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Transcription of Life as Art #237

Announcer:	You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physicians who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Eric:	I associate myself as a musician, visual musician, improvisational, jazz, visual jazz.
Emma:	They’re going to look in the mirror and they’re going to be focused on different things. We all are. We’re human, but that doesn’t mean that they need to feel any less loved.
Lisa:	This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show #237, Life as Art, airing for the first time on Sunday, April 3, 2016. Life informs art and vice verse. As human creatures, we benefit from experiencing art as a way of helping us explore some of the larger questions we may find ourselves pondering. Today, we speak with internationally-known, Maine-based artist, Eric Hopkins, about how his art has been shaped by his interaction with the world. We also speak with Emma Wilson, Managing Director of Art Collector Maine and the Portland Art Gallery, about an innovative project focusing on the body as a work of art. Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa:	Today it is really my privilege and pleasure to have with me a renowned Maine artist who, I think if you’ve lived in Maine or really anywhere in the country for awhile, you probably have seen something that he has done. It’s quite beautiful work and in lots of different media. This is Eric Hopkins, who is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and who has taught at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, as well as many other places. Eric has exhibited at the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, many galleries and other museums nationally, and also exhibited as part of the art in the Embassies Program. Eric, it’s really great to have you here today.
Eric:	Thanks. It’s great to be here. Really great to be here.
Lisa:	I have to start with this, one of the things that I love most about, at least the paintings that you do, is that there’s a lot of blue in them. Blue is one of my favorite colors.
Eric:	Yeah. You know, when I was a kid, the space program was just starting and I think it was 1961, Yuri Gagarin went up for a little shot and he looked back and said, “The Earth is blue.” He was the first guy off the planet, in a way. Not just in a plane, but he was orbiting the planet. Blue is a dominant color in this world, in this planet. Both the sky and the water reflecting it. It’s a pretty important part of the spectrum.
Lisa:	You actually look at the Earth in a way that not everybody has the opportunity to look at it unless we spend a lot of time ourselves flying commercially, maybe we are fighter pilots or whatever, but you actually on purpose go up in the air and you look at the Earth from above.
Eric:	Right. Like a bird.
Lisa:	Like a bird.
Eric:	Or like the Big Guy in the sky, the God’s eye view, bird’s eye view. Sometimes people say, “Oh, you really fly high enough to see the curvature of the Earth.” I say, “Yeah, I can see the curvature of the Earth right here in this room. Even in the closet.” Because guess what. I see it with my eyes. My eyeballs are round and as humans we’ve let that roundness of life, the connectivity of life, go and we draw straight lines and isolate everything with straight lines and little boxes and everything. I like to think of the roundness as well.
Lisa:	You spend a considerable amount of time working with glass.
Eric:	Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lisa:	Obviously there’s some roundness associated with glass.
Eric:	Right.
Lisa:	Not every artist wants to go in that direction. Why was that important to you?
Eric:	I probably was a little rebellious at times growing up and I was told not to play with fire and not to break glass. What could I do? I remember we built, my brothers and cousins and I would go camping 9, 10, 11 years old, build these huge, hellacious bonfires way back when Coke was stored in glass bottles, real thick, greenish glass bottles. We’d drink the Coke and they’d kind of melt, kind of sag around. I’d take sticks and poke it. I thought, “Yeah, that’s pretty good.”
	Then eventually I was a night watchman at Haystack School of Crafts when Erwin Eisch, a German glassblower, was there. I saw him blowing glass for the first time. I thought, “Wow, that’s for me,” so I did it. My first piece of glass I gave to my 104-year old grandmother for her birthday. It was this awful blob of glass, but I did it. It was really fun.
Lisa:	Not everybody would choose to, say, go up in the air or experiment with fire and things that break or do things that, for some people, could be very scary. You don’t seem to be scared by these things.
Eric:	Can’t help it. It’s fun. It’s alive, being alive and moving. I think when my brother drowned, my 5-year old brother drowned, I was 10 and I saw his wet, dead body there laying still. We shared a room, we shared a bedroom together. He was still. He’d stopped moving. I realized at that point very, very distinctly, a memory, not even a memory, but the visual is very strong, but I realized eventually I’m not going to do that. I want to keep moving. As long as I’m moving, I’m alive and I choose life, choose to be alive. That’s really important.
	Also, the space program was going on. It’s not a flat-Earth society. Remember, Christopher Columbus was going to sail over the edge of the world? As a kid and growing up on an island, I thought a lot about what’s over the edge, so that sense of movement, of space, of this blue island Earth going around the sun, that’s pretty important stuff. All these movements going on and I didn’t know much about physics and science, in particular. I have a science-concept mind, but not the measuring all the numbers and the realities, formulas, but I remember seeing those scientists on their chalkboards saying, “We get out of Earth’s gravity this way and that way, then we’ll get the moon’s gravity and pull around.” That was all about the timing, time and space, and movement through space, through time.
