Painting Fabric Patterns in Portland
Alice Spencer's Fabricating Time
by Edgar Allen Beem
March 2009
From the fabric of life
A common thread weaves through Alice Spencer's new exhibit at the UNE Art Gallery.
By BOB KEYES, Staff Writer
November 9, 2008
"The power of [Alice Spencer's] work[s] took my breath away. They are bold, emotional and
political."
- Phillip Isaacson, Maine Sunday Telegram
"The textiles are woven by the caring hands of people with strong textile traditions who take pride in their work. Their stories, embedded in the threads, are heard by the artist and retold through her paintings."
- Lynn Felsher, curator of textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York
"The paintings recapitulate the lattice of interlocking awareness that we use to approach
any event or object that we intend to understand or at least relate to. Meaning is often
an issue of putting what we discover into our preconceptions and letting the new
information form a fresh matrix from which we look again at the world. It is how art
changes us in great or small ways. We do that with Spencer’s paintings and it is what
they are about as well."
- Ken Greenleaf, Maine Sunday Telegram
". . . Spencer has discovered an amazing and beautiful landscape. These images seem
like quiet reminders of the importance of the interior and its connection to the exterior.
She teaches us through her own awareness and introspection that art can stimulate
healing energies."
- Karen Kitchen, Director, University of Maine at Farmington Art Gallery
"[There is] a notion that printmaking entails a complex negotiation between technical
skill and conceptual aims, strategy and surprise, each feeding into the other, pushing the
other into new territories that, if the work succeeds, results in a print that records the
rich history of its constructions. The two prints in Spencer's Lakestone Series give shape
to just such a visual history."
- Chris Thompson, The Portland Phoenix