The Artistic Journey of Maine Artist Jane Dahmen

Today I have with me in the studio artist Jane Dahmen. And the reason that this is important is that you are one of our earliest radio main guests at the beginning or height of the Covid Pandemic. And you joined us remotely, so I did from New Castle number four. Yes. And so I'm so thrilled to have you here today. Well, I'm thrilled to be here. What a, what a great place you have here. And I went across two bridges. I didn't realize you were so far out. I, you know, you go into these towns and you think you know them and you don't know them at all. But anyway, I love where you are. Yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of nooks and crannies to the coast of Just like sailing down all these little inlets, when you drive down all these little places, you find all these hidden gems. Mm-hmm. . And you're in one. Yes, we are. Yeah. No, I mean, I grew up in Yarmouth and even though Yarmouth is the town that we currently are in Yarmouth is attached to Cousins Island by a bridge, which is attached to Littlejohn, which is where we live by a causeway. And it's, it's a very different part of the town. So I didn't even know Littlejohn that much when I was growing up. Oh, Really? Yeah. It's beautiful. And I went over the little bridge to Littlejohn in all the rocks. The, yeah. The tide is low. Little causeway. It's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Really pretty. Yeah. Yeah. I'm fortunate I get to run over that every day. Mm. And drive to bed. So it's it's a pretty nice place to live. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And there's lots of fields and farms coming down here. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. We're pretty fortunate. It must be why people like to live in Maine , or, or visit Maine anyway. But you're not originally from Maine? No. My mother lived in Augusta all her life. But no, I went to Colby College. That's how I, well, and my husband and I loved to sail, and we came up and kept a boat at Round Pond and sailed two or three days a weekend while the kids were growing up. So we spent a lot of time in Maine. My sister lived here, so if the kids didn't wanna go sailing, they went and stayed with her and their cousins. And we let our, we let them use the boat during the week when we weren't here. So it was a good deal. Well, I don't think I knew about the Augusta connection with your mother. She went to Coney High School. I'm not sure it was Cony High School in those days. It was a long time ago. But my uncle was the the head of Cony High School. He was the principal there. And all my cousins went there. And that was her sister. So how did she meet your father? She met him in Marblehead at a card game, that's all I know. After college. She went to Wheaton College, then transferred to Colby College, missed Maine, and he went to Bowdoin. And they had some connection, the Maine connection. And they lived in Massachusetts when I was growing up. So your family has the, the entire small Maine Liberal Arts College connection. Connection, yeah. You've got, you've got them all covered. Right. I mean, father wanted me to go to Boden in the worst way, but women were not allowed then . So I did the next best thing he thought, which was to go to Colby. Let you do That? He did. I didn't marry anyone from Boden, though. Oh, okay. Joe went to m i t. Oh boy. . Well, I mean, it, it is interesting because Jean I interviewed Joan Benoit Samuelsson, and she was from, I believe, the inaugural class of women. Oh. She was admitted. Oh, interesting. Or, or soon thereafter. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. But it's so it wasn't that long ago that women were not on campus at all. It's true. So the fact that you actually had to choose a different college entirely because it just wasn't even a possibility is Interesting. Well, mine, this was way back before Joan Samuelsson. Yeah. When is, when can I see that interview? Oh, well that was, that was a different interview for a different, for a publication. Oh, okay. That was many years ago. Oh. But I could probably find it and send it to you. Yeah, I'd To read it. Yeah. But speaking of interviews, mm. You actually have your own, you and I were kind of joking about this, that usually you like to be the one doing the interviewing. Right. , because you, you've actually done quite a bit of interviewing particularly of artists over the Years. I have. Yeah. I did it for seven years at the Lincoln Theater in Damariscota. I loved doing it 'cause I majored in art history. And so I like reading about artists. I like meeting them. I'm a little bit shy about meeting them in a group in a gallery, but when I can interview them, boy, that is fun. So I, I do my homework and I read up on 'em. I'm not doing it anymore because after Covid, we stopped doing it for a while. We took a break and I thought, gee, I really like having