When one considers the recent work of three of Maine’s most-respected artists—Brenda Bettinson, Beverly Hallam, and Dahlov Ipcar—one is tempted to correlate making art with staying young. Certainly the process is considered therapeutic (many studies confirm this), and each one of these women (eighty, eighty-six, and ninety-two years of age, respectively) would agree that they live to create. What sets them apart, however, is the clarity and freshness of their vision: they are currently producing work that represents both new horizons and a continuum of their independent creative spirits.

Working in semi-seclusion on Barters Island, Bettinson is in the throes of producing a powerful body of work that reflects on war and its players. In her studio in York, Hallam, a pioneer in acrylic and a master of monotype and airbrush, employs a computer to compose stunning abstract-geometric designs. And Ipcar, who resides in the homestead on Georgetown Island where her pioneer modernist artist-parents, William and Marguerite Zorach, moved in the 1920s, visits the studio nearly every day to set in motion her marvelous menageries.

Within the span of thirty years celebrated in this anniversary issue, these three artists have contributed to the rich aesthetic weave that is New England art. At the same time, they serve as exemplars of the committed artist.

Born in England, Brenda Bettinson came to the United States in 1960, eventually landing a teaching position at Pace University. Retiring in 1989, Bettinson moved permanently to her spruce-clad aerie not far from Boothbay Harbor in mid-coast Maine. She soon found herself responding to her surroundings, enamored of the working waterfront as well as heavy machinery (one of her shows was titled Backhoe Museum). Her work gained critical notice as she sought to reinvent the coastal motif, using cubist-like means to capture the passage of time and a multiplicity of perspectives.

Two years ago, during a hiatus caused by a health problem, Bettinson had the time, in her words, “to brood over the ruthlessness, corruption, and cruelty so common in the world of power today.” Returning to the studio she began a series of large heads, visages of archetypal individuals (such as the inside trader), some of which represent the ills of modern society.

As she developed these figures, the “shadow and horror” of contemporary wars, particularly those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Gaza Strip, came to dominate Bettinson’s thoughts. Looking for an iconic conflict that might serve to channel this contemporary despair, she turned to the Trojan War. “Everything can be found there,” she has written, “the trivial act that legitimizes the war, the young warriors, the psychopaths, the leaders, the victims, the desolate children, and violated women and, of course, the bodies and the body parts.”

As portrayed by Bettinson, Priam, the King of Troy, shows the ruin of ten years of hostility, of family slain and brutalized, of a kingdom pillaged. Like statuary left to the elements, his face is cracked and worn. By contrast, Three Goddesses offers an unsettling yet becoming composite visage of the immortal women—Venus, Juno, and Minerva—who were judged by Paris. Their lips are rouged, an earring dangles.

Bettinson ties the surface treatment—pigment piled up, swaths of color and tone applied in a gestural manner—to conveying images of ruthless power as well as the physical and psychological deterioration of the subject of the portrait. When these heads were displayed at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art this past summer, the center’s curator, Britta Konau, noted how their “rawness of execution, sense of urgency, and larger-than-life size provoke immediate, visceral reactions and prevent us from escaping into pure aesthetic experience.”

Around the same time Bettinson was arriving in New York City, Beverly Hallam was nearing the end of a ten-year tenure at the Massachusetts College of Art (while there, she introduced photography, audiovisual aids, and theater arts to the curriculum). She was also making some of the first paintings by an American artist in a medium called polyvinyl acetate, now known as acrylic. She later explored monotype and then took up airbrush, which she employed to paint her acclaimed, large-scale flower paintings of the 1980s.

A pioneer who has always managed to blend ingenuity with aesthetics, some eight years ago Hallam began exploring various design software programs, developing a repertoire of shapes that she arranged in abstract configurations. She has had two solo shows of the resulting digital prints, and an entire gallery at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art was devoted to these graphics during her retrospective this past fall.

Hallam has always been comfortable working in abstraction; many of her acrylics and monotypes are nonrepresentational and even her floral images have an essential abstract quality to them. The computer-produced pieces range from configurations of floating geometric forms, often symmetrically arranged, to such dynamic compositions as Rotterdam Cube Bouquet, which explode across the page.

Just as she had with her acrylic and monotype techniques, Hallam has gone out of her way to share her computer design discoveries with fellow artists. This sharing of resources will also be a part of the artist’s legacy: with her friend Mary-Leigh Smart, Hallam has established the Surf Point Foundation, which after their deaths will oversee artist residencies at their oceanfront property in York. (The place has already served in this capacity, as the home of the renowned poet, novelist and memoirist May Sarton for the last twenty-two years of her life.)

Dahlov Ipcar’s first solo show was at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 when she was twenty-one. Her first children's book assignment was to illustrate Margaret Wise Brown's classic The Little Fisherman, published in 1945. By the early 1960s, Ipcar had established herself as a well-known painter and book illustrator, yet in the decades that followed she fully came into her own, developing into an acclaimed animalier, an artist of animals.

Ipcar’s oeuvre followed several rich routes. She created remarkable soft sculptures, animated freestanding figures and animals covered in colorful decorative cloth. A book project in 1965 entitled Calico Jungle led her to more fully explore patterns in her paintings. She let her fancy take over, creating singular ecosystems inhabited by all manner of flora and fauna.

An exhibition of new work this past November at the Frost Gully Gallery in Freeport, Maine, offered evidence of an artist in full stride. In addition to painting variations on some of her favorite creatures, such as the leopard, she tackled species new to her, including the caribou, which once roamed the Northeast. The antlered creature leaps across the off-kilter canvas, harried by a pack of wolves. As she has done in other canvases, Ipcar hints at Tennyson's “nature red in tooth and claw” without including the graphic details.

On occasion over the years, the painter has expressed an aversion to overtly political art, yet she herself has an agenda, as it were, celebrating the natural world in the face of global warming, war, and rampant poverty. By embracing the freedom of wild birds and beasts, Ipcar makes her own statement about the state of the planet.

There are many other “experienced” artists in Maine displaying amazing verve in their work. Many of them happen to be women. One thinks of Lois Dodd, eighty-two, who, over the past decade, has resuscitated the nude as subject with her delightful women working outdoors series; Nancy Wissemann-Widrig, eighty, maker of mesmerizing water pictures; and Anne Ayvaliotis, eighty-four, whose abstractions continue to further the vision of her teacher Hans Hofmann.

Many a Maine artist will tell you the state is a great place to accomplish work. With few (or at least fewer) distractions, surrounded by landscape that is a kind of tonic, artists can follow their muse in a setting where art trends are largely forgotten. Left to their own devices, Bettinson, Hallam, Ipcar, and company proceed on their own unconditional terms, breaking new ground at every turn.

Carl Little’s first review for Art New England, of a show of Robert Eshoo watercolors at the Currier Gallery of Art, appeared in the January 1987 issue.