Bangor Beautiful Artists capture spirit of the city

A few months ago, seven artists set off in search of Bangor’s soul. One sat on a street corner as darkness fell on Hammond Street hill. Another went to Brewer and watched the spires and bridges reflected in the Penobscot River. One looked up at the rooftops against a clear blue sky. Several looked down Main Street and watched shade and sunlight play on the storefronts.

In the streets and in their studios, the artists captured the life of the city – the river flowing through its veins, the buildings and streets that form its backbone, the faces and places that give Bangor its character. Whether they looked in a shadowed alley, at a bend in the Kenduskeag Stream, or in the leaves of a maple tree, they found what they were searching for. The result is on display through the end of October at the Clark House Gallery on Hammond Street in Bangor.

“It was really cool in this show to have this range of pure nature and urban street scenes,” said gallery owner Susan Maasch.

The show is full of juxtapositions, from Gaylen Morgan’s vintage-look photographs of the old Clark’s Watch Repair shop to Stefan Pastuhov’s pastoral view of the Kenduskeag Stream. But there are also parallels. Scott Moore and Paul Black both painted the same view from the Standpipe, and their pieces reveal the nuances in their styles and the similarity of the artist’s eye.

“Bangor people love the city and I think they’re attracted to images of it – I know I am,” Black said during a recent phone interview. “I think it’s because of the history. Bangor has a very colorful history.”

For Black, a Bangor native who now lives in South Portland, it was hard to block out his own history here to paint objectively.

“Having grown up there I have so many feelings, so many memories,” he said.

His Impressionist canvases show Bangor in its best light, sun-dappled and hazy, like a daydream. Bangor’s riverbanks become Black’s Giverney, with reflections of steeples and bridges taking the place of waterlilies.

“It’s a very romantic view of Bangor,” Maasch said.

And the romance springs from the Penobscot, Black says.

“The river – that’s what Bangor’s all about,” he said. “In the heyday of the lumber industry, they say you could walk from one side of the river to the other, from Bangor to Brewer, on the wood, the logjam. All that wood turned into all the houses.”

Those houses, and the brick buildings that dominate downtown, give the show its personality. You’d want to live on Moore’s “Court Street,” with its tidy white houses and flying American flag. It’s sunny and welcoming, like Main Street U.S.A. Pastuhov’s slushy view of a butter-yellow house on Hammond Street shows the city’s muted winter palette. In his “Full Moon over Bangor,” the city lights up and shines under a starry nighttime sky.

Landscape painter June Grey focused on snippets of Bangor in her precise, realist paintings. For her, the lines of a rooftop or the corner of a granite staircase reveal as much about the city as a full scene. She finds spirit in the shade of a maple tree or a flash of hyperblue sky between buildings.

“I wanted to focus on sections of the beauty within the city,” Grey said. “Bangor has some gorgeous buildings. They’re just beautiful architecturally.”

In her watercolors, Diana Young took that architectural beauty and gave it a colorful, humorous twist. Her painting of the Penobscot County Superior Court building would be fine on its own, but she didn’t think so. So she added paper cutouts of convicts flying from the courthouse on angels’ wings. On the second-story colonnade, a judge waves his gavel in vain, trying to get everyone inside. In “Flight of the Ballerinas,” dancers and birds swirl around outside the Thomas School of Dance.

“I wanted some interesting things happening all over, and I thought, ‘Well, it looks like those tutus would hold them up,'” she said, laughing.

Still-life painter Rachel Schiro took a landmark and gave it her own twist. Rather than paint a straight landscape, she painted the Standpipe in a snow globe, sitting on a table in front of a window.

“That’s an artist’s liberty,” Schiro said. “I think once you get going and start working on something like this, you start to see things in an entirely different light.”

For Morgan, a photographer known for her pictures of flowers and seascapes, the show was a chance to put her love for the city on paper.

“The photographs capture the way I feel about Bangor,” she said in a recent interview at her East Blue Hill home. “The light, the old buildings, the windows – they’re just very atmospheric.”

Her photographs, like many of the pieces in the show, have an old-fashioned feel about them. They show the city as it is today, the Bangor of days gone by, and a hint of what’s to come. They’re about tradition and change, city and country, history and the future.

“You look at the old and new,” Schiro said. “I think the buildings are extremely beautiful and I’m glad to see a lot of restoration of the old buildings. I think that’s the personality of our city.”

“Images of Bangor: Paintings and Photography” will be on view through the end of October at the Clark House Gallery. Gallery hours are from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday; Monday and Tuesday by appointment. For information, call 942-9162.