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PAUL PLANTE High Street Gallery Please click images above for full view.
Paul Plante resides in the Northern Maine town of Oquossoc where he serves three isolated parishes and also, in the winter months, officiates at weekly Mass at a nearby ski resort.
His signature 4 x 4 inch oil stick drawings, small enough to complete in one sitting, allow Father Plante to continue making art whilst fulfilling the rigorous duties of a rural priest.
Excerpted Maine Sunday Telegram review by Philip Isaacson, December 14, 2008
Tom Hall's small reductivist monoprints (a variant, I believe, of monotypes) are on view at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery on High Street. Some depart from his established use of black and white to include evanescent passages of color. In them, asceticism and blunt austerity yield to colors that are taking their departure. They endow the work with a sense of melancholy and even regret. To use such tiny images to ferry elegiac moments is notable.
The work in black and white tends to be dark and brooding and occupied by trees in a variety of congregations--glades, rows, thick forest--and carry such home--like titles as "Quaker Ridge," "Morse Mountain" and "Audubon Trees." One, "Greenville," is just 1 by 1 inches, and is a masterpiece.
I also note Paul Plante's 4-by-4-inch oil stick drawings. Father Plante anomalously is a fixture, and his drawings are perhaps the most widely known--and most quickly recognized--work by a contemporary Maine artist. The show at the Fitzpatrick has Plante's anticipated images of eyes of birds, but it also includes his meditations on the features of plums made in years gone by. They are now rare fellows of wry content. Go see them.
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