The Brooklyn Rail

It’s summer in Maine. And while most big city galleries close or settle back onto shows built from existing inventory, August in Maine brings ambitious exhibitions mounted by small galleries throughout the state. In Rockland, the intimate Triangle Gallery with its entrance buried under low-lying branches of a fast-growing, abutting tree, features several shows of under-known artists, none more deserving of attention than Maury Colton, among the rarest of artists living in Maine; he is native-born. Possibly his relative invisibility stems from seventeen years of living and working twenty miles offshore on remote Matinicus Island where his neighbors are mostly a few fishermen, seagulls, seals, and the occasional puffin. His paintings are on view through August 31 at the Triangle Gallery accompanied by a museum-worthy catalogue with an insightful essay by Phong H. Bui and revealing interview with Katherine Bradford, an artist who credits Colton with helping to inform her own very different and much better-known body of work. In their art, both share highly individual notions of simplicity and direct physical experience providing emotional resonance and understanding. Among Bradford’s early memories is Colton advising her to “Go to New York because that’s where you will find people who hate what you’re doing!”

In Portland he was among a small handful of artists for whom abstraction mattered, was essential. He was something of a young tyro and rebel against the academy, then embodied in the Portland School of art. Along with his mentor and fellow native-born Maine artist, William Manning, they prodded this venerable but conservative local art school (now the Maine College of Art and Design) to open its eyes to other, more progressive approaches to making art, most notably at that time, the many variants of abstraction. Figure drawing had its uses but Arthur Danto would declare painting after Warhol “dead.” Manning with his lifelong fascination with torn-paper collage and three-dimensional painted and collaged plinths (that he insists are not sculpture but paintings) may still be seen, probably subconsciously, in Colton’s recent work. His Again with Variations, and Need Not Choose (both 2023–25), among others in the exhibition, include forms that appear to be composed of torn, painted paper with their hand-ripped, ragged white edging suggesting collaged application. Theses semi-translucent, irregular and rectilinear overlays are in fact trompe l’oeil illusions of paper laid down over the underlying and pre-existing abstract colors and forms. While layering is present, it occurs only in the overall painted, sponged, and paint-washed canvas surface. The faux edging is simply white paint around the “island” of  inner, open-centered  rectangular forms providing the illusion of opening(s) below.

Whether tip-o-the-hat acknowledgements to another living pioneer of Maine’s contemporary art scene, the paint handling, imagery and serial format (all works in the show are a uniform 32 by 44 inches) are unique to Colton. The roughly circular or rectilinear overlays also reference something of island living. Walking the perimeter of small islands means never seeing the same visual information twice, especially for those attentive to, possibly obsessed by, change and transformation. He tells of nineteen days of fog the year he and his artist wife, Kathleen, who works with textiles, decided to permanently move to Matinicus, the greying, brushy atmospheres he loves and that seem to have filtered into many of his recent works—the mottled, complexly colored layers of thin, water-based acrylic paint, and water-soluble charcoal under-drawing. Colton’s paintings are garrulous; chatty even—no space is left alone, empty; everything is worked, albeit thinly and with purpose. They contain microcosms and macrocosms from the amoebic to the galactic, as microscope slides of organic single-cell creatures from the primeval ooze to the Pillars of Hercules seen through the Hubble telescope. Such allusions, however, are never direct and, for Colton, float freely in his largely intuitive process of making a painting. 

Colton came of age in the late sixties and early seventies in Portland where his free-ranging childhood led him to the Casco Bay shoreline at all seasons. There he experienced the nearby island-dotted sea, its rocky, flotsam and jetsam littered edges and suddenly shifting weather—all part of the daily inter-tidal zone flushing its coves and inlets twice daily, accompanied by infinitely varied natural, organic matter and materials. Later, after moving to New York City, one suspects that instead of looking up to skyscrapers and the built environment, the artist was mostly looking down at broken city streets, cracked pavement (“Chasing Pavements”?) and scudding litter blowing across and through the man-made urban canyons. Or, perhaps, he viewed lower Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s broken city buildings at a time when New York was literally going bankrupt and garbage pick-up strikes were part of the regular rhythms and routine annoyances of daily life in the city. Doubtless, he would have noticed gas-tinted puddles after rainstorms with their swirling. shifting colors and meandering flows—so different from Maine beaches, but with their own visual allure informed by chance encounters among urban detritus with a kind of beautiful ragged, rawness.   

