Radio Maine with Dr. Lisa Belisle

When Maine artist Dan Daly leaves his house, he checks off the essentials: keys, wallet, sketchbook.  Over the past several decades, he has filled hundreds of sketchbooks with ideas and inspiration from his day-to-day travels. It’s not only images that capture his attention--Dan is equally drawn to people and their stories. He easily relates to people from a broad range of backgrounds, from the ja...

Steve Rogers has an appreciation for history, tradition, and service. This, in addition to his lifelong fascination with the ocean, boatbuilders and, (as he refers to them) “watermen,” has resulted in an almost documentary feel to many of his works: his attention to detail related to the working waterfront is unparalleled. On today’s episode of Radio Maine, Steve talks about his rare, but much ant...

Willa Vennema’s life is as wonderfully layered as the encaustic pieces she creates. Raised by art-loving parents in New York City, she became a talented flautist, attending what is now called the LaGuardia High School of Music & Performing Arts—the school that inspired the ‘80 film, television series, and musical, “Fame.” She also began a decades-long relationship with Swan’s Island, a remote encl...

Sculptor David Moser has creativity woven into his DNA. A member of the Maine family known for the Thos Moser furniture company, David learned much from its entrepreneurial founder–his father, Tom. The wisdom that he gained, alongside his three brothers, would influence an early interest in business and economics. His comfort in working with his hands would eventually lend itself to the craft of s...

Artist Doug Caves has an affinity for the natural space afforded by rural New England. “It understands me and I understand it,” he says. Doug translates the energy he feels from the environment onto his paintings. Whether teaching artists, or pursuing his own art, Doug believes in taking a deliberate approach to exploration, discovery, and invention.  His own explorations have led him to consider...

Julie Houck began life as a traveler, moving several times for her father’s career. This pattern repeated itself in her later years. After attending art school, she became a highly sought-after commercial photographer who traversed the globe shooting for corporations, as well as publications such as Business Week, Newsweek, Forbes, The New Yorker,  and U.S. News & World Report. The accumulated mil...

Carol Bass approaches life with an innate empathy, compassion and joy. A love for people and adventure brought her to Maine after college, and she stayed to raise a family, develop her art career and start a successful business. She moved to South Carolina after her children had grown, with the idea of reconnecting with family, but the draw to Maine was too strong.  After a decade, she and her hus...

Kim Case began her creative journey as a photojournalist. After growing up in central New Hampshire, she trained in art history and photojournalism at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston. Finding the field of photojournalism difficult to break into, she went on to photograph weddings, using images to create narratives of a couple’s special day. She eventually became...

Inspired by Scott and Helen Nearing’s classic “back-to-the-land” book, Living the Good Life, Nina Fuller first came to Maine in 1972. Being close to nature had taken root in her psyche from early days spent on her parent’s farm in Connecticut, and she sought this same agricultural connection for her own family. When her Maine dreams imploded with a series of life transitions, Nina knew she would s...

Holly L. Smith’s New England connections run deep: she can trace her family lineage back to the Mayflower. Her great-grandfather, Captain George Lane, used to sail from Rockport, Maine to the West Indies, carrying lime and lumber.  Maine has been home her entire life, and she has taken full advantage of access to its islands, including Eagle, Monhegan, and Vinalhaven. With loving encouragement fro...

Martha Burkert’s successful career as a photography stylist taught her much about perspective, subtracting from a scene, and proper lighting--each of which has been important to her art.  Martha attended the Maine College of Art in Portland later in life, at the suggestion of several artist friends. One of her early influences was artist and author Alfred “Chip” Chadbourn, with whom she shares a c...

An undergraduate finance major at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Dick Alden did not anticipate that he would enjoy his ceramics class as much as he did. In contrast to work he did in his other classes, he found that the process of doing something “not exact” was very appealing.  Putting his interest in art on hold, he went on to pursue a career with State Street Bank in Boston, while rai...

