Camden native calling shots at Rockland gallery

Christina DeHoff was living in Aspen, Colo., with her fiance, snowboarding and working in a high-end art gallery when the call came from Maine.

It was her close friends Keith and Carolyn May, asking if she’d like to run her own gallery in Rockland in a building they own across the street from the Farnsworth Art Museum.

A bright, energetic Camden native and a 1995 graduate of the University of Maine, DeHoff was quick to recognize a remarkable opportunity. At 25 years old, she was being offered most of her dreams on a plate: to be part of the local arts scene, to have winters free to work on her own painting, to live in Maine.

Now 26, DeHoff has a year’s experience calling the shots at The Gallery at 357 Main. She finds the artists, hangs the art, plans the openings, mails the invitations and makes the sales — a lot more sales this year than last. She is now married to Bangor native Scott McPherson, who is also an artist and UMaine graduate.

This month, she has had the strangely thrilling, slightly daunting experience of featuring the work of some of her former UMaine art professors: painters Nina Jerome and Michael Lewis in “Radiant Passage” through July 29, and their colleague James Linehan in “The Mindful Tree” July 29 through Aug. 17. Jerome and Linehan had her in class; Lewis knew her as a student.

“It’s important to me to do well, especially when I’m representing my professors. It’s intimidating,” DeHoff said. “Jim and Mike brought their work by together, and it was funny — they were standing there waiting for me. They needed my signature. I thought, I’m enjoying this.”

Still, “it’s scary to have people have this much confidence in you,” she said. “I am representing them on the midcoast of Maine.”

Linehan had very few qualms about his former student’s abilities. “It was first and foremost because of Christina,” he said of his decision to show at the gallery. “She was one of my best students. She’s very, very genuine, very earnest, and she’s always been like that.”

Linehan’s show will include new paintings of Machias-area apple trees, whose gnarled, “thwarted” character offered a hard-to-paint intensity, he said. The show’s title refers to the mindfulness, or mental focus, he achieves when painting.

“Radiant Passage” has new landscapes by Lewis, in his luminous turpentine-wash technique, and new fog paintings by Jerome, inspired by an intense hour’s experience watching the atmosphere shift one morning. Memory played an important part in creating the works, which convey space and light with minimal structure, she said.

“Landscape has a wonderful expressiveness, and so many possibilities for metaphor,” she said. “That’s one of the nicest things about it — there are so many layers.”

Jerome said she was attracted to the simplicity of the gallery space at 357 Main. “It’s a clean space, direct and open and friendly,” she said.

“It was a gut feeling that it would be a comfortable and compatible place,” Lewis said. “I liked Christina and trusted her. … She has good instincts about how to talk to people, how to approach them.”

So far, DeHoff said she has found a tightknit, supportive gallery community in Rockland. When some customers from away employed hard-core bargaining tactics, leaving her conflicted, she sought advice from a colleague in a gallery across the street.

It’s not always easy, being young and looking even younger. “Some people look at me like I’m 16, and talk to me like I’m 5,” she said.

With her clear blue eyes and youthful face, she probably could pass for 16. A pair of funky eyeglasses make her look studious, if not older, and her beach-stone bracelet, by a local artist, lends a rustic sophistication.

And while she may look green, DeHoff is far from inexperienced in the business of selling art. She started working in Camden-area galleries at 16, and returned for summers during college. Her Colorado experience gave her a strong shot of confidence.

“Dealing with rich and famous people who expect everything, selling $50,000 pieces — it really toughened me up,” she reflected on a recent evening after closing, sitting behind her tidy desk watching a horse-drawn carriage pass by the window.

The gallery, a former hair salon, was “very blue” when DeHoff got hold of it in May 1997. The walls are now softly brushed white and pale caramel under an ornate tin ceiling. Besides the paintings, teapots, bowls and vases rest on pedestals, their presence part of DeHoff’s mission.

Her goal at 357 Main is something other than the snooty silence of some of the upper-tier galleries she has worked in. “I really wanted to not be a part of that,” she said. “I hate that starkness — walking in to people in black. People who wouldn’t ordinarily come into a gallery feel welcome here.”

A large part of that is surely DeHoff’s own warm presence. She is animated and accessible, revealing herself quickly and comfortably. Her self-assurance and ease takes down walls quickly, and connections are made that would be impossible with someone more guarded.

Craftspeople being separated from fine artists has always been one of her pet peeves, thus the pottery and jewelry in her gallery. She also hopes to offer paintings that are different from the Maine coast realism already available elsewhere.

“I view it as helping these people do what they love, what drives them,” she said. “I’ve seen artists treated without any thought. At the beginning I said, I’m going to be honest, and stick with that.”

Her approach seems to be working. “The majority of people who walk in here blow my mind, they’re so appreciative of what I’m doing,” she said.

Linehan, who has taught at UMaine for 16 years, said success stories like DeHoff’s are some of the highlights of his work.

“The nice thing in this business is that you do see people grow up and make good,” he said.