At long last, Alison Hildreth, a beloved Maine artist who has been studiously (I mean that word literally) working for almost seven decades, is getting her due in a multipart retrospective organized by Speedwell Projects. This began with one show of Hildreth’s drawings and prints at New Era Gallery in Vinalhaven that has already closed. But we have the great fortune of longer runs for Speedwell Projects’ “Alison Hildreth: 50 Years” in Portland (through Dec. 22) and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art’s “Alison Hildreth | Darkness Visible” (through Jan. 7).

There is also a refurbished permanent installation in the lobby of the Portland Public Library, and Hildreth was honored on Oct. 14 with both the debut of a new documentary by Smith Galtney on her life and work (“Darkness Visible”) and the Second Annual Speedwell Prize, awarded to women and nonbinary artists who have demonstrated a lifetime commitment to their art-making practice.

In the documentary, Hildreth speaks of her love of black as “the color of descent.” She doesn’t view it as gloomy or necessarily an indication of a dark mood. Rather, she sees descent and its representative color as a journey of unpredictable twists and turns whose impetus is the search for knowledge and wisdom. Everyone cannot walk through life, she maintains, being cheery. Hildreth acknowledges that there are certain tunnels encountered on this journey of descent that will turn us inside out and cause fear, pain, doubt and so on. None of this does she consider a negative.

This helps give context to the moody, large-scale canvases (most 66-by-72 inches) at Speedwell Projects that Hildreth painted from the 1980s into the early 1990s. She has written of her admiration for artists and writers who plumbed the dark side of the subconscious: Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, any number of Hieronymous Bosch paintings, Dante’s “Purgatorio,” John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” She also identifies with the Greek god Hermes, whose many roles included being the protector of travelers (she considers artists as people exploring new territory in their work) and a psychopomp, or conveyor of souls into the afterlife.

The 1980s paintings feature whirling, vaporous eddies (“Waiting for Merlin” and “The Watcher”) or telegraph a gravitational descent into lightless watery depths (“Sinking” and “Untitled,” 1989). These are richly impastoed and texturally complex, as well as masterful manipulations of our perceptions of surface and depth. But what’s technically astonishing to me is how liquid they feel in spite of the thickness of her medium, which is clearly troweled on and pushed around. This requires a thorough understanding of both color and the physical properties of water. You almost want to put your hand into the eddy of “Untitled” to see if it comes out wet.

The “Night Writing” works in the window cover a lot of territory – from Hildreth’s signature bats (“Bat Night”) to beings struggling to untangle themselves from nets (psychological? emotional?) in which they’re caught (“#64”). All of this is lightened by the side gallery’s grouping of nude studies, self-portraits and other sketches from her early development as an artist. The self portraits highlight the chiseled facial features of her youth as well as Hildreth’s intense stare, her eyes exuding an undeniable intelligence. The artist is a voracious reader of subjects varied and arcane – from complex scientific texts and a fascination with astrophysics to classical literature and history – all of which informs her work (hence the studiousness noted above).

There is a general feeling in this show, particularly with a painting called “Bee Keepers” – where figures dangle from strings manipulated by disembodied blue hands – of being led, worked or regulated by forces beyond our understanding or control.

This is a good segue concept to the CMCA’s “Darkness Visible,” which pairs long Kitikata paper drawings with oil paintings, some of the latter of which, at the time of the documentary’s filming, director of the CMCA Tim Peterson observes were still wet. The drawings are ostensibly maps that suggest aerial views of Earth, while the paintings peer into the infinite cosmos.

Hildreth has spoken of her fascination with cartography, which has persisted after initial landscape architecture studies at college. These are not rationally navigable maps. Rather, they are records of the human condition and the way it intersects and/or conflicts with nature. Hildreth has been a lifelong environmentalist, and she subscribes to the pantheistic belief in the innate spirituality of nature. But these are not intended as overt environmental statements. What they chart, in a way, is the folly of human ambition to dominate nature.

The Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu, who is also fond of this sort of psychic cartography, has said “History is made: one layer on top of another, erasing itself, consuming itself, inventing something else from the same thing.” Hildreth’s Kitikata drawings produce the sensation of looking down through stacked cartographic layers that record evidence of humanity, natural phenomena and the coexistence and interactions between them.

We intuit the passage of time and civilizations through the remnants of cities – smoke stacks, the pumpjacks of oil wells, roller-coasters – as well as railroad tracks, patterns of migration and ruined foundations of indeterminate origin. The latter could be ancient archeological sites, what’s left after a hurricane or, because of the presence of impact craters in “Soundless as Shadows #3,” a bombing or asteroid shower. Yet underneath it all, capillary-like riverbeds, root systems or mycorrhizal networks persevere, continuing inexorably to ramify and spread.

There’s a profound, heartbreaking beauty to these, threading back to the art of the sublime that flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries. But the paper and monochromatics also recall makimono, narrative landscape scrolls that reached their zenith 700-800 years earlier in China. The crinkling and bunching of the paper around Hildreth’s marks make the surfaces ripple with a delicate materiality, contributing further still to the sense of our mortality’s fragility, especially in the dimmed lighting at CMCA that washes them in a warm glow. I kept thinking of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” about the broken, half-buried statue of a fallen king.

The paintings, on the other hand, turn their gaze to the maelstrom of space: misty nebulae, fiery suns, cool moons, astral debris. But in some, weblike networks connect heavenly bodies or seem to be rending and losing that connection. In another, a map emerges through the ether, its geography charting subdivided territorial plots of land or states or countries. In a painting on the perpendicular wall, straight and arching lines resembling a mathematical diagram appear out of the swirling space matter. Where did these come from, we wonder?

Hildreth would probably not describe her intention with these paintings as specifically spiritual. More than likely she would ascribe them to the awe she feels for the infinite miracles of the universe. Yet these emanations from the celestial darkness are inevitably pregnant with spiritual metaphor. All forms – moons and planets, civilizations, rollercoasters, oceans, bodies, beliefs, egos – necessarily arise out of nothingness. All manifestation originates from non-manifestation. How else, after all, could it be otherwise? From both scientific and spiritual perspectives, eventually also everything returns to that formlessness. Everything we call life, in other words, emanates from and disappears back into a great, unknowable mystery.

Call that mystery “God” or “the Beloved” or “Source.” Hildreth doesn’t presume to label it. There’s far more humility in accepting a mystery exactly for what it is – a mystery. In our earthly lives, we can know particular flavors and manifestations that originate in that mystery, but we cannot finally grasp the actual source of it until we are returned utterly to it. And of course, in the return, we lose – completely and irrevocably – the sense of whatever we thought we were.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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