Free with admission

Join us for a Sunday Salon featuring artist Linden Frederick in conversation with author Richard Russo on their collaboration, “Downstairs,” a short story paired with Frederick’s painting of the same name, featured in the newly published book, Night Stories: Fifteen Paintings and The Stories They Inspired.

The exhibition, Night Stories, and the accompanying book, have been eight years in the making. When artist Linden Frederick (b. 1953) realized a growing number of his collectors are novelists and screenwriters, he wondered what would happen if the writer-illustrator relationship were reversed: the painting first, then the writing. The result is Night Stories. Fifteen celebrated American fiction writers each agreed to select one painting especially created by Frederick as inspiration and then, over the following months, write a unique story inspired by it.

A native of Amsterdam, New York, Linden Frederick’s paintings are celebrated for their evocative light and atmosphere. Compared favorably to Edward Hopper’s American scene paintings, Frederick’s contemporary works suggest the human presence without depicting it, allowing the viewer to complete the narrative. Frederick has lived and worked in Belfast, Maine since 1989. He has had more than twenty solo exhibitions of his work throughout the United States, including the exhibition You Are Here, held at CMCA in Rockport, in 2010. Night Stories will be on view at CMCA through November 5, 2017.

Richard Russo knows small town America. This masterful novelist has an uncanny sense of the way life works in the gritty industrial towns of the American Northeast. From the gossip and the resentments to the people and the cafes, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Russo chronicles blue-collar America in ways constantly surprising and utterly revealing. Russo’s previous works include seven novels and one collection of short stories. His 2001 novel, Empire Falls, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was also adapted into an HBO mini-series, starring Paul Newman, Ed Harris, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Helen Hunt. His latest book, Elsewhere, came out in 2012. Russo earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s in fine arts, and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. He has two daughters and lives with his wife in Camden, Maine.