth-century art.

George Wardlaw: Crossing Borders

Arts & Photography

Soltes, Ori Z.

Gruber, Richard J.

McAvoy, Suzette

Individual Artists

Marshall Wilkes Books

The Art of Francis Hamabe offers a selection of his work, from dynamic modernist oil paintings and lively Sumi ink abstractions to his well-known screen print posters.Writer Carl Little weaves an engaging narrative of the artist’s life and art illustrated with vintage photographs and examples of Hamabe’s witty and stylish graphic work. Paintings from the Colby and Bates College museums and the University of Maine Museum of Art are featured, along with numerous works from private collections, many reproduced for the first time.Francis Hamabe (1917–2002)One of Maine’s most beloved artists, Francis Hamabe was born in 1917 in Orange, New Jersey, to a Japanese father and Swedish mother. He served in World War II and attended the Rhode Island School of Design. Moving to Maine in 1947, Hamabe established himself as a sought-after painter, printmaker, ceramicist, and pupeteer. A dedicated teacher he was the first art instructor at the Farnsworth Art Museum and later taught at the University of Maine at Machias he also served as art director for Down East and Maine Life magazines and for the state's first public television station in Orono.

The Art of Francis Hamabe

Little, Carl

WILLIAM IRVINE: A PAINTER'S JOURNEY, by Carl Little, with foreword by Richard Russo, features a stunning selection of Irvine's work, from early abstractions to an array of landscapes inspired by Maine but also by Scotland, England, and France.William Irvine (b. 1931) is an American painter whose career spans six decades with the last four decades spent in Maine. Irvine’s journey in art began in the town of Troon on the Scottish coast, where he was introduced to modern art through the collection of whiskey magnate Johnnie Walker. After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art and serving in the Scottish army, Irvine came of artistic age in London, where he was a part of a lively avant-garde scene. Moving to downeast Maine in 1968 proved a turning point: harbors, islands and boats, the sea and the sky inspired bold work that combined Irvine’s abstract instincts with new pictorial concepts based on the landscape. In the ensuing forty–plus years, Irvine has established himself as a Maine and American master, known for his seascapes as well as enchanting figurative paintings and still lifes.WILLIAM IRVINE: A PAINTER'S JOURNEY features a stunning selection of his work, from early abstractions to an array of landscapes inspired by Maine but also by Scotland, England, and France.Writer Carl Little’s text covers the painter’s life in art from his formative years in Scotland to a visit to his new studio in Brooklin, Maine.Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Richard Russo offers an affectionate appreciation of the artist.This book is an insightful exploration of Irvine’s work as it evolved during his journey from Scotland to Maine. color thoughout

William Irvine: A Painter's Journey

Little, Carol

History & Criticism

Jeffery Becton is a pioneer in the field of fine-art photography who creates provocative montages, often playing with the borders between dream and reality, interior and exterior, abstraction and representation. As art critic Phillip Isaacson observed, Becton's images "begin with photography, sometimes add painting or watercolor, and metamorphose into a medium of their own." Author Carl Little offers a compelling account of Becton's progress as an artist, from his studies in graphic design and photography at Yale in the 1970s to the creation of his signature digital montages over the past 25 years. He explores Becton's fascination with vintage New England houses and their furnishings, and how the artist draws upon his surroundings on the coast of Maine and elsewhere to create surreal scenarios than hark back to René Magritte as well as Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. Appreciations by art writer and novelist Deborah Weisgall; Dan Mills, director of the Bates College Museum of Art; and art critic Peter Plagens help complete this portrait of a master of photo-based art.

