“I like the directness of painting; I like to see an image materialize,” says Gail Spaien on a visit to the studio at her home in South Portland. After three decades of teaching at Maine College of Art and Design, where she was a professor of painting and graduate studio, Spaien retired at the end of 2022. With a recent residency at the prestigious Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, a solo show at Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York and at Taymour Grahne Projects in London, and with a dynamic two-person exhibition with artist Lynne Drexler at Elizabeth Moss Gallery in Falmouth last fall, Spaien has made the most of her new-found time in the studio. Her exquisitely crafted, pattern-rich images take inspiration from her immediate surroundings and domestic life. “Painting is a place,” she says, “a site of exchange between the painter and viewer.” For the past 25 years, Spaien and her family have spent time each summer at the Hadden Cottage on Cliff Island in Casco Bay. Working from observation and memory, the island landscape and the cottage, with its homey furnishings and view of the bay, are a continual source for many of Spaien’s paintings.
SM: Gail, you often combine imagery from the outside world with depictions of interior spaces within the same composition, what do you attribute this interest to?
GS: In the mid-1980s, while pursuing my MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, I lived on The Mudlark, a small houseboat moored in Galilee Harbor in Sausalito. Living on the water in this unique community was transformative; it’s where I learned to sail and what it meant to lead a creative life. The inside-outside nature of my imagery and the notion of the floating cottage were inspired by my years of living, working, and sailing on the water there.
SM: Your paintings are representational, but they are also highly stylized, with strong abstract underpinnings. Can you elaborate on this?
GS: I’m a formalist at heart. I’m interested in the structure of paintings. I literally think of how things are built. As an undergraduate, I studied with artist Juris Ubans at the University of Southern Maine, who told me, “The grid is a meditation.” It’s a sentiment I embraced and have long engaged within my work. I begin each painting with geometry, dividing the picture plane into segments to create a container for an imagined or observed situation to enter. The image evolves through the process; I start right on the canvas with no plan in mind and spend a lot of time moving things around, often erasing huge swaths of the canvas in getting things right.
SM: You’ve spoken of painting as both a verb and a noun. What do you mean by this?
GS: I think a lot about the way a painting functions. This is really at the heart of my practice. A painting is both a thing and an activity. It’s an act that supports solitude, a place to put my mind and to make sense of my experiences. It’s also an object that transmits touch and emotion from one person to another. It is an interface between myself and the person looking at it. My paintings are places, and I approach them as such. As a painter, I turn my back to the external world and enter the world of the painting. I hope a viewer might do that, too. When people say, “I want to go there,” I feel I have hit the mark in some way.
SM: You’ve mentioned your admiration for the work of the 20th-century self-taught artist Morris Hirshfield, with whom you share a love for pattern and decoration, shifts in scale, and maximal opticality. Who are some of the other artists you admire?
GS: I look to artists who celebrate time-intensive work, the quiet of home, and a tradition of craft that speaks to the possibility and wish for a kinder, gentler existence. In terms of art history, this includes early American folk art, American Modernism, the Pattern and Decoration Movement, Japanese Ukiyo-e prints, and the sublime landscape paintings of the Hudson River School. I also admire the work of contemporary romantic painters such as Peter Doig, Laura Owens, Amy Lincoln, Ian Felice, Sophie Treppendahl, Matthew Wong, and Maureen Gallace.
SM: Did you grow up in an artistic family? Did you always know you wanted to be an artist?
GS: I decided I wanted to be an artist in the eleventh grade, partly because I thought it was cool but also because I knew it was something I could do. My mom painted still lifes and did crewel work; she was a maker, and my dad had a darkroom and was a builder, so I grew up with art being embedded in the domestic world, where the arrangements in the home and the objects that were collected were very considered. My interest in painting relates to the domestic and how we order our world.
