Healing Arts Exhibits

Kathy (Kal) Elmore is exhibiting at St. Joseph Healthcare, The Gallery at 900 Broadway, Building 5, until December 15, 2023.

Kal is a native of Philadelphia where she grew to love art. After years of traveling, she settled in Cherryfield, Maine, and earned a Master of Education degree in Arts Education from the University of Maine in Orono (UMaine). Kal went on to have a 25-year career as a teacher at Brewer and Bangor High Schools and shared her passion for art with local young people.  

Now retired, Kal enjoys facilitating groups of adults interested in art and learning new techniques, including a watercolor painting group. She also continues to advocate for more arts education in the Bangor region.  

As an artist, she uses her creativity to generate visually interesting works for herself and others. She shares, “I don’t think of myself as an artist; I’m an art educator.” Kal’s work has developed over the last few years and is partially inspired by her watercolor painting group. Parts of her work are influenced by the printmaking projects she completed at UMaine after retirement. She likes working with various printmaking techniques and processes, such as relief printing, mono-printing, and collagraphs in this exhibit. Kal often uses re-used or re-purposed prints as a starting point and looks for ways to add to them, giving the works additional meaning or focus.  

Kal’s work featured in this exhibit reveals an attraction to the shapes, colors, textures and values in natural forms. Imagery from art history is used in random and surprising ways, from calendars, postcards, or books. She says, “There are endless possibilities when collaging and I am often entertained by the images and how the juxtaposition of images can tell one story or another.” 

John Rohman is exhibiting at St. Joseph Healthcare, The Gallery at 900 Broadway, Building 5, until December 15, 2023

John spent much of his 30-year career in the field of architecture with a pencil in his hand. He has always had a passion for art and interior design, beginning his artistic journey in his 40s with training at the University of Maine, Orono, and Boston Architectural College. He put aside his personal artistic endeavors, however, to lead WBRC Architects and Engineers as its CEO.  

John is now retired and has jumped back into his love of creating art. The Gallery at 900 exhibit is his first art opening and John is very excited to be alongside his two artist friends, Kal Elmore and Nancy Lloyd-Fitch. “This exhibit is lovely to share with friends whom I connected with through a Zoom painting group, where we pushed to new creative directions.”  

John enjoys challenging his talents and techniques as an emerging artist. For this show, he focuses on past travels, including recent trips to Portugal and Spain. This three-week artist journey is seen in his works “The Flamingo Dancer-Mallorca” and “Etching Printing-Ronda, Spain.”   

“I am fortunate to have spent summers on Deer Isle in the town of Stonington, whose natural beauty leads to some beautiful water and harbor scenes.”

If you are interested in purchasing John’s work, you can contact him at jlrohman8204@gmail.com. 

Nancy Lloyd-Fitch is exhibiting at St. Joseph Healthcare, The Gallery at 900 Broadway, Building 5, until December 15, 2023.

Nancy was born in Natick, Massachusetts and moved to Brewer at age 13. After a career in Microbiology/Pathology, she returned to college at the age of 33 and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Art Education from the University of Maine, Orono.  

Nancy first began teaching at the Graham School in Veazie and moved to Asa C. Adams Elementary School in Orono where she went on to teach for the next 24 years.  

She was inspired to become an artist by her father, an architect/artist, and her mother who taught her to talk with her hands. Both skills served her well as an arts educator. She continued her growth as an artist attending workshops with Kal Elmore, at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Plein-Air with Philip Frey, and more.  

In retirement, Nancy is now experimenting with a variety of media and techniques, including printmaking, watercolor and collage. Much of her art is inspired by her artist friends and peers, and by her travels in Maine and beyond. During COVID-19, Nancy joined a virtual watercolor group with John Rohman and led by Kal Elmore, who are also featured in this exhibit.  

“I have always considered myself an Art Educator, and my students inspired me for years with their talents and enthusiasm while creating art. Now, it’s my turn. Artwork I have produced has never been for anyone but me, so to put my work on display has added to my artist journey.”  

The work of this exhibit explores watercolors, pushing new techniques from her art group, which she attributes to why she is displaying. The works are an acrylic painting and woodblock print created while still teaching watercolors. 

• Location: First floor, St. Joseph Hospital, 360 Broadway, Neuroscience wing

You will find the paintings of Diana Young on the first floor of the hospital. Young remembers being an artist since she was a child, in fact, she has been “making pictures” by painting landscapes in Maine and from her travels throughout the world for nearly 50 years.

Her work leans toward line, direction, force and motion, rather than form and naturalism. For her, an outdoor place is a point of departure rather than a study in nature. She is always looking for “the kernel of a place.”

“What makes an artist? Doing art with enthusiasm for many years is the proof. What starts our looking strange may become accepted as beautiful over time and I’m hoping that happens to me. Being an artist could well be one part talent and nine parts desire.”

Young is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and has exhibited in regional galleries and across artist cooperatives throughout Maine. She continues to create art in her studio located in Bangor, Maine.

Her art can be seen at the Eastport Gallery in person during the summer months (June through September) and online year round. You can see a beautiful collection of her work online and available for purchase by visiting Flood Fine Art.

• Location: Third floor, St. Joseph Hospital, 360 Broadway, General Surgery and Urology Extension Wing

You will find colorful paintings by local artist Jill Hoy on the third floor of the hospital. Hoy’s work focuses on the qualities of Maine light in her plein air oil paintings. Strong composition, rhythm, gesture, pattern, energy, power of place, and soul are primary focal points.

“I’ve spent my summers in Deer Isle, Maine since I was ten years old. Deer Isle has raised me to be a painter,” said Hoy. Reflecting on the exhibit, she shares: “All of my oil paintings are done outside on location. My work captures both an intimate relationship with nature, along with the movements of wide-open spaces that allow our heart to expand.”

Hoy has exhibited her work extensively in Maine and in locations across the United States. You may have seen her work on the cover of an L.L. Bean catalog or a Down East Magazine publication. Hoy’s work is on display in more than 600 private and corporate collections throughout the United States and Europe, including The Jill Hoy Gallery, which is open for the season in Stonington, Maine.

• Location: Second floor, St. Joseph Hospital, 360 Broadway, Respiratory, Cardiology, and General Surgery wing

You will find contemporary landscape paintings by local artist Nina Jerome on the first floor of the hospital. As a long-time resident in Maine, Jerome finds inspiration for her work in both natural and constructed environments, drawing and painting in series that examine visual variations of place. For her, the painting process conveys her personal direction through the land as she witnesses its light, movement, and changes.

Jerome spends the warmer months in coastal Maine, a rich visual resource with its undeveloped shoreline and wide-ranging tidal fluctuations. She has also explored sense-of-place in other Maine areas. Jerome has completed residencies on two of her favorite Maine islands – Great Spruce Head Island and Great Cranberry Island – and has created paintings for fourteen public art projects in Maine including a series for the Penobscot Judicial Center in Bangor.

This exhibit includes paintings dating from 1980 to the present. Notable series presented here are “Quiet Tension” (1995), a record of Jerome’s walks along the rocky shore in Addison, ME, “Altered Landscape” (1986), construction views of the Veterans Remembrance Bridge across the Penobscot River, “Winter Power” (2005), a series depicting the steam plume marking the location of an electricity generating plant along the Penobscot River, “From the Kayak” (2006), images of floating between sea and sky in Addison, ME, and “Homage to the Ocean” (2013), a series that wove words written about climate change into the images of the sea.