all this time to paint. So I'm not doing it. But I did love it. And I met, I met some incredible people. What are some of the surprising things you learned about some of these people that you interviewed? Surprising things. Well, that they're all human. They're all quite modest. They're all, except maybe for Alex Katz, who has tremendous strength of of what he likes and what, and in a, not in a bad way at all. He's just very he, he'll never give in. You know, he, he, he did work that nobody liked after he graduated from Cooper Union. And he kept at it, even though he was poor. He was take, he was giving up awards and so forth. But it meant so much to him to do what he felt in here. And I, I value that a lot when I heard it. but there were many fun things we learned about them. All quite different. Everybody's unique. Everybody. Lois Dodd really impressed me 'cause she was in her eighties and she drove down herself, , and came in. She's so natural, unaffected, and just wonderful. Now, did you interview William Wegman? I did. I said, dogs are welcome. But he said, well, I can't bring my dogs because they're pretty active. And I get complicated. It gets complicated and I can't, I can't talk easily. But he called me the day of the talk. He came very early. It was like three o'clock in the afternoon. I was just having a cup of tea. And he said, I'm here. And I brought my dogs and I was so excited. So he, I said, well, bring them over 'cause I have a nice long way down to the river where I live, and we'll let 'em out and let 'em run. And boy what great dogs and they love him. And he said, I need to take a nap. And I said, okay, come on upstairs. And the dogs went up with 'em and they got up on the bed with 'em. And then they got off and they . It was so fun. They ran all over my yard. They went down, I have a dog. And they ran down the steps to the water. I never took one picture of them. I was just happy to be there with 'em. And while his wife and I had tea, so that was fun. But he was very funny. The dogs got up on the stage and they performed. And then his wife took them out for a walk. 'cause they got pretty they love to entertain. Well I mean, I have two small dogs myself. And they don't pay any attention when I try to get them to pose for anything. So that was why I was always really impressed with William Wegman because he's was able to kind of create these, these compositions with, with animals. Well, it might be something to do with why Mars? 'cause they're very calm and he gets 'em dressed up. And they'll sit there like this with, with all this paraphernalia on. And they, if one of them is doing the acting, the other one gets jealous. And so they wanna both do it. It's interesting. Like children. Exactly. And he had some earlier tapes that were hilarious talking to the dog and saying this and that. And the dog would look around like this, you know, make these dog looks. But it was sounding like that he was responding to what William Wegman was saying. It was really funny. So if you ever have a chance to watch it, one of the early William Wegman movies videos, I'll go back and I will watch it. Yeah. It's hilarious. in my other job as a doctor, it's inspiring in a different way. What do you mean? In my job as a doctor, I work with really intelligent, passionate, hardworking people who show up every day to keep pushing the boulder up the hill. And that inspires me because as anyone who is intersected with the current healthcare system knows it is not easy. And particularly with the pandemic, people have been understandably, very upset and anxious and angry. And sometimes the person in front of you, if you're angry and upset, Is the doctor And trying to help you. Is the person that you're sometimes going to kind of project information and emotions onto. So when I show up, and it's not to doctors, nurses, other healthcare people who work with patients I'm just amazed. I'm amazed at the resilience and I'm amazed that this is a group that never got to take a pause. Mm-hmm. Because the people who are working in healthcare Now Oh, I know. Mm-hmm. We're all still working. It's amazing to me Yes. That there are still any nurses left well after what they went through. That's True. And doctors too. Yeah. Really. And so that is inspiring. And also I love coming and doing, having these conversations. 'cause I come away and I go, oh, that's so interesting. That person's career path is so different than I would've thought. I learned so many things about choices people make about you know, the education that they took and how they applied it. So I'm wondering if you felt the same way when you were interviewing artists, if you took away lessons from your conversations that had an impact on your own art. Oh, always, always. I learned a lot from, I can't tell you specifics, but I know I, I learned something from every one of them that I took away and took into my studio and thought about when I was in my studio. They were inspiring. Most of these people were pretty well known. And they had been, they had been at it for a long time. But I think you'd be a very good doctor 'cause you're such a good listener. And you know, not all doctors are. So, if, if I meet a doctor who isn't a good listener, I change doctors because they can't be creative and figure out what they need to do to help. So I'm just saying, after watching all your interviews, I think, wow, she's a good doctor too. Well, it is important to be able to listen to people. I agree. 