A dozen years ago we sold 90 paintings in 3 hours in downtown Bangor, Maine, in a show called TEN: 10 artists with 10 pieces each, all 10 x 10, all for the same amount of money, whether you were an artist who normally sold pieces for thousands. We’re doing it again. This year it’s $210.

FUN, REFRESHMENTS, FABULOUS ARTWORK. A PERCENTAGE OF EACH SALE supports the BANGOR PUBLIC LIBRARY and OUR LOCAL BOOKSELLER, BRIAR PATCH. All work is being made in response to some kind of literary inspiration. The list is long and varied and surprising.

The artwork on the TEN poster is Siddhartha at Mount Desert Island by JOHN LeBLANC. And above, Call of the Wild view from Cadillac Mountain, made in response to Jack London’s classic. Represented by Elements Gallery (Portland and Rockland, Maine) and the Offerings Gallery (Katonah, New York), among others, he attended the Art Students League of New York City on a merit scholarship and is a juried member of the Pastel Society of America. The recipient of many awards, his work is in the collection of the Zillman Art Museum. For TEN, he’s painted oil portraits of ten men inspired by titles of famous works of literature, including Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Other 10 x 10s are Far from the Madding Crowd beneath Old Orchard Pier, from the Thomas Hardy novel, and Sitting among Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman).

DEBORAH JELLISON is a mixed media artist. Her work most often references the natural environment—patterns created by barren trees against the sky, textures of plants, shadows on the forest floor. She’s making work in response to her daughter Summer J. Hart’s poetry collection, Boomhouse, published in 2023. She earned a BFA in Art Education from the University of Maine and an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

DIANA YOUNG’s paintings are known throughout the state. Colorful and dynamic, they tell stories of place and time almost always through structure. She prefers dynamic interlocking shapes to bring us into her space. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, she has been drawing, painting, and living in Bangor for decades. Over the years, she’s found The New Yorker and its drawings a literary inspiration.

JOANNE HOULSEN is an oil painter focusing primarily on landscape and coastal work. She’s worked as a professional artist in central Maine for more than 30 years, with work in private and public collections nationally. Affiliated over the years with a number of cooperative galleries, she maintains a downtown Bangor studio. For the TEN exhibit/sale, she’s made work in response to the novel Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.

LINDA PACKARD holds a BA in Studio Art from Smith College with a concentration in drawing and printmaking. She has a full-time oil painting practice, employing a variety of mark-making tools and different surfaces. Her 2024 solo shows include Courthouse Gallery Fine Art, Ellsworth, and Zillman Art Museum, Bangor. The recipient of a Heliker-LaHotan Fellowship, Great Cranberry Island, Maine, and Artist-in-Residence at Weir Farm National Historic Site, Wilton, Conn., she lives and works in downtown Bangor. All of her TEN paintings are made in response to Louise Dickinson Rich’s 1942 classic We Took to the Woods.

JEAN DEIGHAN grew up in the home of collectors with professional artists on both sides of her family. When she retired in 2020, she picked up a brush in earnest. She’s grateful to many artists with whom she’s studied as well as to the University of Maine where she’s had the opportunity to take studio art courses. A lifelong sailor, she often paints her favorite places, especially the cozy anchorages and verdant hikes of Penobscot Bay. The literary works of both poet Mary Oliver and children’s picture book writer Robert McCloskey come together to feed her vision of home.

ANNALIESE JAKIMIDES is a writer and mixed media artist who grew up in inner-city Boston and raised a family on 40+ acres on a dirt road in northern Maine, growing almost all their food and pumping water by hand. Cited in national competitions, her prose and poetry appear in many magazines and anthologies, are included in audiobooks, and have been broadcast on NPR. Her visual work is in private collections in the U.S. and Europe. Published in journals, her artwork is also on the cover of the award-winning poetry book Body of Evidence by Kathleen Ellis. A cowriter of the musical Love Affair, she is currently at work on a novel in poems, a musical, and a memoir. For this project she made work to books published in 2024, including, here, The Union of Synchronized Swimmers by Cristina Sandu.

DAVID HASKINS is a lifelong artist who began studying art as a child in New Mexico. With a master of fine arts from Colorado State University, he has taught painting in Colorado and Maine, most recently at Husson University. All of his work for this event is mixed media inspired by Birds & Blooms.

JUNE GREY is a landscape painter who finds daily inspiration in Maine’s natural beauty. Although she uses photography for reference, she relies on her memory and feelings of the experience to shape her paintings. Intrigued by the rules for miniature paintings, decades ago she began exhibiting, and placing, nationally and internationally, through the Miniature Painters, Sculptors & Gravers Society. She lives in a house full of books in Enfield.

Kristbjorg Whitney was born and raised in Iceland. She currently lives and works in Orono. The east coast of Iceland, specifically Eskifjordur, is the foundation of her orientation and her art. All her formative years were shaped by that community—with many similarities to Maine, where she has lived for decades. A graduate of Reykjavik School of Arts and Crafts, she has exhibited work in Iceland and along the East Coast of the United States. Her work is in private collections in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, Canada, and the United States. Her work, including for TEN, is informed by The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art, & Architecture by Gyorgy Doczi.

Love Affair: a new musical