	Kind of heavy ideas, but that’s the basis of a lot of what I do. I ended up at Montserrat School of Visual Arts in Beverly, Mass., and studied with a guy, Paul Scott, who had studied everyday for seven years with Hans Hofmann. We talked about the push/pull of that flat, 2-dimensional plane and making it come alive through movements on that dumb, white, dead, flat white space. To activate it, bring it to life conceptually, visually, was real important for me.
Lisa:	One of the pieces that I like in this book that Carl Little has written called, Eric Hopkins: Above and Beyond, is a very simple cloudscape. I like a lot of your pieces, many of which are blue. This one just happens to be the clouds themselves, but there’s something really almost, simultaneously I guess, mystical and whimsical. It’s as if you take things seriously, but don’t take things seriously.
Eric:	It’s called balance. That’s what it’s all about. Balance, you know. Health and wealth and wise and balance. I think a lot. When I’m working, painting, or whatever, I don’t think a lot. I just get rid of that damned old brain, mind. Get it out of there. There’s no place for it.
	It’s like you can practice your scales as a musician. I associate myself as a musician, visual musician, improvisational, jazz, visual jazz. There’s a lot of structure there. You have to think about that structure. There’s something very strong and very real and then you take off. You go off in this free form, which really gets to the essence of things. That’s when I think you’re talking about. You had the study is definitely there. There’s a lot of thought going on behind it, but the real, true expression, it’s like breathing. How do you think about that? Can you hold your breath for 30 seconds right now?
Lisa:	I can’t.
Eric:	We’re not going to do it on the radio, too, right?
Lisa:	No, it doesn’t make for very good radio anyway.
Eric:	That sense of if we had to think about holding our breath and not breathing, it would be pretty difficult. We naturally breathe. All these parts of our brain are working for us, keeping us ticking as is. I think that’s my one goal, one of many goals, is to be natural like breathing.
Lisa:	It’s interesting to see some of the pieces that you’ve done because I wouldn’t necessarily think of trees perhaps looking the way that you’ve created them, but then once I’ve seen them I think, “Well, of course. Of course they look that way.” They can look many other ways, but of course they look the way that you’ve made them. It doesn’t seem as if you need to be hemmed in by what other artists have created as trees.
Eric:	No, again, a lot of that comes from flying and breaking down things into simple elements. I think that’s part of that Paul Scott/Hans Hofmann thing. It’s just breaking it down into very essential, simple, basic shapes, lines, colors, elements, elemental rhythms, patterns. In flying, I notice there are a lot of these pointy conifer trees and, in a plane, you want to stay out of those pointy, toothy-type trees, alligator-tooth trees. Then at the same time, the deciduous trees come up from one point and arc out.
	In terms of breaking down those two basic kinds of trees, it’s like the point at the top and then the point at the bottom with the arc at the top, or numerous arcs with the branches. That’s some of what I do. Try to break it down into real essence, real elemental rhythms and patterns.
Lisa:	You’ve also been a teacher. How do you help the people that are learning from you understand some of the concepts that you’re describing to me?
Eric:	Mostly I tell them to forget everything they’ve been taught. Get on a big plane and throw it all out the window. You can learn. You’ve got the stuff already. You were born with it. You learned it. Kids go to school, they get taught to not trust themselves, to not do what’s natural.
	I get in trouble sometimes. My one son, an engineer, went to Maine Maritime Academy, got out in three and a half years, and I get ranting on schools, how they wreck kids and stuff, and he looks at me and he says, “Dad, I couldn’t have done what I did if I hadn’t gone to school.” Again, balance is really important. Man, I couldn’t stand school. That was the worst thing to do, stick a kid in a box with a bunch of other kids in rows, knuckle slap for not doing the right thing. Man, it’s just not good.
Lisa:	I must say that you’re the only guest we’ve ever had who took off his shoes and socks before he sat down to talk with us.
Eric:	Well, I need to be in touch with the earth, the wood, the trees, the metal.
Lisa:	Isn’t that interesting that that’s so important to you and I can imagine that that would not translate well into a classroom setting.
Eric:	No. Not at all. I get in trouble a lot. Or used to. Now I get the license a little bit more.
Lisa:	Why do you think that?
Eric:	Just do.
Lisa:	Somehow you get away with things that you never got away with before.
