It isn’t easy to believe
the sky comes down to the ground
here, not just in the distance
behind the corner store where darkness
bleeds at the edges, but here, to say—
it is sky I’m breathing, as if that
implied heaven as well and perhaps
required something of us, like the effort
my daughter makes with her blue crayon
filling in between flowers, fence posts,
the branches of trees.

—Betsy Sholl, “Learning to Love the Sky” (1986)
Maine Poet Laureate

Karma presents A Particular Kind of Heaven, an exhibition of nearly one-hundred-and-twenty works spanning multiple disciplines by over seventy artists, on view at 70 Main Street, Thomaston, Maine, July 21 through September 1, 2024.

A Particular Kind of Heaven presents a wide array of empyrean imagery by a multigenerational group of artists. Sited in a deconsecrated Catholic church, the exhibition probes connections between the spiritual and the natural, the everyday and the sublime. While the near-universal motif of the sky unites the expansive contributions on view, the representation of this subject morphs and multiplies to span pictorial fealty, surrealist interpretation, lyrical rumination, narrative landscapes, geometric and gestural abstractions, three-dimensional works made of sweetgrass and post-consumer paper, and more. A Particular Kind of Heaven is titled after a 1983 Ed Ruscha text painting that calls attention to the idiosyncratic nature of our visions of the sublime and our projections about and on to the American landscape. The exhibition proceeds from dawn to dusk, following the transformation of the sky over the course of a day.

DAWN

The rising sun casts a hazy yellow glow through a veil of clouds in Yvonne Jacquette’s Grey Sky / Barn Side (1969), painted from observation at the artist’s summer home in Searsmont, Maine. The artist attends to her prosaic subjects—carefully-laid wooden boards, leaves stretching skyward, dawn—with a care that inches beyond realism and into the poetic. The foreglow of a sun not-quite-risen comes through in Jacquette’s subtly golden blues. Dawn is also the temporal setting of Norman Zammitt’s THEOGREY.4 (1988), in which the artist fractures light into horizontal stripes that thicken incrementally as they transition from black to periwinkle to simulate the diffusion of light through the smoggy skies of Los Angeles. Leonora Carrington described dawn as “the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence.” For a moment, all is still. 

MIDDAY

The sun is climbing, and the air is beginning to heat up. Maureen Gallace revisits the landscapes of New England time and time again, here distilling clouded sky, horizon, ocean, sand, rock, into a scene of gesture and muted color. In contrast to her intimate canvas, Nathaniel Oliver’s monumental oil painting Over Here (2024) is a panoramic perspective on a mountainous landscape anchored by a lake whose contours pull the eye from the foreground up and through the horizon. A smoke signal suggests the presence of a figure who needs saving; we can use the remaining daylight to find them. Barkley L. Hendricks took breaks from painting his iconic figurative works each winter from 1983 until the early 2000s, escaping the dreary cold of New London, Connecticut, for the warmth and light of Jamaica, a pilgrimage he described as “following the sun to the Caribbean.” There, he worked en plein air to capture the island’s natural beauty, often finishing his small paintings in a single day. Hendricks’s Calabash Bay (Waterview), Jamaica, W.I. (1997), from his series of gold-framed landscape tondos, is a porthole to a world of sky and saltwater bisected almost symmetrically by an expansive horizon. The religious connotations of its form—tondos first became popular in fifteenth-century Italy as settings for Biblical scenes—honor the spiritual impact Jamaica had on Hendricks. 

DUSK

As the day winds down, the clouds take on an apricot tinge in Dike Blair’s Untitled (2023), a gouache, pencil, and chalk rendering of an early evening sky. The chalk’s carefully smudged edges mimic the misty veils of color that change by the second during this transformative hour. Like all of Blair’s tableaux, which are based on the artist’s diaristic point-and-shoot photographs, Untitled is but a fleeting glimpse of the world’s banal sublimity. A new body of sky paintings by Blair inspired the theme of A Particular Kind of Heaven. Karma’s New York location will open an exhibition of these gouache works this fall. The orange glow in Seth Becker’s small oil Outrunning a Storm (2024) is even more transient. In thickly-applied daubs, he depicts a roiling tempest as it overtakes a majestic sunset, threatening a moment of peace as a kangaroo dashes ahead of the storm. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Maine’s most famous poet, wrote: “Into each life some rain must fall / Some days must be dark and dreary.”

NIGHT

When evening sets in, even the brightest of summer days evaporate. Matthew Wong’s August Sky (2016) braids darkness and light; thick strokes of swirling, wet-on-wet acrylic evoke a terrifying, unpredictable nature that overpowers the human subject. The last vestiges of day reflect on a river traversed by a lone boatman, transforming into hallucinatory orange and purple shards. Alex Katz’s Study for Ocean 10 (2022) captures the light of the moon absent its source as it dances on the surface of the sea; the artist’s gestural white-on-black brushstrokes convey the water’s movement, weight, and transparency. Finally, Gertrude Abercrombie’s Landscape with Church (1939) sets the viewer at a distance, gazing down onto a road that leads to a white church suspiciously similar to the one in which the exhibition is set. A full moon glows auspiciously in the distance. In A Particular Kind of Heaven, the sky reaches beyond landscape and into pure abstraction, into the better-than-real texture of realism, into sculpture, into bending arcs of heavenly light refracting off of and changing the plane of the visible.

Gertrude Abercrombie, Henni Alftan, March Avery, Milton Avery, Seth Becker, Dike Blair, Louise Bourgeois, Katherine Bradford, Joe Bradley, Peter Bradley, Tom Burckhardt, David Byrd, Sean Cavanaugh, Mathew Cerletty, Andrew Cranston, Ann Craven, Verne Dawson, Rafael Delacruz, Nancy Diamond, Jane Dickson, Lois Dodd, Lynne Drexler, Matthew Tully Dugan, Inka Essenhigh, Melanie Essex, Hadi Falapishi, Marley Freeman, Jeremy Frey, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Will Gabaldón, Maureen Gallace, Sanaa Gateja, Robert Gober, Barkley L. Hendricks, Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Ulala Imai, Yvonne Jacquette, Tamo Jugeli, Alex Katz, Zenzaburo Kojima, Hughie Lee-Smith, Jacob Littlejohn, Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, Kathryn Lynch, Calvin Marcus, Keith Mayerson, Richard Mayhew, Donald Moffett, Yu Nishimura, Nathaniel Oliver, Woody De Othello, Nicolas Party, Francis Picabia, Walter Price, James Prosek, Alice Rahon, Ugo Rondinone, Ed Ruscha, Maja Ruznic, Salvo, Trevor Shimizu, Marian Spore Bush, Hirosuke Tasaki, Mungo Thomson, Anh Trần, Tabboo!, Carole Vanderlinden, Nicole Wittenberg, Jonas Wood, Matthew Wong, Randy Wray, Xiao Jiang, Leon Xu, Manoucher Yektai, Joseph Yoakum, Albert York, Norman Zammitt, and Luigi Zuccheri