A screen grab from a recent Zoomcast hosted by Alan Crichton (right) and artist Hilary Irons.
Alan Crichton, co-founder of Waterfall Arts in Belfast, had just seen an exhibition by Hilary Irons at Unity College and was preparing to write a review for his local newspaper, The Free Press, when the coronavirus closed the gallery. Soon after, he also lost his column.
Instead, Crichton turned to Zoom to create what he is calling a new Zoomcast featuring interviews with Maine artists who have lost exhibitions because of the pandemic. The series, which is available on YouTube, is an extension of his art-appreciation print column, HiLo Art. He’s calling it his “Ghost Ship Series,” and Waterfall Arts posted the first installment, a 12-minute segment with Irons, in mid-May. The videos are available through the Waterfall Arts website, waterfallsarts.org.
Artist Hilary Irons explains details of a painting on a recent Zoomcast with host Alan Crichton, co-founder of Waterfall Arts.
“Hilary had done all this work and gone to all this trouble to present her show, and no one could see it,” Crichton said. “The image came to mind of ghost ships, these mythical vessels out on the ocean with no crew and captain, just sailing along. It seemed to be an apt image for many artists who have this kind of circumstance going on, this frustrating situation where they have worked hard, created all this art and put it up on the wall – or maybe they haven’t because the show was canceled or postponed – and no one can see it.”
Crichton, an artist, writer and educator, expects the series will air weekly. In addition to Irons, he’s talking to Barbara Sullivan, who lost a retrospective at the University of Maine-Farmington; Alan Fishman, who missed out on an exhibition at the Maine Jewish Museum; and Abby Shahn, whose show at Speedwell Projects in Portland is still up and can be seen on a limited basis, but has mostly been closed to the public.
“I am going to focus on local artists because I know them best,” he said. “I am not there to comment. I really want to bring out what the artists have to say. Even when the COVID crisis is concluded, this is still something that has interesting legs. We very rarely get to talk to an artist directly about what they want to talk about and what they want to say about their work, where they come from and how they got to this particular place.”
Crichton is a printmaker and sculptor who studied with Neil Welliver at the University of Pennsylvania. He also studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Goddard College and, in 1981, a decade after coming to Maine for the first time with the back-to-the-land movement, at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
He moved to New York when his art career took off in the 1980s, before coming back to Maine in 1998 and two years later co-founding Waterfall Arts as the Arts Center at Kingdom Falls in Montville with his wife, Lorna, in the original location of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. It moved to Belfast in 2006. In 2018, the Crichtons received an inaugural Maine Arts Award for arts philanthropy for their work at Waterfall Arts and across the midcoast. Crichton now chairs Waterfall Arts’ capital campaign.
The arts group celebrates its 20th year this year. “We’re still going strong, even in the face of this,” Crichton said.
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