Eric:	Well, yeah. Teachers and school. Sorry, teachers. There are a lot of good teachers that have really learned a lot of things and taught me things. Particularly, coming back around to Maine and mentors are a different form of teachers and I think that’s some of what I’ve been doing more informally as a mentor by putting things on the wall, by talking on radios and back alleys and beaches and rocks and places.
	The importance of mentors. Little kid, about this tall, in the Thorndike Hotel in Rockland, standing with my brothers on a rainy day, the ferry boat didn’t go, looking at these black boxes with all these weird shapes all organized somehow. Kind of laughing at them, but knowing that this is elevated high art.
	This was Louise Nevelson, her brother’s hotel, and here I am this little kid looking at this organized junk all painted black. Louise Nevelson right here in Rockland, Maine. As I grew up, I thought she was like this rock star of art and a woman. It was natural. I didn’t think there was any real gender specificity to be an artist because she’s a woman she couldn’t or could be an artist. It didn’t make any difference. Then I found out later, 70’s, 80’s, that she was just getting started. Now I’m talking about in the 50’s getting some notoriety for her work. That importance of mentoring is really important.
	Blackie Langlais down the street in Cushing. I saw his wood pieces. There’s this other guy at the Farnsworth Museum growing up. Did these lot of shingles. Kind of gray, kind of bleak-looking stuff. An old lady sprawled out in a blueberry field. That was kind of real, too. Very realistic, arty kind of thing, but I didn’t relate to that quite as much. That’s Andy Wyeth. Those are kind of pretty broad extremes of teaching right there and basically in Rockland, Maine, and growing up around that. These are real people.
	I remember I did a talk somewhere. I think in New York City. This antique woman came up to me afterward, shaking. Pretty shriveled, old, been around a long time. She’s like, “Oh dear, I’m so envious of you. I grew up and every Saturday my parents took me to the Metropolitan Museum and all these places. We studied Egyptians and all this and that.” She said, “But you got to study real people. You lived with real artists, real live artists, contemporary artists of right now. I wish I could have done that.”
	I thought, hey, Maine is full, maybe exaggerate a little, but I think Maine has the, besides New York City, the biggest artistic, the broadest artistic community of any state in the Union. Very specifically over time from the Native Americans to the Thomas Hart to Frederick Church and those guys right on up through into Monhegans and all the different art camps around. It’s pretty amazing. They all were East Coast, Philadelphia, New York, Boston school coming here. I think that’s a big part of my teaching is not formal, but as being mentored and mentoring, the importance of passing that along.
Lisa:	It’s not that you aren’t a fan of education, per se, just maybe not the formal structure of education that maybe we all think of when we think of going to school.
Eric:	I love education. I love learning. Don’t get me wrong there, it’s just schools I don’t like. I know there are a lot of great work at schools right now. Absolutely phenomenal, great stuff.
Lisa:	You also took some of these classes yourself. From what I understand, you took classes in geology and botany and other things that informed your art.
Eric:	Science. I took Brown University courses when I was at RISD. Yeah, I think when you cram a poor little kid into a classroom when they don’t want to be there, that’s kind of a more negative aspect, but I’m not anti-school, anti-education at all. It just has to be appropriate. Some people learn one way and some people learn other ways. I think that we need to acknowledge all of that, how important that so many different ways of learning and doing. Your favorite color’s blue. Mine’s red.
Lisa:	Actually, red is an equally-favorite color of mine. Blue was my favorite color for probably the first 32 years of my life and I never really cared for red, then all of a sudden I really enjoy red. It’s interesting, also, that things can shift that way.
Eric:	Yeah, a lot of times kids will come in, I did a gallery talk. “What’s your favorite color?” They expect blue. I wear blue jeans and blue shirts a lot of times. “Red.” Again, it’s I don’t want to be typecast with anything. I like all my full spectrum. I’m a full-spectrum guy. I like them all.
Lisa:	Well, and in fact, before we went on the air you said, “I don’t want to be known as a painter. I’m an artist, so I don’t want to be constricted because I want to be able to use paint, but also words and anything that I would like to use to be an artist.”
Eric:	Don’t want to be constrained, yeah. That’s pretty important and also to acknowledge there are some people that love to have assignments and to be doing this, this, this. Deadlines and all that.
Lisa:	You have three children, one of whom has passed away now, and two stepchildren. At least one of them is an engineer. You haven’t really talked about the other ones.
Eric:	Yeah, my daughter, Eva, is living here in Portland right now and she’s a musician, drama artist, independent cuss like her old dad at the same time, and wants to get more in the medical field some. She went to Alfred University in Syracuse. In Syracuse, she was in Communications and Rhetorical Studies. She had a part-time, temp agency job with a health company, insurance company, and she was calling up people, bugging people at their mealtimes about their health care. I said, “What’s that like?” She said, “Well, today I had two really tough ones, but I let them rant and I probably took a little longer than we’re supposed to, but they left happy.” I said, “You know, I think that rhetorical studies helped.”
