FEATURED ARTICLES

Downeast Art & Artists Shine In Barridoff Galleries’ Summer Sale

Dahlov Ipcar’s (American, 1917-2017) “Zebra Wood,” 1968, shattered its $6/8,000 estimate to finish at $40,260, an artist auction record. The oil on canvas from a private Maine collection was signed lower right with an artist’s label with title on verso, 24 by 36 inches.

Art Seen: Barridoff’s Auction in a Time of Pandemic

To encourage online bidding, Barridoff increased its buyers premium from 22 percent to 25 percent for live bidders on top of the hammer price...Zebras by beloved artist Dahlov Ipcar, who died in 2017 at the great age of 99, set an auction record for her ($33,000) as did her African nocturne ($25,000). Spontaneous applause broke out when the Ipcars were hammered down.

200 Reasons to Love Maine: #87 The Legacy of Dahlov Ipcar

In a special issue of Down East magazine — 200 Reasons to Love Maine — which is a loving tribute to the sites and sights, the moments and memories, the tastes and smells, the people and peculiarities of the Pine Tree State celebrating Maine’s bicentennial, Dahlov Ipcar's legacy is featured as one of 200 reasons to love Maine: … Ipcar was known for her geometric, wildly colorful renderings of animals — batik-ish canvases jam packed with life — plus more than thirty children’s books she wrote and illustrated.

Behind the Canvas

The Zorachs decorated the house by hand, painting many of the interior rooms with animals and figures. Their daughter, Dahlov Ipcar, painted her own childhood bedroom and helped in the other rooms. Georgetown was a gathering spot for many artists. Photographers Clarence H. White, F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, and Paul Strand worked there, as did Marsden Hartley and Gaston Lachaise. One artist might spend a summer and return the next year with two or three friends. Word of a good thing spread quickly. 

Insight / Incite – Three Arts Educators on Remote Learning – Introduction by Christine Higgins

We started with Dahlov Ipcar’s Maine Alphabet. (A) All Alone, the loon in the water… with Rachel’s assistance, with Dahlov Ipcar, and ending with her Zoom of our visit with Victoria Browning Wyeth, took care of the letters (W) Walls, Winslow and Wyeth, and (Z). Great way to celebrate the Art History of Maine during its 200th Anniversary.

48 Hours in Cape Elizabeth, Scarborough + South Portland

Saturday Afternoon: World-class art and spa bliss — Back at Fort Williams Park is the Rachel Walls Fine Art gallery, a cultural gem currently displaying the work of artists Cabot Lyford, Dahlov Ipcar, and Robert Andrew Parker.

Maine magazine’s Top Gift Picks for the Holidays

Dahlov Ipcar’s Deep Sea Tote and Holiday Animals Bucket Bag by Sea Bags are highlighted by the editors of Maine magazine making it to the top of their holiday gift picks.

Educating an Artist

Dahlov Zorach Ipcar was her parents’ greatest creative experiment. Both practicing artists living in Greenwich Village, NY, Marguerite and William Zorach educated their daughter with a progressive philosophy, encouraging material experimentation and stressing the importance of individual expression. They took her to museums and artist friends’ studios, exposing her from a young age to early-20th-century avant-garde movements like Cubism and Fauvism.

Wild Things

The art world is seeing renewed interest in iconic Maine painter Dahlov Ipcar, whose work hits a range of price points, appraiser John Bottero says. … Since Ipcar’s passing in 2017, collectors have been in pursuit of her works, pushing auction prices into the $20,000 range.

Dahlov Ipcar’s Bug City among Children’s and Young Adult Reissues: Summer 2019

Publishers offer up plenty of reissued books to read against the background hum of cicadas this summer. Read on for familiar books with fresh faces, from a collection of stories originally published in the 19th century. … In this reissue of Dahlov Ipcar’s 1975 picture book, Bug City, the members of a realistically rendered insect family go about their busy day.

7 Great Children’s Books About Art That Just May Inspire the Next Generation of Wee Warhols

Action Jackson — Jackson Pollack might not be the most obvious choice for a children’s book protagonist … the resulting story is vivid and full of great details. I love the wiry frenetic line work of the accompanying illustrations (by Robert Andrew Parker) to capture Pollack’s macho energy.

Dahlov Ipcar's Underwater World

A limited-edition collection from Sea Bags has brought the magical world of Dahlov Ipcar to life on recycled sail cloth totes and accessories. Utilizing illustrations from Ipcar’s classic Deep Sea Farm, the unique collection features a tote, beachcomber bucket and wristlet.

Cabot Lyford Retrospective Shines Light on Late Artist’s Diverse Talents

By all accounts, the late New Harbor sculptor Cabot Lyford was a formidable man, both in his tenacious approach to life and in his favored choice of medium – hard, unforgiving stone.