'cause sometimes some person's high blood pressure may not be the reason for another person's high blood pressure. Right. . So trying to kind of tease out the story, or there's always a little subtlety involved in people and their wellness. I'm enjoying the fact that every time I start talking about you, you, you come back and start interviewing me. So thank you Jane. That's that's a very funny thing to have. The two people who are used to interviewing other people kinda jump in and acting the other way. It's a great dynamic. I'm really liking . so when I went to your studio, and it's probably gotta be 10 or eight years ago, I don't know, it was quite a while Ago. No. Yeah. It was about eight years ago. Eight years ago before Joe died. So it was six or seven years ago. Yes, that's right. I was impressed by you have these, your pieces, many of them are very large. And so it was such a different sense of scale than I would've thought in visiting other people's studios. And you're not what I would say a particularly tall person, , I'm sure Kenya, you're working on this very large scale with these pieces. And you, you, you wear like a, a suit of Tyvek suits, Tyvek suit. It's great. Yeah. To, to protect your Clothing. So I don't have to wear old clothes. I can just go out there at a moment's notice in my pajamas or in a ball gown. And if I have that Tyvek suit on, it doesn't, no paint gets through that stuff. It's ama amazing. It's a wonderful suit. So if you're out there in with these very large pieces in your Tyvek suit mm-hmm. It's essentially, it's like entering into a space capsule or something. and putting you in kind of this contemplative space. A hazmat area. A hazmat area. I used ladders and I did have, Joe had made me a, a well, I don't know what you'd call it, but it was, it was a metal lift and you, it would go up and down and actually he drilled a hole in the ceiling and one on the floor. But we have since rectified that we've gotten rid of it because we rebuilt the room. But it was helpful because then I didn't have to go up and down a ladder. But I don't mind going up on a ladder. I just don't, and I'm not making such tall paintings. I made one really tall one for this latest show, but most of them are 60 inches. And I can reach that. So how did you decide to work on that larger scale? Well somebody gave me an eight foot by eight foot canvas when I was down in, I lived in Concord and I, I had a studio at the Emerson umbrella and I had a big studio there. 'cause I burned my studio at home. That's a whole other story. But I looked at that canvas every day when I went in to work and I couldn't figure out, I thought, how can anybody paint that large? But I was going for walks in the morning with Joe before he went to work, and then I'd go to my studio. And I loved walking out in the woods and thinking, oh boy, it's so spiritual and I just feel it right here. I wanna paint it. But I couldn't do it. It never worked. And then one day I walked in, I don't know what made the difference. I just felt something. And I started painting these vertical lines from the top of the canvas, the bottom. It had a frame on it. So it was, it was solid. And and then I went across this way and painted the, the water and the sky and the land and it worked. And that was the first one I did. And then I started doing them a lot. And you and I think had a conversation at that time about trees. Yeah. And how you paint a lot of trees, but trees are not as easy as people might think. It's not as easy as just putting lines on a canvas. Right. Well, because a lot of stuff going on in the woods, you know, falling down trees and branches and debris everywhere. And so I kind of have to make sense of it. but I've, I've decided I don't really need to make so much sense of it anymore. I'm, I'm, I'm kind of thinking to go a little more intuitive about it because it is pretty messy in there and it's okay. Why did you feel the need to make sense of it before? You know, I don't know. It was just the way I was thinking. I guess. I was, I'm trying now to get my mind out of my work so that my, what's the God inside me or the uncaused cause or whatever you want to call it, that lives in here out without any mind altering fear or criticism. You know what I mean? And if I can keep my, my mind out of my work, I think it's a lot better, a lot