Lisa:	Maybe art isn’t just the visual. Maybe there’s also art in conversation and communication.
Eric:	Yeah. The art of living. I think that’s the big thing. They talk about STEM: science, technology, engineering, math. I throw an A in there. Go from STEM to STEAM: science, technology, art, engineering, and math. The same thing with the three R’s: reading, writing, arithmetic. The first R begins with A and it’s arts, so I’m going for the four R’s.
Lisa:	Your son passed away three years ago, so that’s not that long.
Eric:	No, it was pretty tough. He was independent, too. We’re very connected right now, but had been painting lobster buoys in a small, confined area with nasty paints. Been drinking and driving his truck fast and drove off the road and rolled and died. Basically died doing what he loved doing.
	I was living on Mount Desert at the time and my former wife called. This was on North Haven. She called and said he’d been in an accident, didn’t know any details. I sat there in front of my fireplace and I just got this download, I wouldn’t call it a voice, but it was a message, “Your daredevil child is a grownup angel tonight.” I knew. I just knew he’d gone and left this body and this planet as such.
	I’ve been connected with him ever since. We’re always connected. He was a chip off the old block for sure. I write a lot. I was one day, a couple months later I was writing and kind addressing him in the writing and said, “Geeze, I’ve been doing all this writing stuff for five decades. Damn, the decades are going by fast. You only were there for two of them. Got any bright ideas on how I can organize this writing and do a book or something like that? Hey, Ev, I’d like to dedicate it to you.”
	Boom, damn, “Yeah, Dad, right. Dead-icate it to me like I’m dead. Hey, I’m not dead. I’m right here with you. Can you feel the goosebumps? You know I’m right here, right? Go do this. Go do that. You know, I didn’t get to be a dad before I left.” He doesn’t call it “dead,” doesn’t like that. “Left,” is the more appropriate terminology for the others. He said, “Go do this stuff. I didn’t get to be a dad, but I tell you what. I’ll dad you.” Dadding is a verb. I’ve had that sense of some guidance, some subtle, some blatant, and got the message there. The leavers and the lefters. He left. He was a leaver. He left the planet. We’re the lefters. We’re left here. There’s that aspect.
	My father died in ’79 and in the show there’s some fish paintings that come back after he died and kind of tying in a lot of these different aspects. I was doing these blown-glass fish, painted fish, different things. He was kind of out of it on his death bed, checking me out before he checked out. I told him I was doing this blown-glass fish and stuff and shells. He said, “You know, I got you going on that.” He had a party fishing boat. I went fishing with him. Caught my first fish, cod fish, and kind of take it home, show my mother, all puffed up proud. It was just old, dead, gray fish. She’d seen a lot of them, so I was kind of disappointed that she wasn’t more enthusiastic, so I painted right on the fish with my poster paints. After awhile, a few days, she said, “You’ve got to throw that away. It stinks.” I’m like, “It stinks? Come on, Mom.”
	I painted fish on paper and he told me that story. I had totally forgotten about it. He went and died and I went back to Providence where I was living and did all those lobster buoy paint fish images on paper and then brought them back to life with color. That’s kind of a continuity, a sense of life and death. It’s all part of it. It’s all part of the deal. I think you asked me a question and I got off on a tangent with.
Lisa:	No.
Eric:	Can you believe it?
Lisa:	I think no, never. I think you answered the question. The continuity that you’re working with right now, actually, we’re fortunate because you’ve agreed to do a show with the Portland Art Gallery and the new expansion into our bigger space. This is going to take place, I believe it’s opening April 7 and into the beginning of May. It’s a big deal for us.
Eric:	Yeah. A big deal for me, too.
Lisa:	Well, and I wondered about that. I mean, you brought in this beautiful piece that is hanging right now in the conference room of 75 Market Street, at Maine Media. It’s like a 3-dimensional piece and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a piece quite like it, the way that you’ve done the kind of land/skyscape. It’s really been a pleasure to spend time with you today. We’ve been speaking with Eric Hopkins who is really nationally- and internally-known as an artist of many different sorts and a native of North Haven and Rockland. Really proud to have you be a fellow member of the great state of Maine. Thank you for coming in and talking to me today.
Eric:	Well, thank you. It’s great being here. I could go on and you could go on and we will. We’ll continue.
Lisa:	Yes. Maybe we’ll have you come back again on another day.