Garnet Hill: Storybook Styles with Illustrations by Dahlov Ipcar

We’re thrilled to introduce a new collection of kids’ styles illustrated with the colorful designs of artist and author Dahlov Ipcar. … As admirers of her work, we’re so excited to feature it in our new Storybook collection for girls. Find these and two of Ipcar’s most famous children’s stories, I Like Animals and The Cat at Night, in the spring kids’ collection.

The Vision and Art Project Helps Artists with Sight Loss Fulfill Their Vision

Georgia O’Keeffe, Edgar Degas, and Titian were all luminaries in their respective eras of art history, but there’s another commonality among the trio: Experts believe all three had macular degeneration, a condition in the retina marked by a loss or blurring of vision. 

The Book Corner

Dahlov Ipcar, Blue Moons and Menageries is a book and art catalogue. Hard cover and just published, it is the lasting record of a major exhibit held at Bates College during the summer of 2018. It is a collector’s item in the art world because it preserves the works of Dahlov Ipcar, Maine’s beloved artist, in an exhibit which includes all the media she worked in.

Cabot Lyford: War, Whales, Whimsy, Wings, Women and Workings

When Cabot Lyford died in January 2016 at age 90, he left behind a remarkable legacy of sculpture, primarily in stone and wood … The wonderfully alliterative Cabot Lyford: War, Whales, Whimsy, Wings, Women and Workings provides the fullest picture of the artist’s creative enterprise to date.

Macular degeneration doesn't stop artist, 91

Now showing at Rachel Walls Fine Art in Cape Elizabeth is the work of Robert Andrew Parker which includes 125 oil paintings, watercolors, pen-and-ink drawings, stand-up cutouts, fascinating model planes, prints, and small portraits. The exhibit, titled Robert Andrew Parker: Artist, Musician, Poet …

Into the Wild: The Bates College Museum of Art’s Dahlov Ipcar show features the best of the artist’s long career

A year after the passing of artist Dahlov Ipcar, the Bates College Museum of Art is exhibiting her work throughout the summer and early fall. The show, Dahlov Ipcar: Blue Moons and Menageries, will feature works spanning the mid-1960s to 2014.

Art review: Ipcar’s distinctive work a blend of logic and fantasy

The show at Bates College Museum of Art includes some pieces that haven't been publicly displayed before.

Dahlov Ipcar’s Impact

We know of Dahlov Ipcar, the amazing artist and her contributions as a children’s book author and illustrator but this story tells much more about Ipcar’s relationship with others.

Ipcar exhibit at Bates is 'spectacular'

Once in a blue moon you see an exhibit that is spectacular; Dahlov Ipcar: Blue Moons and Menageries is that exhibit.

Blue Moons: Bates and Walls ’99 Arrange a Visit with Ipcar

Rachel Walls ’99 was 8 years old when she first met Dahlov Ipcar, one of Maine’s best-known and most-loved artists. Ipcar, known for her children’s books as well as her work in other media, came to Walls’ classroom in Cape Elizabeth through an artist-in-residence program in Maine schools.

Dahlov Ipcar: Blue Moons and Menageries

Just a year ago, Sara Torres had never heard of Dahlov Ipcar. An education researcher at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Torres was deep in the archives, researching MoMA’s revolutionary first director of education, Victor D’Amico. Among D’Amico’s myriad achievements, he is noted as the curator for the museum’s first solo exhibition of a woman artist in 1939. The exhibition was Creative Growth, Childhood to Maturity, and the artist was Dahlov Ipcar, just 21.

Blue Moons & Menageries at Bates museum

In the summer exhibition Dahlov Ipcar: Blue Moons & Menageries, the Bates College Museum of Art presents a wide array of artworks — many of them being exhibited publicly for the first time — by one of Maine’s best-known artists.

Artists Who Lose Their Vision, Then See Clearly

Pablo Picasso probably wasn’t thinking about macular degeneration when he remarked: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist as we grow up.”

How Artists Fight Vision Loss and Continue to Make New Work

In 1964, Georgia O’Keeffe was driving from her home in New Mexico when she sensed something strange. As her biographer Jeffrey Hogrefe wrote, the artist later said she felt “as if a cloud had entered her eyeballs.” This obstruction was one of the first clues that O’Keeffe’s sight was fading. Eight years later, she was diagnosed with macular degeneration, a medical condition that damages the macula—a small part of the eye central to the retina—leading to loss of central vision.

The Persistence of Vision: Early and Late Works by Artists with Macular Degeneration

The Persistence of Vision: Early and Late Works by Artists with Macular Degeneration is an exhibition that explores the versatile, inventive, and personal ways artists respond to the challenge of working with the loss of sight.