better for me. So you brought with you some of your recent pieces. Well, you didn't bring them with you. You brought, you brought your your binder that, that talks about them mm-hmm. . And you have a, currently have a show up at the Portland Art Gallery. And I'm, I'm interested to hear you describe them because what I've loved with your work in particular is that it evolves and then it evolves again. And it evolves again. And I think the last time I interviewed you, I told you that I, we have one of your earlier works and it looks completely different from the works in your show now. Yeah. So tell me about the works that that you most recently put in the Portland Show. Okay. Well, they're very colorful and they show my, I would say, I'm trying to get my intuition to, to be the, the most important thing about this work. So they're very colorful. They don't always make sense. And there's a lot of I like indigenous art, which is very organic. And I like the little stripes and the marks and the dots that they put on in the work. So I let myself do that. And the trees don't look like real trees. They look like trees that I made. And it just made me so happy to, to be able to be free like that and do that. Because before I, I felt a sense of trying to make them look real. I don't know why. I just did, but now I don't wanna do that. So they're very colorful and they're very, I would say not abstract, but they're my trees. They don't look like other trees. And also, I was looking at I took a break after my last big amount of work that I did and went into fertile laziness as Bo belayer calls it, which I love that term because it's so full of something and you don't have to be working, but you're still thinking and you're still mulling things over. And I was looking at Matthew Wong's work, and he died very young, but he did some beautiful work. And he happened to like Matt Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, who, both of whom I interviewed, and both of Whom's work I like. And David Hockney, who I like. And I thought, wow, he likes the people I like, I like what he's doing. I'm gonna extend what he's doing and keep going with it. So that's part of the reason I had the confidence to do the dots and the, and the lines without making too much sense of them. You also have a piece that is a different color than you use oftentimes. and this one, I think is called Oh, right. Quite a few people have mentioned that. It's, which I just find, I mean, you use a lot of great colors. A lot of them are very bright. Mm-hmm. , I'm actually wearing this color, as I've already told you, in honor of Jane Damon , because you use a lot of pinks and reds and, and reds and, but you, you created this piece, yellow Hill. What inspired you to do that? Wow. it just came out of me. I don't know. 'cause I haven't really done something like that before. And I did it with pen and ink and and acrylic paint. But this is what's happening and I'm happy about it because I'm, I'm making paintings that may me maybe don't make a lot of sense, but they are coming out of something, which is what I'm trying, I'm, I'm after I want to get to my soul and get that showing on the canvas somehow. Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that you, at some point, something inside you was saying, I'm resonating with yellow today, and I'm, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna use this particular color mm-hmm. . And, and when I think about how that connects back to your soul, it just, it just makes me wonder. Well, yeah. colors are very red me gives me energy and talks to me about in excitement. Red blue is more peaceful, calm green is very natural and kind of soothing. And yellow is like very happy, very happy. It's like the sun. So color means a lot to me that way. And I don't know if it means the same to everybody or not, but that's what it means to me. So the fact that in some of your other pieces you use so many different colors. You know, you have one that's called river landscape, for example. Colors galore on that one. So does that mean a sort of a mixture of emotions? Does that mean just a kind of a multicolored version of your soul? I mean, maybe multicolored version of my soul. I painted under that one a whole lot of orange paint. I've never done that before. And it kept creeping out behind other things I put down. And I loved the way it looked, so I just kept up with it and keeping my, my brain out of the work. Ordinarily I would've said, oh, you better not do that. That's another color you're putting in there. I just let it happen. And that's what I'm trying to do because I think it's very freeing to feel like I can do whatever I wanna do in there. And there are no rules. No rules. And, you know, just we're, we are meant to, I think let the creativity out. That's what we're all meant to do. I love, I wei you know, him, he's, the Chinese dissident has said that creativity