Eric:	Well, and I’d just like to say to everyone, look inside. Reflect what’s inside and what’s outside as well. Keep the balance. Trust, don’t rust.
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Lisa:	It’s really fun to have people in the studio with me who I just like as human beings and who are also my friends, but also I know they’re pretty high-quality community movers and shakers. I think this individual, you will listen to her and you will understand why I feel so strongly about her. This is Emma Wilson. She is a Managing Director of Art Collector Maine and also a fellow Yarmouthian. I don’t know that that’s actually a word, but citizen of Yarmouth.
Emma:	Of course it is.
Lisa:	Of course it is. Thanks for coming in, Emma.
Emma:	Thank you for having me.
Lisa:	Emma, you and I have known each other for quite awhile and I’ve always been interested in your background and how you came to be doing the work that you’re doing with Art Collector Maine because you’ve done a lot of other things. Social work, you’ve worked within the psychiatric field, you’ve moved around a lot as a military spouse. Walk me through the process of how it is that you came to be the Managing Director at Art Collector Maine.
Emma:	That’s a great question. My journey, as you referenced, definitely starting in a social work field and then moving around the country quite a bit through a period of time over the course of twelve years, living in almost every part of the region, and really always valuing my work with kids and with youth and children and their families.
	Then when I was living in the south and the Bible Belt, I got sort of reconnected with the arts in a way that was very important to me. I was going back into the work field after having three young children and being with them. The arts were just always a place where I felt safe, I felt comfortable. I felt like there were people that were interested in having dialogue about things that were relevant and meaningful in their life, that I agreed with or disagreed with. It didn’t matter. I actually had family members who are artists and living, supporting artists.
	I came to Maine and became very involved with the Portland Museum of Art. Worked there. Was part of their docent program and it felt really good, but then was starting to miss the teenage population. Then was offered an opportunity to do development work with Wayfinder Schools, which is a wonderful program that works with teen parents and kids at really high risk of not completing high school. I found a lot of pleasure and satisfaction with working with them and also became more and more involved with the broader community of donors at that time.
	Just through the experience and being in Maine since 2007, everybody’s connected and it just constantly amazes me how that happens. Through having a conversation with Kevin Thomas, became aware of an opportunity around returning to work within the arts, but also be able to continue to work with furthering connections in supporting the arts. It felt like a really good opportunity and a good fit in that moment in time. That happened last August and so that’s where I am.
Lisa:	Emma, you’re from New Jersey originally
Emma:	I am. I’m a Jersey girl.
Lisa:	You went to college in New York state.
Emma:	I did.
Lisa:	Your education was in social work. Why did you decide to do that?
Emma:	I went to BU for social work. My undergrad degree was in Sociology. Certainly relationships and connecting with people were always interesting to me. How people think, work together. Social work was a more interesting field for me because to me it was all about systems working together and sort of strengthening the individual, so how those systems work together was more in line with the way that I seem to practice. That’s how I decided to go to social work school and then from there worked in a psychiatric community and in education systems as well. That was why.
Lisa:	You started your education in New York state doing sociology as an undergraduate and that worked its way into a desire to do some work in the social work field. It’s not an easy field.
Emma:	No, it’s not. There’s a lot of challenges that are prevalent in our society still and that we’re there then, but I really am drawn to trying to help when I can, try to become civically-engaged and really wanting to participate and not just watch it happening around me, but wanting to participate. That is definitely what compelled me, I think, to stay with it. People are amazing. They have amazing stories. It’s just an honor and a privilege when you get to know their life.
Lisa:	Was there anything in your family? You said you had artists in your family.
Emma:	I have artists in my family. I came from the most dysfunctional family in the universe, but no I definitely have … and you can leave that on tape. We all know it. No, it’s not the most dysfunctional, but I had an interesting upbringing. I’m one of four girls. My parents split when I was in third grade. They finally divorced when I was in ninth.
	There was a lot of challenges that we encountered during that time period. I think that certainly there were people in my life that were very helpful. It wasn’t formal as a therapist or whatever that might be, but it was a youth group or a teacher. Some adults in my life that were making sure that I knew that I was cared about. My parents, of course, as well to the best of their ability. I think that certainly influenced me wanting to be able to be an adult in another person’s life, to be able to show them that they care about them.
Lisa:	That’s interesting. As I asked that question, I was thinking she’s going to say, “All my siblings were social workers.” I have never had anybody say, “I have the most dysfunctional family in the world.”
Emma:	That’s a strong statement. I shouldn’t retract that. No, my sisters and I interestingly, one’s an artist, one’s a lawyer, one’s a journalist, and a social worker. We’re an interesting combination.