Last Battles: The Persistence of Vision at DAAP’s Meyers Gallery

Gallery exhibits often feature artists at a specific stage of their career, a period marked by consistent subjects or stylistic choices. Some shows take a more contrastive approach, capturing the creative process at distinct moments and inviting audiences to consider the evolution of perspective, tonality, and preferred media. Less common, however, are shows that feature multiple artists adapting their practices to changes in their own bodies over a lifetime.

Art is on the House!

The myth of a disappearing house, the discovery of one that still exists and the challenge of one that will hopefully exist one day in the future.

48 Hours in Cape Elizabeth, South Portland + Scarborough

Sunday Morning: Art and lighthouses — Our final destination is Rachel Walls Fine Art, a gallery housed in the former bachelor officers’ quarters at Fort Williams Park. Cape Elizabeth native Rachel Walls gives us a tour of Dahlov Ipcar’s Century, an exhibition showing some of the famous Maine artist’s lesser-known works, including soft sculpture and needlepoint. Walls’s friendship with Ipcar, who died in February 2017, makes the experience fascinating.

Dahlov Ipcar’s Enchanted World: Remembering the Artist on the First Anniversary of Her Passing

Dahlov Ipcar passed away last February at the age of 99. For eight decades, she lived at the end of a dirt road in the town of Robinhood on Maine’s Georgetown Peninsula. When, in 2015, I arrived to interview her in her neatly kept white farmhouse, it was as if Maine had given way to a sort of enchanted world: a low-ceilinged house with sloping floors and the colors and textures of patterned textiles and wallpaper, paintings, marionettes, sculptures, cloth figurines.

A deeper look at Dahlov Ipcar: Works by the iconic Maine artist are on display at Fort Williams Park

Rachel Walls’ gallery space at Fort Williams is an ideal space to see Ipcar’s work. It’s an authentic Maine place, mired in history and the tough-nut truth of the fortressed coast. (Fortress ruins, after all, are places where the imaginations of young people run wild.) Walls’ sense of place and history, as well, is handled with a quiet sense of time that fits the ephemeral flashes of Ipcar’s work …

The other outstanding art shows of 2017: Maine's art scene provided more than enough to write about this year

A related bright point is the new gallery Rachel Walls Fine Art in Cape Elizabeth. Walls specializes in Marguerite Zorach’s daughter, Dahlov Ipcar.

Teaching as an Art Form: Discovering Stories of Learning at The Museum of Modern Art

  … Take, for example, Dahlov Ipcar, the first woman (and, at the time, the youngest person) to have a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition, curated by Victor D’Amico and Ipcar’s father, the artist William Zorach, opened in 1939 in the Young People’s Gallery.

Sharing the story of the wondrous and much-loved Dahlov Ipcar

Two Maine authors who knew Dahlov Ipcar and wrote about her life and work will speak about the artist during upcoming talks at the Portland Public Library, where an exhibition of Ipcar’s illustrations for children’s books is on view through Dec. 23 in the Lewis Gallery.

Ipcar exhibit opens children's eyes to fine art

“A child raised without art is as surely deprived as a child raised without love,” the renowned Maine artist and children’s book author Dahlov Ipcar has said, how she felt about the importance of creativity in a child’s life.

More fall visual arts: Zorach-Ipcar

The year of Zorach-Ipcar continues into the fall, with exhibitions by Dahlov Ipcar in Cape Elizabeth, her mother, Marguerite Zorach, in Rockland and her father, William Zorach, at the Portland Museum of Art. Ipcar died at age 99 in February. Rachel Walls Fine Art at Fort Williams in Cape Elizabeth is showing Dahlov Ipcar’s Century, with a range of material …

Fort Williams Park to Show Dahlov Ipcar collection

One hundred works from the late Dahlov Ipcar’s personal collection will be on view for the public in a magnificent exhibit which opens Saturday, July 29, in an exciting new exhibition space on the grounds of Fort Williams Park.

An Interview with Robert Andrew Parker

This interview was compiled from two recorded audio conversations with Robert Andrew Parker at his studio in West Cornwall, Connecticut. A’Dora Phillips and Brian Schumacher conducted the first interview in August 2014 and the second in July 2015.

Robert Andrew Parker Turns 90: A Life of Talent, Lucky Breaks, Music, & Play

The American Artist Robert Andrew Parker turned 90 this week. He feels like he is 180 or 190 years old, he says. But he seems miraculously ageless when he talks, paints, or riffs on drums. Parker is a painter and printmaker who still goes to his studio every day, a drummer who still plays gigs every Saturday night, and a committed pacifist who maintains a lively interest in politics and culture. 

Remembering Dahlov Ipcar: children’s book illustrator and artist

American illustrator Ipcar, who created colourful, animal-based picture books for children, has died at the age of 99. We look back at her career.

Dahlov Ipcar's seven decades in children's books - in pictures

Celebrated for her ‘non-intellectual cubist’ takes on wildlife and nature, the illustrator died last week, aged 99. Here are some highlights from a singular career.

