What sets Welliver’s woods apart from the woods of others is that they are, of course, his. We see them and know instantly who painted them.  That stream plunging and swirling around those gray rocks is familiar, so are those clouds parading in ragged order across the sky spreading a midday blue over those hills.  They are all part of Welliver’s woods.  The unaffectedness, the ease with which they are simply here, without a hint of what went into their making, without an indication anywhere of the turmoil that prompted them, is what sets them apart.

Mark Strand, 2001

Like much of Maine’s northern coast, Cranberry Island is a moody place, austere in its beauty, rich in wet, dark spruce trees, and overwhelmed by the atmospherics of the sea and sky. In many of her drawings, Nelligan captures the island at twilight when the failing light softens the outlines of the trees and mutes the contrasting textures of sky and water. The softness of her lines and forms is an appropriate vehicle to evoke the way that fog obscures details—such that the fog that made Nelligan first fall in love with Cranberry Island has, in a certain manner, never left her drawings of it. Nelligan’s use of charcoal contributes to her ability to capture the dramatic weather changes and atmospheric moods typical of this island’s environment. Cumulatively her drawings give us a sense of what it is like not only to see but to feel the moist foggy air on our skin, allowing us to imagine the smell of the cool crisp ocean breeze tinged with the pungency of washed-up seaweed, or the sound of the deep, grand rhythms of the ocean’s waves as they roll on to the shore.

Alison Ferris, 2005

In our harsh age of anxiety and despair, the lyric art of Loren MacIver shimmers with enchantment. Her observation distills the spiritual from the ordinary, and she expands the familiar into vivid patterns that constantly surprise. Color is pleasure and often joy. Overstatement is alien to MacIver’s eloquence and as an artist she fits no convenient category. She shares with us the clarity of her personal vision, and its essentials combine a poet’s eye and a painter’s craft. She discovers magic in simple truth and we are richer and therefore greatly in her debt.

William S. Lieberman, 1987

Will Barnet has made outstanding contributions to American art as a painter, printmaker and teacher. In the course of a long, virtually unparalleled career, he has always taken a vigorously individual route advancing to the pulse of his own aesthetic and philosophical concerns. He has traveled that road so rarely traveled, moving fluidly between abstraction and representation. Barnet has followed the passions of his own beliefs, even when this has not only meant going against the grain of prevailing movements in American art, but even contrary to the directions by which he established his own reputation.

Bruce Weber, 2011

It was not only the finished image but the awareness of how it came into being, the pointillist technique itself, that generated a meditative mood. The viewer re-experienced the slow single-minded addition of dot to dot, each subtly modulated in tone so as to create a luminous field.”

“The paintings are finally, a place into which to project yourself. They are experiential and attempt to describe both an inner experience and outward perception, harnessing fleeting aspects of the natural world. Drummond has said that her work is, “like a humming, a drone, emanating from somewhere, a unified field, pulsing, energetic.

Irving Sandler, 1984

Visit the quiet and passionately inquiring mind of Vincent Smith and what is gently revealed is an impressive and dynamic display of black history, memory and creative workmanship in a very unique visual experience. Undaunted by the difficulties one encounters in a racially repressive society in which many African Americans often struggle daily to live above the poverty line, Vincent Smith, like his long time friend, Jacob Lawrence, has chosen art as the vehicle through which he speaks to the world airing his concerns about our humanity as well as our inhumanity to each other. Smith’s art examines, chronicles and visually comments upon an important segment of American history thereby singling him out as one of the few remaining American artists whose work is truly social commentary in nature.

The figural dimension of Smith’s art is bold without being overpowering. It is expressionistic without the impuissance of action painting. Most importantly, Smith’s work is a passionate inquiry into the nature of things and we see it from the hand of a visually affluent artist.

David C. Driskell, 2003

The art world, with its fast pace, ongoing turnover of interests, and voguish audiences, never held him. He always knew he was an anomaly. His only satisfaction was to mine the possibility for an art that could transcend temporal boundaries by alluding to a world beyond the material.

Debra Bricker Balken, 2019