Gail Spaien & Lynne Drexler: Light in Every Room
Light in Every Room presents a selection of domestic interiors, still lifes, and landscape paintings by Gail Spaien and Lynne Drexler. Scenes of everyday life have been a source of inspiration for generations of artists. Historically, artists such as the Ukiyo-e painters, the Impressionists, and many early American Modernist painters captured the fleeting nature of an ordinary moment — light streaming through a window, a view of a regional landscape, a bouquet of garden flowers on a tabletop. Intimism, a movement from the late 19th and early 20th century, demonstrated the intense exploration of domestic space, often focusing on mundane, overlooked domestic scenes, and forgoing some aspects of formal representation in favor of mood and, as the name of the movement suggests, intimacy. Infusing time and care into each mark, both painters use their distinctive palettes and approaches to painting to imbue images of quotidian moments with emotion.
Though a generation apart, both Drexler and Spaien follow in a lineage of painters who draw inspiration from Maine’s natural landscape and coastal life, reflecting on how life in Maine often invites the outside inside. Where inside and outside meet within the work can be interpreted both as a felt connection to a physical, natural place and to an internal, emotional space. This relationship between the interior and exterior forms a threshold for viewers and artists alike to pause and contemplate – to acknowledge beauty within one’s surroundings, and the poignant and poetic within one’s life experiences. The pairing of Drexler and Spaien illuminates painting as a place for the poetic. Light in Every Room offers this simple reminder: to lend time to the poetic, connecting us to what is essential in life; images of quiet, ordinary, timeless moments that reflect and help to build a more empathetic world.
