UMaine Museum of Art announces book signing with artist Philip Frey

THURSDAY, JUNE 20 
5 - 6:30 PM

Join UMMA in welcoming artist Philip Frey to the Museum for a special book signing event. In the past twenty years, Philip Frey has developed into one of Maine’s finest landscape painters. Known as a brilliant colorist, Frey paints Maine’s harbors and islands with a bold palette that captures the light and moods of his home state, from the streets of Ellsworth and Portland to Monhegan and Acadia National Park.

With an introduction by curator George Kinghorn, and essays by art critics Daniel Kany and Carl Little, Philip Frey: Here and Now presents the first in-depth look at Frey’s body of work. Kinghorn highlights Frey’s remarkable ability to render complex motifs by way of dynamic planes of color, while Kany and Little place the artist in an art-historical context. In response to Frey’s role in Maine’s evolving contemporary art scene, Kany sums it up best: “Frey’s art occupies the nexus between contemporary painting and brushy traditionalism. If there is a focus to this new direction in Maine painting, his art is it.”

This book offers readers thoughtful commentary and a glorious, full-bodied color representation of Frey’s work, much of it created over the last decade. His paintings are imbued with an immediacy that reflects his commitment to being “in the present,” whether responding to a panoramic view from the summit of Cadillac Mountain, a working waterfront, or an intimate interior.

Philip Frey: Here and Now is a gift to aficionados of Maine art. Here is a painter whose sense of place is profound and whose art is a feast for the eyes.