Rodney Dennis is committed to his craft. For months, he took a late flight out of Washington DC bound for Boston every Thursday night after his compressed 4-day work week had ended. He did this so that he could spend weekends attending the Academy of Realist Art. As a result of his continuing commitment to serious academic pursuit, and countless hours of painting, his pieces display a level of pre...

In the field of computer science, abstraction refers to the process of taking away, or removing less relevant characteristics, in order to get to what is most essential. Using that definition, Jodi Edward’s life, like her art, has been a process of abstraction, leading to her current existence on a bucolic family farm in Surry, Maine. Jodi traces her journey from an education at the  Parsons Schoo...

For Brenda Cirioni, art has provided an opportunity for both catharsis and joy. While attending a retreat as an adult, she reconnected with feelings around a fire that destroyed her family’s home when she was 16-years-old--an event that was found to have been caused by arson. This emotional touchpoint became the impetus for a body of work that spanned several years, and eventually provided her wit...

Stephanie Brown understands that food and family are foundational elements of a life well-lived. Trained as a chef at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, her professional pursuits are the continuation of a personal legacy reflected in memories of homemade pasta drying in the bedroom of her grandparents’ four story walk-up in Boston’s North End.  Her decades-long career encompasses a lov...

Fred Williams traces his love for art back to his childhood, when he accompanied his parents on a visit to an artist’s studio located on Hancock Point in Downeast Maine. From a longstanding Maine family, his parents met at the University of Maine in Orono, and bought their first piece of art from one of their professors. Fred says that connecting with artists is something that he treasures to this...

By his own admission, Cooper Dragonette “could not tell the bow from the stern,” when first hired as a sailing instructor by Maine’s Hurricane Island Outward Bound School in Penobscot Bay. Raised in Easton, Connecticut, he spent several years in landlocked Arizona working toward a degree in education, and had come away longing for the coast. His unanticipated Hurricane Island experience initiated...

Artist Matt Chamberlain has always felt an urge to paint. Although he pursued his passion at the Maine College of Art (MECA) in Portland, he initially felt uncertain about how to make a living through his art. With this in mind, he picked up a “real” job as a prep cook at Portland’s venerable farm-to-table restaurant, Fore Street.  The experience, a total immersion into foodservice, set Matt on an...

Artist Ann Trainor Domingue, and her eight siblings, grew up in the oceanside community of Barrington, Rhode Island. There is little doubt that her relationship with the coast and devotion to family have informed her artwork. Ann’s paintings are unmistakable, offering her own distinctive depiction of family and working life on the New England waterfront. In this free-ranging interview, we talk abo...

Emma McHold Burke started working with the Portland Art Gallery just as Covid was causing small businesses like the gallery to “shift direction.” She had recently graduated from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Pennsylvania after gaining an education in painting and art history, and had planned her next life steps around the Philadelphia community in which Tyler is located.  With the un...

Artist Jean Jack has earned a reputation for her unique and now iconic rendition of New England-style farmhouses and barns. Although she had no personal experience growing up in or around these structures, she was mesmerized by a particular farmhouse in Connecticut while in the early stages of her artistic career. After surreptitiously photographing this structure, she painted her version and ente...

Dr. Jarrod Daniel defies easy categorization. A former professional hockey player from Canada, his travels and educational path have taken him all over the world. Now a Portland-based surgeon, he has been married for more than two decades to a woman who grew up in Bangor, Maine and Paris, France. Jarrod and Frederique have chosen to raise their four children on a small Maine island, in a home fill...

Artist Ann Sklar was a printmaking major in college--not because she loved printmaking, but because of the charismatic female professor who led the program. From this professor, Ann learned much more about life and work than one might expect from a college course of study. The professor went on to become a provost at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Ann went on to co-found thre...

Bill Crosby exemplifies the dualistic nature of many artists.  He is both a photographer and a painter, who worked for decades as an art professor, while actively practicing his own craft. Bill reminds us that, as the poet Charles Baudelaire suggests, “An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature…the power of being oneself and someone else at the same time...