John Moore: Portals
Writers Suzette McAvoy, John Stomberg, Carl Little, and Rossana Warren
Published by Marshall Wilkes
Hardcover, 144 pages
11 x 11 inches
82 Color Plates
ISBN: 978–0–9839670–8-8
Price: $35.00
JOHN MOORE: PORTALS presents the work of American artist John Moore (b. 1941) by bringing together an esteemed group of art historians, poets, curators, and critics who responded to Moore’s canvases through prose and verse. Writers Carl Little,Suzette McAvoy, John R. Stomberg, and Rosanna Warren make art-historical and literary connections from Nicholas Poussin to Bob Dylan. Poems by Vincent Katz, Wallace Stevens, Rosanna Warren, John Yau, and Geoffrey Young are featured throughout, and in her afterword Christina Kee shares the vision of art collector William Louis-Dreyfus (1932–2013) who acquired forty Moore paintings.
Critical essays by the writers explore four thematic sections: Windows, Urban, Industrial, and Elegies. “Moore embraces the idea of illusionistic painting,” writes McAvoy about his window paintings, “but constructs his own reality. . . a synthesis of the seen and the imagined.” Stomberg, who writes about Moore’s urban paintings, notes that the paintings “find him looking for echoes of the past with both feet firmly placed in the present.” In his essay about Moore’s industrial paintings, Little notes how, like the painter Charles Sheeler, Moore seeks “to combine the memory and the present in a given painting.” And in addressing Moore’s elegiac works, Warren views the painter as “both a classicist and a savvy late-twentieth-, early-twenty-first-century artist working in full awareness of the idioms of abstraction, grids, and color field.”
Published by Marshall Wilkes, John Moore: Portals pairs a comprehensive collection of 82 color reproductions thematically with insightful essays that place the artist in the larger canon of American realism. The poet John Yau sums up John Moore’s work: He uses paint, Yau writes, to arrive “at a threshold moment when the daily world, and everything in it, suddenly holds our attention, and we look at it as if we are seeing all of it for the first time.”
Mary Alice Treworgy: A Maine Painter
by Carl Little with foreward by Frederick Stecker
Published by Marshall Wilkes
Hardcover, 108 pages
10 x 10 inches
104 Color Plates
ISBN: 978–0–9839670–7-1
Price: $35.00
Mary Alice Treworgy: A Maine Painter follows the artistic career and life of Mary Alice Treworgy, a modern-day precisionist who found inspiration on Monhegan Island and elsewhere in Maine and New England. Author Carl Little traces Treworgy’s journey in art, from a childhood infatuation with paint to studies at the Massachusetts College of Art, a career in graphic design, and critical notice as a painter.
Born in Baltimore in 1936, the great-granddaughter of board game creator Milton Bradley, Treworgy lived for much of her life in Brunswick, Maine, where she raised her family and maintained a studio. Treworgy studied with noted painters, including Joseph Nicoletti, Thomas Cornell, and Wolf Kahn, and attended the Vermont Studio Center on several occasions.
In 1991, Treworgy discovered the work of the American precisionists, which further sharpened her geometric approach. Her work was shown at Maine Coast Artists and numerous galleries, reviewed by critics Philip Isaacson and Pat Davidson Reef, and juried into three biennials at the Portland Museum of Art.
An introduction by Episcopal minister and author Frederic Stecker offers a personal account from his perspective as a member of the Monhegan summer community and as a collector of Treworgy’s paintings. “Mary Alice has taught us well,” he writes. “She paints the object’s essence; there is really more to see and to understand if you remove the distractions.”