Works ‘Seen at the End of the World’
Blue Hill exhibit focuses on the ‘memory of a landscape’
A new show at Cynthia Winnings Gallery runs through Sept. 12. Photo courtesy of Cynthia Winnings.
Sept. 2, 2026
By Marilyn Eckberg
BLUE HILL—“Seen at the End of the World,” the current group show at the Cynthia Winings Gallery sounds apocalyptic, but it's not. Artist and gallery owner Cynthia describes the abstract paintings as "atmosphere, feelings, spatial ambiguity; the memory of a landscape."
Oil paintings shown by co-curator Christine Lafuente recall familiar Maine summer scenery. She chooses not to resolve the painted colored swatches of textured shapes that she puts next to other colored shapes evoking coastal water, land and sky.
Scott Balz manipulates thick layers of paint to convey moody, nearly recognizable Mount Desert Island forests. Enter his imagined space that leads to something mysterious.
Carol Peletier takes what she's seen of changing light and reduces the scene down to what that feels like. By applying long swaths of stacked brush strokes using pigment mixed with wax, she delivers distance, water, foreground and light in compositions that are largely sky.
There is a pleasing order to the vigorous marks and gestures of Avy Claire's soft, cool, predominantly white acrylics. She slows down winter or speeds through it, depending upon which of her snowy paintings one looks at.
Stanley Bielen changes it up by making smaller pictures of abstract classic still life subjects. With dabs of thick rich impasto paint blending edges into backgrounds, he can shine light in glass, suggest a single blossom, group some yellow lemons or paint the morning mist.
Perhaps the show's most idiosyncratic artist is Stuart Shils. He gouges and cuts through slabs and blobs of acrylic paint slathered on the surfaces of what looks like found pieces of wood. He adds a poetic title to the artfully distressed result.
“Seen at the End of the World” at the Cynthia Wining Gallery runs through Saturday, Sept. 12.
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