is part of human nature. It can only be untaught. I love that. And he's going around the world because he's worried the Chinese educational system is actually making it impossible to develop critical, unique thinking. And he's right. I mean, these people are all in a system. And so we need to value our freedom here in this country of being free to do whatever we wanna do without anybody telling us, you can't do that. So I, I have a, I'm a, I'm on a big something of freedom, trying to be free and, and valuing it and knowing it's very fragile in this culture. It's fragile. And we're, we're just, we're having some problems with people who wanna tell other people what they should or shouldn't do. And that's a slippery slope. I worry about that too. Hmm. And even when it, I think comes arguably, in some cases, people believe it's coming from the right place that they should tell people what to do. Mm-hmm. because they think their way is the right way. Sure. I they're well-meaning maybe, but it's very, very dangerous. It shuts down conversation. It causes people to retreat back into themselves so that you can't actually have a back and forth about a current, a shared experience. So, I'm with you. Mm. I I feel, I feel troubled by that. Yeah. It's very, very fragile. This freedom we have. I don't think people always think about it that much. You're, you're trying to explore that in your art, it sounds like. I am. I'm trying to it makes me incredibly happy to feel that I am free in my studio with nobody, including myself, telling me what I can or can't do because of this thing I feel in here that I don't really know where it comes from. It's not out there, but it's all the answers to my problems. It's all the creativity that I have. I think it lives in your soul, not in here. That's my feeling. I dunno how true it is, but it's what I'm going through right now. To me, It reminds me of the idea of the, the still small voice and acknowledging the still small voice. And it is hard. It's really hard to do that because I think when we hear so many other people's, sometimes much louder, much bigger voices around us, then it's easy to say, oh, okay. Sure. That sounds good. That's so true. Oh my gosh. And now with all these devices where you to use a device, you're using your brain, you're not using your intuition. And then I worry about AI and I think it's wonderful what's happening, but it's also scary. But can a robot ever have a soul? I don't think so. I don't know. I've been thinking a lot about that. How would they get a soul? What is a soul? What is the God in you? And where is, where does it come from? That kind of thing. These are Big questions you're asking . I know, I mean, I, I love these big questions 'cause I, I sometimes think about them too. Mm-hmm. , but I think they're the kind of questions that you could give up on pretty easily because you don't have the answers, but you're like, well I don't know what the answer is. Probably will never get to the answer. I suspect. Well, Not in my lifetime, but I, I don't know that you could ever have a robot that had a soul. Yeah. I don't think there's too much going on in there and we're all too unique. I think you could get pretty close to it and you could maybe have, do a lot of damage and a lot of good. But I don't know if you could ever have a soul and a robot, but I'll be long dead and gone by the time that answer comes around. Maybe. I mean, everything's happening so fast. Maybe I won't . I dunno. Well I guess we'll have to wait and see on that one . But I try not to use my devices as much as I'd like to. It's very tempting. But I think it's better to be quiet and put those away a little bit at least once a day. I think That's what I actually enjoy about spending time with patients. I bet. Yeah. I don't bring my phone into a patient encounter with me. And particularly when I am doing acupuncture with patients. Hmm. And I don't even turn the electronic health record on, so I don't turn the computer on. And that's great. So it's just that, it's just that space. It's just that interaction. It's just that conversation and that ability to work with healing in a really different way. I love acupuncture. Do you make them take their, I mean, do you ask them to take their phones out? Is an interesting question. I'm actually, I try to respect where people are coming from. I never wanna say, don't use your phone. Mm-hmm. , because if they have a grandmother who's in the icu Yeah. It's gonna cause them stress not to be able to connect. True. However, if somebody has a phone with them, I'll say, would you like me to put this over here for you? Yeah. You know, would you like, would you like me to press the, if they already have needles in, would you like me to turn them off button for you? . So, so give them the opportunity to do that. Mm mm-hmm. . but it's, I think you're, I think there's also in interactions when you have