Jeffery Becton: The Farthest House

Philip Barter: Forever Maine highlights a choice selection of masterful works that reflect Barter’s increasingly abstract inclinations in depicting Maine landscapes, from the coastal estuaries and blueberry barrens of Washington and Hancock counties to the western mountains and lakes, and north to Hartley’s iconic Mount Katahdin. Barter also explored the world beyond Maine, painting in Spain, Newfoundland, Greenland, the American Southwest, and elsewhere, employing a palette as bold as his vision of his surroundings. Of his narrative paintings Barter says, “The narratives I paint are historical documents of the characters of Maine and the places they frequent, a roguishly, independent people whom I seek out, and try to be with, and who make this place I know the one-of-a kind place it is―forever Maine.When, in his twenties, Philip Barter (b. 1939) discovered Marsden Hartley, he felt a calling: to further the vision of the great American modernist. This was an ambitious undertaking for a brash, self taught artist from Boothbay, Maine, but Barter’s passion for Maine and its fiercely independent people gave his work a unique, unencumbered vision. Barter was prolific, and he spent a half-century painting the landscape of his home state, becoming the “painter laureate” of the region.In Philip Barter: Forever Maine, award-winning author Carl Little traces the painter’s life from a formative trip to California in the 1960s; to downeast Maine where Barter and his wife, Priscilla, made a life immersed in art for themselves and their seven children; to critical acclaim for Barter in the 1990s and his most recent paintings from 2016 and 2017.By the early 1990s Barter had come into his own. In a review of a Barter retrospective at the Bates College Museum of Art in 1992, Maine Times critic Edgar Allen Beem noted the painter’s progress “toward a more idealized vision of the northern landscape, a vision tempered by the spiritual simplicity of Arthur Dove and the physical simplicity of Milton Avery.” The Farnsworth Museum and Portland Museum of Art also acquired Barter’s work. He was the subject of a feature profile in Down East magazine and went national when, in January 1995, Tim Sample highlighted his life in art in one of his “Postcards from Maine” segments on the CBS Sunday Morning program hosted by Charles Kuralt. Color throughout

Philip Barter: Forever Maine

William Irvine believes that every artist is born with a small set of poems to express, and this unique collection of narrative paintings explores his signature motifs.
Lending grace and delight to daily activities, his paintings show women celebrating spring with forsythia, calling in their cats at dusk, gossiping, planting trees, or sunbathing sans clothing. Men sip their morning coffee, repair windows, gather fishing gear and wait for the fog to lift. Mermaids, sheep, and sleeping sailors populate rugged, elemental scenes. And always, soaring overhead in the seascapes for which Irvine is best-known, there are gulls, whose cries, soaring flights, and calculated stillness captivate the painter.
Irvine moved to Maine in 1968 and was immediately drawn to the fishing villages of Corea and Jonesport, whose tidy houses reminded him of the white farms dotting the green hills of Scotland, where he grew up.
William Irvine: At Home joins William Irvine: A Painter’s Journey in establishing Irvine as a Maine and American master. Color throughout

William Irvine: At Home

IRVINE,William

Staff Pick in July/August issue ofArt New EnglandPhilip Frey is one of the handful of artists responsible for changing the course of Maine painting.Philip Frey: Here and Now is a book for anyone who appreciates Maine and bold art. Daniel Kany, art critic for the Portland Press Herald, writes that “Frey’s art occupies the nexus between contemporary painting and brushy traditionalism. If there is a focus to this new direction in Maine painting, his art is it.” Author of a number of books on Maine art and artists, Carl Little explores art-historical influences on Frey from the Fauvists and Matisse to Rockwell Kent and Howard Hodgkin, and traces the history of landscape painting in Maine, revealing how Frey’s bold colors and dynamic brushwork set him apart. “His palette is strong and fresh, his approach painterly in a manner akin to Fairfield Porter and other devoted plein air painters,” writes Little. Beautiful reproductions of Frey’s portraits of Maine provide eloquent testimony of Frey’s vibrant originality. Color throughout

Philip Frey: Here and Now

Kany, Daniel

Born in Baltimore in 1936, the great-granddaughter of board game creator Milton Bradley, Treworgy studied with noted painters Joseph Nicoletti, Thomas Cornell, and Wolf Kahn, among others. After discovering the work of the American Precisionists in 1991, she further sharpened her geometric approach. Her work has been shown at numerous galleries, reviewed by critics Philip Isaacson and Pat Davidson Reef, and juried into three Portland Museum of Art biennials.

Mary Alice Treworgy: A Maine Painter

John Moore: Portals

Stomberg, John R.

Warren, Rossana

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Marshall Wilkes Books publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Marshall Wilkes Books