Hello readers!

I am pleased to announce that in December I was chosen as one of five 2012 Calligram Falcon Fellows. The Calligram Falcon Fellowship is Oregon's largest visual arts fellowship. For more information, please see the press release, and visit Falcon Arts Community and Calligram Portland.

This fellowship program caps off a successful year of painting. In 2011 I painted and showed a series of 5 6'x5' and 5'x5' paintings, and completed some smaller work. The series title is "Ghosts as Cocoons". The webpage will soon be updated with this material. In the meantime, here's a preview!

Hello everyone!

I have an opening coming up Friday, Nov 6th from 6-9 PM at Lille Boutique. This show continues my work on The Stare's Nest series. The paintings at Lille are smaller and more intimate than the five by fives at this summer's show, with some new imagery of birch branches and grass. I intend to work quite large for my next two shows, so this is likely to be the last show with small work until next summer.

I'm very excited about this show not only because the work is strong and Lille is a great boutique, but because a friend of mine (Hilary Horvath) is producing the floral arrangements and the opening is concurrent with a trunk show featuring Gretchen Jones' lingerie line Moth Love and Anna Korte's AK Vintage jewelry. I've been impressed with Moth Love in the past and enjoyed Anna Korte's work at Contact '09. All of the work will be a good fit together, and I'm pleased to show with such a creative group of local designers.

There will be free wine, food, art, good company, and some of the best local lingerie and jewelry Portland has to offer. I hope to see you there!

Lille Boutique
1007 E Burnside (NE 10th and E Burnside)
Portland, OR 97214
503-232-0333
Opening: Friday, Nov 6th, 6 PM to 9 PM

Blurb-size Artist's Statement:
I began work on The Stare's Nest at the beginning of 2008. Influenced by the subtractive process in intaglio, where a printer teases out the shades of figures from a completely dark plate, I developed paintings in which incomplete portions of birds and feathers penetrate, emerge from and are obscured by a Northern Renaissance-inspired glazed black background. The title The Stare's Nest is drawn from the sixth section of Yeats' Meditations in Time of Civil War, in which Yeats invokes a counter-world inhabited by birds and insects: a nest built in the crumbling masonry of a building is a new source of life, expediting the decay of the human past and standing outside the scope of the violence and unnecessary death of war. The productive play between our ability to identify with the lived world of birds and its fundamental unfathomableness and otherness is a source of beauty, sublimity and horror, and I attempt to capture this dynamic in The Stare's Nest. In the paintings shown at Lille, I incorporate touches of landscape (branches and grass) to address the cyclical aspects of Meditations that are rooted in the seasonality of landscape and place.

Molly Maine, 24, concentrated in visual arts and literature at Sarah Lawrence College. She studied intaglio and multi-plate color etching with Sweitlan Kraczyna in Italy. Along with her own painting, Molly apprentices with Mahaffey Fine Arts and paints sets at Portland Center Stage.

The Stare's Nest opens tonight at Coffeehouse NW in Portland Oregon, from 5:00 - 8:00 PM.

Coffeehouse NW
1951 W Burnside Blvd (corner of W Burnside & NW Trinity)
Portland OR 97209

On display are five new paintings from my 2008-2009 series The Stare's Nest, as well as a sequence of prints based on Wallace Steven's Poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

If you can not make the opening, the show will be up from the 1st of July to the 30th of August, so please come check it out!