that separate device over there, it actually changes the human interaction. And particularly in something like health and wellness. I mean, you're so impacted by, well there's the electromagnetic, the physical electromagnetic field. But you're also impacted by this idea that your brain is, both people's brains are kind of always distracted by something external to them That pinging You hear the pinging. Yeah. Even in another room, I can hear it if I am not careful. Yeah. So I have to put it far away. Yeah. But yeah, it's a, it's the world we live in. I mean, it's so much good is done on the phone and, but it's, I think it's valuable to realize that that isn't everything. That doesn't answer everything and not to forget about this other stuff. I agree. Hmm. So one of the pieces that you have currently, and I actually hope that nobody buys it. 'cause I'm actually hoping my husband will buy it for our house. , he doesn't hear this of course, because It's also his, one of his favorites. It's called Run. And, and I think what you're describing is the way that I feel when I am running. Hmm. And I love the fact that you have, and actually it was my husband who brought this forward, for those of you who don't know, my husband is Kevin Thomas. He owns the Portland Art Gallery. So there's that just, just full disclosure. Yeah. . But he actually sent me a picture of this piece and I was in the middle of my medical day doing medical things and I was like, wow, that just makes me so happy. Because it reminds me of how I feel when I run, when I'm out Oh, good. In the woods when I'm out on the trails. Mm-hmm. and the freedom that you're describing and the interacting with the nature. 'cause there isn't really a way that I can be continually looking at my phone as I'm running. That wouldn't really work , thank Yes, exactly. And oftentimes I will even I'll though, I'll have it with me. I won't even like listen to music or I'll just, it'll just be quiet. That's good. So that, so to me, and this is just my take on this particular piece, it really did speak of freedom and Oh good. I'm so glad. I, I love exercise. It's one of my loves. I love painting and I love exercise. And I don't run, I used to run, but I surely do. I play pickleball and I lift weights and I have done some yoga, but I don't know if I'm gonna keep doing it. 'cause it, it's really strenuous for my knees. But I'm gonna try and find some poses that I can do in the morning early. 'cause I, I just like getting exercise. But that particular one I just felt I wanted, I I had actually painted it before I put the runner in it. But I thought, this looks like a runner. So I'm glad you, you felt that way As you're talking about the idea of the, the soul and you keep coming back to here and it's sort of the heart and the center. One of the things I've always loved about Chinese medicine and acupuncture is the idea that you have energy running throughout your body and it's all connected. And you know, the meridians are kind of bringing this energy to your extremities, to your brain. And, and so there's a knowing inside your body that is outside of, you know, what we think of as our hearts or of our brains. Mm-hmm. And as your, your, your piece kind of suggests that this freedom, this exercise, like it's a way for our bodies to kind of continue to exercise that knowing mm-hmm. . So whether it's pickleball or whether it's yoga mm-hmm. or whether it's running. I think it's, it's not just about let's just keep the cells healthy and the heart pumping and the blood flowing. It's also about connecting to the wisdom that we all carry in ourselves. That's not just the neurons. I love that idea. Well I think there might be brains throughout our whole body, not brains, but sensitivities and I don't think we know all that. We will find out eventually. 'cause things like acupuncture do such a good job. Chinese medicine is really very healthy, helpful. And I think they look at it a little differently. Maybe you're describing that, I don't know. I don't know enough about how the body actually works. I just think I've read before, I think it's iovedic medicine that says that there might be brain might be thoughts throughout our whole, like maybe our stomach is telling our brain to do something different. We have a, we have a feeling in our stomach. Maybe we shouldn't do that. It's not coming from the brain, it's coming from the, I don't know, stomach. Yeah. I think it's, it's, I mean, think about all the, you know, you have, you have to listen to your gut, you know, your Gut. I was trying to think of it. That's the Yeah, that's the thing I heard. I, I I listened to my gut and that's why I didn't do it. Yeah. And maybe there's some truth to that. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And I agree. I mean, it's not just traditional Chinese medicine, it is Ayurvedic medicine as you've described. I think there are also, you know, indig