While New Yorkers may not have hated what Maury Colton was doing, the galleries and museums were indifferent, possibly because his work has always been deeply, strongly inspired by nature as source and impetus for his sense of abstraction. At the Skowhegan School in Maine where he won a scholarship and studied with Kenneth Noland, Brice Marden, and David Diao, Colton’s formalist sensibility was confirmed. But he also seemed to find recourse in the fissures and cracks of Maine granite or in the ubiquity of beaches mostly covered not by sand but in the smooth, tide-washed and rounded beach pebbles and stones, of towering pine trees split by lightning, or in the crumbling stone walls cleared by farmers hoping to find enough soil to sustain crops and their own survival. After seventeen years in New York, he decided Maine was where he and Kathleen belonged. Matinicus Island is Maine on steroids; not for the faint-hearted.  

Colton’s recent paintings are characterized by thick black outlining, segmenting individual forms from each other as well as the illusion of an overarching structure corralling or loosely trying to gather and hold unruly colors or smaller organic parts—for reasons unknown or simply unknowable except to the artist.  Colton accepts ideas from viewers who see things in his paintings that are not really there. Seining nets drying on the beach? Again, we imagine some kind of weirdly molecular, COVID-adjacent science at work here along with an immensely varied encyclopedia of art he carries around in his mind’s eye. As visually literate as any artist working today, it is possible Colton is channeling stained glass windows with their gem-like and softly mutating colors as light changes from sunrise to sunset. Perhaps Paul Gauguin’s The Yellow Christ (1889) inspired by Breton folk art and hand painted Quimper pottery? Or he may have been struck by modern masterpieces—the frottage rubbing techniques of Max Ernst or Paul Klee, a similarly revered teacher whose own style has proved elusive in terms twentieth-century movements and innovative practice—and whose playfulness Colton clearly admires. Colton also recalls his visits to Italy where he saw early Renaissance art where figures and spatial settings are only beginning to coalesce while remaining separate and apart in space, story, and spirit. He could have seen the medieval Eucharistic dove at the Met with its metal cloisonné channels filled with glowing Champlevé enamel. Ancient far eastern landscape painting as well as sumi-e ink drawings and calligraphy seem relevant to the artist’s interests and explorations in his own work.

More immediately, Colton celebrates a painter’s version of Rufus Wainwright’s “Unfollow the Rules” approach to popular music—form and content freely altered to suit the artist’s own needs, not the radio station’s allotted two-and-a-half minute greatest hit time-limit. Far from our Tik-Tok-mediated world of flashing images and influencers, including an art-market driven by blue-chip darlings, Colton is content with slow facture and close looking. For those seeking metaphors, it perhaps lies in Colton’s long view, itself in the making for over half a century—fragmentation, segmentation, division, and sometimes difficult to locate or even apprehend discourse among diverse parts. This has always been with us in art, nature, and in our lives, perhaps, especially today.  

Maury Colton, along with his heroes Kathy Bradford and Marsden Hartley, is among the Maine masters of contemporary art. For more than fifty years he has explored the gap between representation and abstraction with work reifying a childhood-born wonder at nature’s life-flooding tidal pools at Willard Beach in South Portland. There is wonder to be had among the stones and water, and city streets, too—at finding his own creative means and capacity to make something new and enduring from simply wandering around and noticing beauty where it sometimes fitfully, elusively, but always naturally resides. His abstractions are meaningful, as is true for nearly all auteur-artists, mostly to himself. The painted ideas and their manifestations are his alone and for us to merely look upon with our own retina-spiking associations and wonderment—how is this work possible?