Press in Maine responds to the exhibition Alison Rector: Silkscreen Season on a Maine Farm, presented by Courthouse Gallery Fine Art in May 2025.
The Portland Press Herald writes “Rector's silkscreened chronicle of her homesteading in Maine after moving here in 1990 consists of graphic, colorful and appealingly straightforward scenes of ice fishing, milking cows, splitting wood, beekeeping, etc.”
The Midcoast Villager headlines “35 Years on a Maine Farm” by Willy Blackmore:
“Alison Rector has a familiar story about why she moved to Maine: She and her husband moved to Monroe in 1990, drawn to the Midcoast by the promise of the Good Life as popularized by the Nearings and generations of back-to-the-landers who followed them.
In addition to learning to farm, Rector quickly began a tradition of making one silkscreen print inspired by the year after arriving in Monroe, giving out copies to family and friends around the holidays. While the couple have dabbled in all kinds of gardening and animal husbandry and other homesteading endeavors over the years, trying this and that on for size, the silkscreen habit stuck. In addition to the annual card-like images she printed every winter, Rector started to make some larger prints, too. Now, her entire collection of silkscreens is being shown together for the first time in the exhibition “Alison Rector: Silkscreen Season on a Maine Farm” at the Courthouse Gallery in Ellsworth.
Today, Rector has studios in both Portland and Monroe, where she continues to make prints and paintings, too. The Courthouse show features 43 screenprints made over the last 35 years, depicting various scenes of farm and Maine life — butterflies and beehives and perfectly blue robin eggs tucked into a nest. Screen printing is one of the more commercial of fine-art printmaking processes (it’s how most graphic T-shirts are made) and it can be a very photographic medium, capable of producing full-color, photorealistic images. But Rector’s prints are more painterly than you often see in a screenprint, and it’s a style that’s well-matched to her subject(s).
“Alison Rector: Silkscreen Season on a Maine Farm” is on display at the Courthouse Gallery in Ellsworth, through May 28, 2025.”