Beloved Maine painter Dahlov Ipcar dies at age 99

The Georgetown resident was nationally renowned for her distinctly colorful paintings and children's books.

Maine sculptor Cabot Lyford dies at 90

His sculptures are in museums, schools, parks and public places across the country. Maine sculptor Cabot, a deeply private artist known for his elegant renderings of the female figure and all forms of wildlife in granite and wood, died Thursday at a hospice in Brunswick. He was 90.

The Museum of Modern Art featured Dahlov Zorach Ipcar as the first solo show devoted to a female artist

Opened in 1939 in a gallery focused on education, the show was called Creative Growth, Childhood to Maturity and featured work made from the age of 3 to the age of 22 by Dahlov Zorach Ipcar.

Tea for Two: Cabot Lyford: Maker of Things That Last Forever

You probably don’t know him, but you probably know his work. Have at least seen it. May have touched it. Quite possibly have photographed your child climbing on it.

Dahlov Ipcar, Visual Artist

Dahlov Ipcar is one of Maine’s most prolific painters, illustrators and children’s book authors. The artist has spent the bulk of her career painting out of her home in Georgetown, and at the age of 98 (she turns 99 in November) she muses over what it has meant to be a woman artist over the course of the past century.

Art Review: Dahlov Ipcar: New paintings and new perspectives

Frost Gully Gallery in Freeport, which has shown the painter's work for nearly five decades, features more than 50 works, including three made in 2015, when she painted with macular degeneration, that continue to demonstrate her brilliance.

Dahlov Ipcar opens exhibition of new work at Frost Gully Gallery on Nov. 16

The artist, who turns 98 this week, is exploring new ways to express herself with recent vision loss.

Exhibit spotlights the Boston School of painting

An exhibition organized by independent curator Rachel Walls at Samson brings [Marguerite Zorach's and William Zorach's] work together with paintings by their daughter, Dahlov Ipcar, a noted painter and children’s book author and illustrator.

New York Times' Book Review: Dahlov Ipcar’s Black and White, and More

Black and White was first published in 1963, the year of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and Ipcar has acknowledged her wish that her story might be read, in part, as an appeal for racial equality.

Marguerite Zorach, Dahlov Ipcar, & William Zorach

Samsøñ is proud to present an historic exhibition of works by the family of artists Marguerite Zorach, Dahlov Ipcar, & William Zorach, together in an exhibition for the 1st time.

Dahlov Ipcar: A Maine Treasure

As recently as five years ago, when children’s author and illustrator Dahlov Ipcar (b. 1917) received the New England Independent Booksellers Association President’s Award for her body of work, some in the audience asked, “Dahlov who?”

Dahlov Ipcar: 'I think painting keeps me alive'

Newly republished children’s classics by the American artist Dahlov Ipcar capture the spirit of our age.

Dahlov Ipcar: The Prismatic Dimension

On the occasion of Samsøn Projects of Boston honoring the work of Dahlov Ipcar and that of her parents, Marguerite and William Zorach, we talked with the artist about her career, her recent loss of sight, and her attempts to adapt painting practices.

Robert Andrew Parker: A Studio Visit

In July of this year, as part of the Century Masters exhibition series, The Century Association in New York displayed a rich assortment of works by the esteemed artist and illustrator Robert Andrew Parker. Now 87 years old, Parker’s unique talent was recognized early in his career by poet Marianne Moore, who placed him in the company of some of history’s most storied master painters …

Robert Andrew Parker

They say that everything happens for a reason. In Robert Parker’s case, if he hadn’t come down with tuberculosis as a child, he might never have become a painter. And what a terrible loss that would have been.

Double Take: An exhibition at the Ober Gallery in Kent features the work of a father and son—Robert Andrew Parker and Geoffrey Parker

It’s always interesting to meet a member of a close friend’s immediate family. The sources of personality traits, familiar gestures, or what one thought was a unique laugh are immediately revealed. The friend suddenly assumes a more expansive presence, as though the person you knew now somehow exists in both the present and the past.

Robert Andrew Parker on Life and Illustration

We see deeply disturbing images in dark, murky colors: guns pointing at heads, children strung up by their feet, abandoned eyeglasses lying twisted in a void. Eventually, we come to a factory billowing smoke: the crematorium at Auschwitz. They’re from a series of 20 hand-colored etchings, titled German Humor. And they’re by Robert Andrew Parker, one of the masters of late-20th century illustration.

Jazz and Art Fuel Robert Andrew Parker

Art and jazz have been two long-running passions in the life of Robert Andrew Parker, the 84-year-old artist, illustrator, writer and globe-trotting West Cornwall resident, a witty water colorist of national renown and a professional jazz drummer of solid repute in the Northwest Corner of the state.