Lisa:	Actually, I think the fact that you can say that, “We’re dysfunctional,” but you seem to still have a lot of love for them and I know that you’re very close to them.
Emma:	Oh absolutely.
Lisa:	I like the fact it doesn’t have to stand as being a negative and rooted in some sort of dysfunction. It evolves.
Emma:	It doesn’t. We all have, I said it already once today, but we all have these stories. In order to embrace it and the more I try to push away from my story, the further away I became from who I am. I don’t think in the end that that’s necessarily the way that I’m the most healthy, where I’m in my best. I think that really embracing it, understanding it, laughing about it with my family, crying about it, whatever it might be that we need to do to sort of process and go through.
	Now our parents are aging. We’re going through this whole next step and just how we work through that process together is really important. My sisters are absolutely the closest people in my life. There’s no way. Your siblings have the most closely-shared experience and I just only hope that my kids feel the same way about each other at some point, if they don’t already. We’ll see.
Lisa:	I love that fact that when you were in Georgia, you found your group which I think is really important for all of us to gravitate towards like-minded individuals who make us feel connected. It’s not a judgment on other people who aren’t like-minded, it’s more like, “How do I thrive in this world?” For you, the group was people in the arts.
Emma:	It was definitely people in the arts and then also closest friends were definitely the political science instructor, the director for the local university. Where we lived in Georgia was very much subdivisions and cul-de-sacs and whatnot and pools. Lot of activities centered around pools for the kids in those neighborhoods. I was probably more aware of what was going on in the world at that time. Granted, I had a husband in the military. We were at war. There was a lot to be paying attention to and a lot to be worried about.
	I will say that even if I didn’t agree politically with 80% of my neighbors, I also felt extremely cared for, especially when my husband at that time was deployed and I had these three children. It was petrifying for all of us, but there was a care and condition. Even though there’s a part of me that completely has a lot of issues around the military, to drive on the base at that time was the most comforting place I could possibly be.
	It’s just ironic, but the other part of it, my head part, that really sort of took care of my heart, my kids and heart. My head part needed to be connecting with people that I could have conversations with and that’s where the work really came into play with the arts. I needed that outlet.
Lisa:	You worked at the Portland Museum of Art and then you fond yourself taking a bit of a right turn in working with the Wayfinders School, which is evolved from The Community Schools, which was up on the coast and now is in New Gloucester.
Emma:	Right, well, The Community Schools were in Camden and Opportunity Farm was in New Gloucester and they merged and became The Community Schools of Opportunity Farm and Camden, and then rebranded to Wayfinders Schools with two different campuses.
Lisa:	Tell me about that work. Tell me about the group that you are serving.
Emma:	Yeah, so there’s two schools within Wayfinder. Or two programs. Passages Program which works with teen parents throughout the state. They’re involved in almost every county of the state and that’s where teachers deliver the school to the students. There are so many barriers to teen parents being able to complete school. They can’t take their babies on the school bus. They’re ostracized for so many different reasons. It’s hard. This way it’s like homeschooling essentially, but really to be able to propel these young parents to be able to be high school graduates is such a significant marker for their future. We really tried hard when I was working there, the teachers just worked so hard with their students.
	The residential program, there’s a campus in Camden and there’s a campus in New Gloucester where it was Opportunity Farm for years. They work with students at a residential, so the kids live there and are cared for by adults and are really expected to engage in conversation and in relationships and that being the tool to help them heal and to be able to help them to ultimately graduate. There’s a huge hands-on, experiential component to the curriculum, and they also are very much met where their individual needs are in terms of their academics. Because it’s a small program, the teachers are able to really meet with them where they need to be. With that, they’re able to learn. It’s amazing when you reduce those barriers how that happens.
	It’s a wonderful program. Joseph Hufnagel runs the residential program. Martha Kemp runs the Passages Program and they just work so hard. My hat goes off to them. I was offered an opportunity to come in. A friend of mine, Patsy, was working there as a Development Director at the time and then she had then left and I stayed on.
Lisa:	Then we were lucky enough to bring you into our fold here at 75 Market Street with Art Collector Maine and you’ve been working with the Portland Art Gallery and the Gallery at the Grand down in Kennebunk. You’re back in the arts.
Emma:	I’m back in the arts.
Lisa:	You’re watching Andrea King from Aristelle give a talk at Maine Live last fall. She was discussing something that you really connected with.
Emma:	Yeah, she was. She definitely was discussing body image. Here I just loved the idea. I had no preconceived notions on Andrea. I had never met her. I had never seen her. I just didn’t really know much about her business, but here was this feminist business woman talking about having this fine lingerie business, but also just really supporting this conversation about reducing the negative connotations around body image and just what that means. It was very personal for me in the sense that growing up, it was very much, “You could be beautiful if”. That was always the line. It was always around body image. It was always around presentation. It was not nice. It was really not something that you’d say to a child or that you even feel for a child, I think.
