Maine curators present eye-opening Rockport exhibition

“I of the Eye,” through Dec. 28 at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, 26 Russell Ave., Rockport.

Museum curators make their living looking at art and deciding what others get to see. But what of their own art – their own passion? Where does that fit in?

It fits in quite well at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, whose latest exhibition examines the “I,” or personal work, of the “eye,” which refers to the discerning creative vision of 10 Maine curators.

Shelley Gipson Adams of the University of Maine at Presque Isle’s Reed Gallery turns her eye to intimate moments. Her larger-than-life canvases look like tanned leather – rich, luminous, timeless. Her moving, spare figures resemble Goya’s tortured subjects, and their private struggles at once repel and attract.

The same could be said of the gorgeously creepy photographs by Wally Mason, director of the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor. His night visions of Old Town, enhanced through a long exposure, show the world as we can’t see it: drenched with icy hues, the colors of night. They bring to mind film stills – there’s the sense that something’s about to happen, and it is deliciously disconcerting.

Robin Lowe’s still-life gelatin prints are equally jarring. The fine art director from Unity College arranges tchotchkes in strange little tableaux – a delimbed doll with a candle strapped to its stubby shoulder, a porcelain dove nestled in a tangle of plastic grapes. She draws from her childhood, where the women of the house amassed and displayed all sorts of knickknacks. Like Lowe’s prints, each told a story, a family history.

Genetta McLean’s still-life paintings are a tranquil diversion. The director of the Round Top Center for the Arts in Damarasicotta borrows techniques and inspiration from the masters and emerges with images that elevate plain fruit and vegetables to an almost sacred level.

Carolyn Eyler of the University of Southern Maine merges marine maps, medical charts and Buddhist imagery to create paintings that have their own spiritual undertones – they summon the living, breathing spirit of the waterways that flow through her life. The sacred also comes to bear in Robert Katz’s altars of steel and stone. Especially arresting is “When a Friend Dies, You Start Listening For His Voice,” a round rock seemingly hovering above fused metal beams. On the “altar,” a pot of ivy grows, proving that life does go on for Katz of the University of Maine at Augusta.

Michael Culver’s paintings, which can be loosely viewed as landscapes, may remind the viewer of Mark Rothko. But that’s not his only inspiration. If anything, Culver of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, is inspired by the paint itself – thick and rich and vibrant, or stark in black and white.

Susan Lerner of College of the Atlantic presents a series of monotypes, also in black and white, that can be read many ways. The “V” in each of the “V Series” prints, could be a river delta, a horse’s skull, a vagina, the junction of the thighs. They are ambiguously sensual, commenting on both womanhood and the environment in the same breath.

Tiny collages by Suzette McAvoy, assistant curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum, serve as personal narratives. She selects objects and images collected on various adventures and creates delicate, decorative travelogues of treasured memories and faraway places.

Bernie Vinzani of the University of Maine at Machias sticks a little closer to home. His sculptures transform everyday objects – piano keys, belt buckles – into fanciful characters, each with his or her own personality. They embody what this show is about – the individual personality behind a creative vision – the “I” of the “Eye.”

If you plan to visit CMCA, be sure to go upstairs, where Jason Rogenes has assembled cardboard and plastic foam into a stellar installation. In “Megalitectronic,” Rogenes takes tossed-away packing materials and turns them into a study in intergalactic architecture – in other words, it’s like walking onto the set of “Star Wars” and it’s not to be missed.

Also, downstairs, Portland photographer Sean Harris gives an intimate, poignant look at “A Lebanese Family in Waterville.” This is the first in Harris’ “Families of Maine” documentary photo project. It features his wife’s family and the ways they come together: over coffee, in church, in business. In words and pictures, it tells a captivating story.

“Andrew Wyeth: Watercolors, Temperas and Drawings,” through May 18 at the Farnsworth Art Museum, 356 Main St., Rockland.

If you’re lucky, you’ll catch this show before Wyeth’s newest painting, “Heavens to Betsy,” leaves for Pennsylvania. Apparently Wyeth wants it back, and he’s coming up soon to get it. It’s a whimsical, wistful look at a woman, presumably his wife, Betsy, looking out an airplane window. This is a nice airplane, the kind you’d fly in if you were an internationally known painter. But the leather seats and legroom are secondary to the view. In one window, you see Chadds Ford, Pa., where the Wyeths spend their winters. In the next window, you see the Atlantic Ocean. In the third, you see their home on Benner Island in Penobscot Bay. A stretch of the imagination? Absolutely. But a great one.

Even if you miss “Heavens to Betsy,” which will be replaced by “Maidenhair,” you won’t be disappointed by the new Wyeth show at the Farnsworth. Think of it as an illustrated tour of midcoast Maine, complete with the requisite seascapes, and that wondrous strangeness that makes the Wyeths, well, the Wyeths.

There’s a touch of Halloween mischief in “Peter, Peter,” a watercolor with pumpkins in the foreground and a flurry of crows surrounding a shrouded scarecrow in the background. “Dr. Syn” is a spooky, funny favorite – a self-portrait of Wyeth’s skeleton, dressed in an elegant officer’s coat and black loafers, a bit too big for his bony feet.

But everyone in the area is talking about the tender portrait of Wyeth’s son Nicholas, who lives in Cushing. If you didn’t know Nicholas was a Wyeth, you might think this was painted by one of the Dutch masters, but in tempera, and in Maine.

The show is an intriguing survey of Wyeth paintings from 1944 to the present, some of which haven’t been exhibited before. Catch them while you can.