	Then she spoke about her own children and that certainly resonated for me. I have a 16-year old, an 18-year old, I have a 14-year old son. The other two are daughters. Knowing that that was an issue as they’d been growing up that I wanted to make sure to pay attention to and so my language has been very intentional with them as they’ve grown up because the language felt so hurtful to me growing up.
	To see her on the stage and just lending voice to that in a way that was kind of cool. It was a different angle. I just loved it and so was eager to follow up in conversation with her, just as a person, but also just to see if there was an opportunity for us to do something together through the galleries.
Lisa:	That opportunity led to an event called, Every Body is a Work of Art, which included women walking around in lovely lingerie in February.
Emma:	In their lovely underwear. Exactly. In Maine. Why not?
Lisa:	Into your art gallery.
Emma:	Yeah, it was really great.
Lisa:	Which is really great in no small part because these were women who had a wide range of body shapes, wide range of ages. They didn’t need to be the traditionally-sized women. They were all beautiful because they were all fitted with the absolute right lingerie for them and they all went out there and were completely self-confident.
Emma:	Yeah, which was really great to see and so much of Andrea’s work is around that. It’s about celebrating all ages, all shapes, all sizes, and by celebrating what makes you feel good for yourself and increase that self-confidence. I think that the fashion show piece of it came together in such a really wonderful way, an authentic way, just because it just supported her brand of what she really wants her business to be and also just supports the idea that every body is a work of art. That is important for us to know and believe. Yeah, there was a pregnant woman and people of all … it was just a lot of fun.
	Art, to me, is such an important platform that we have available to us to have conversations about anything that’s relevant in our lives and so we intentionally set up the gallery with different works of art that represented human form. They were in all shapes, sizes, and ages in those sculptures as well. That sort of set the stage. We didn’t need to be in the foreground at that point. We were somewhat in the background, but the gallery, to be able to use as a forum for this type of conversation or this type of programming is really where I love to see the direction to continue to grow.
	Anytime we can get people in the gallery, we want that, obviously. We’re a business. We want to support our artists through our business, but this is another piece of having a space in Portland that can be made available for really important community dialogue.
Lisa:	There’s been a lot of conversation lately around body image in advertising and in the media. There was a big Dove campaign that tried to bring in “normal” or average-size women and there’s been a lot of things about fat shaming and thin shaming. There’s a lot of stuff going on in social media. I think it’s great because it generates conversation, but at the same time, I wonder if the conversation is entirely productive.
Emma:	You hope so. Or does it just draw more attention to those things and so therefore what the next step might be? I asked my daughter, actually the 16-year old daughter in sort of anticipation of this conversation and also along the way because they knew I was planning the event with Andrea, and she said social media is definitely, it used to be magazines and whatnot, but social media is the area where it hurts.
	She’s talked about on Instagram about how girls are watching what models the boys are following and vice verse and it’s not just about the girls worrying about themselves. It’s also these boys who are drinking protein powders and trying to bulk themselves up and become more masculine and more the ideal of whatever the girls are paying attention to on Instagram.
	I don’t know what the answer is except to continue to have that dialogue or to continue to open those doors or to continue having people doing the work like Andrea’s been doing, but it’s important. I’m not sure if I have more to say about that. Social media is just a big, different animal.
Lisa:	It is and it’s an interesting conundrum because I think we have made some strides forward. I believe Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue has a size-16 model on one of the covers.
Emma:	Now Barbie does, too, right?
Lisa:	Barbie has changed her shape. I think that you’re also, and I believe that people who have been traditionally called “plus-sized models” are now asking that they just be called models. I think that there is some movement in that direction, but it’s hard because there is still a lot out there that is basically very thin women who are wearing clothes in a way that most of the rest of us can’t pull off. I wonder about this conversation about how we move this forward because sometimes you draw too much attention to it, it becomes the thing that attracts people rather than educates them. I don’t have answers. That’s why I’m kind of talking out loud with you about this.
Emma:	Yeah, and I’m realizing I don’t really have that answer, either, except for that I think that the dialogue is truly important and it is refreshing that it’s become more of a forefront. Then you wonder if attitudes really, really changed. I could segue into something that’s totally different in terms of the political world right now, but you know I think that it’s really have the attitudes really fundamentally changed? I don’t know. I don’t know, but if we continue to work with our kids to raise confident, not expected to be perfect people, then perhaps that’s the biggest step in the direction.
Lisa:	I think that the art world is actually the perfect place to be having this conversation because artists focus on the things that they feel compelled to focus on and some of them do it because it’s what will sell, but some of them really do it because of their interest in whatever that media is. I’m thinking about Eric Hopkins and pieces he’s been doing lately which are kind of 3-dimensional pieces. I know he’s coming to the art gallery.
Emma:	He’s going be, yeah. He’s going to be coming. April 7 is the opening. Excited.
Lisa:	Yeah. Yes, anybody who’s an Eric Hopkins fan, and I definitely am, you should show up for that art gallery opening. Also, I think to be able to see that there’s such a broad variety. You can love photography as an art. You can love music as an art. You can love the visual arts. To know that those are reflecting something inside of the people who are creating them and that there is such a rainbow of possibilities that exist within humans and also the forms that humans themselves take.
Emma:	I also think, ironically, art is a blank screen. It’s what you project onto it. You could be projecting onto a sculpture of the human form or it could be an Eric Hopkins piece or whatever it might be, but it is something that you can use as a tool or a way of understanding yourself better or engage in conversation with other people about a topic. Art has definitely, through the centuries, it has communicated what the ideal human form has been and it’s changed and it’s evolved at different times. I do fundamentally believe that art has always been able to give us a form or a platform to have conversations and to be able to move forward.
Lisa:	Well, one of the best things about my job in working with 75 Market Street, Love Maine Media, Love Maine magazine, is actually my exposure to art and having been a purely science-oriented person for so many years, to be-
Emma:	There’s a direct link, Lisa.
Lisa:	This is why I love your story because I think we are learning more and more there’s crossover. The brain pathways, there’s not left brain, right brain. There are things that jump back and forth between the hemispheres and that you can start out being a social work major or social work Master’s student at Boston University as you did and then jump to, fast-forward to the current day and be the manager for Art Collector Maine, and it all still makes sense.
Emma:	Yep. There is a path.
Lisa:	To use really whatever form you have. If you are interested in body image and you’re interested in making sure you have healthy young people, then let’s show them that we can have an art show where women of all different sizes, and maybe someday men. We just didn’t happen to have the ones who were volunteering.
Emma:	Chris would have been able to help us with that.
Lisa:	Yes, our MC Chris Kast I’m sure would have jumped in there to be a male model.
Emma:	Once Chris was on board as being the MC, you just really felt as though the event was going to pull together and have its best place. I think that that whole idea around perfection is something that we have so many expectations out of our kids. I love community in which I live, of Yarmouth. I love the school district. I have nothing but respect. I think the teachers understand the pressure that our kids are under better than almost anybody because we get so proud of our scores on US News and World Report, but that’s on the shoulders of our kids and it just drives me crazy.
	I think that to let them know, just stay awake to life, just you don’t have to be perfect all the time, but that’s really, really important for them to know and believe and to help them foster that self-confidence. They’re going to look in the mirror and they’re going to be focused on different things. We all are. We’re human. That doesn’t mean that they need to feel any less loved and so that’s key.
Lisa:	Well, from your lips to their ears. Actually, I’ll broaden that out. Not just to the children, but to know that none of us need to be perfect. There really isn’t any standard of perfection that any of us will ever achieve. I think that people listening to this will understand why it is that we love you so much, Emma.
Emma:	Oh, well, the feeling’s mutual.
Lisa:	I would like to know where they can talk to you or learn more about Art Collector Maine.
Emma:	Absolutely. My email is [email protected]. Our number there is 956-7105 at the Portland Art Gallery. Or we are at 154 Middle Street and we’re getting ready to expand, so come on in and visit. If you’re in Kennebunk, we are right connected to The Grand Hotel.
Lisa:	Excellent. We’ve been speaking with Emma Wilson, who is the Managing Director of Art Collector Maine, who spends a significant amount of time around the Portland Art Gallery and the Gallery at the Grand, so stop on in. Connect with her and enjoy some art. We’ll be continuing to talk to you in the future. Thanks for coming in today.
Emma:	Thank you for having me. It’s wonderful.
Lisa:	You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show #237, Life as Art. Our guests have included Eric Hopkins and Emma Wilson. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our enewsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page.
	Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see my running travel, food, and wellness photos as Bountiful1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week.
	This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Life as Art show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Announcer:	Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of Maine Magazine, Berlin City Honda, Macpage, Boone’s Fish House & Oyster Room, and Apothecary by Design. Audio production and original music have been provided by Spencer Albee. Our editorial producer is Kelly Chase. Our assistant producer is Emily Davis. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our host production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at lovemaineradio.com.
	Here’s an exclusive look at a new song from my forthcoming record, Relentlessly Yours. This is, “Miss You Too”.