Majo Keleshian Painting "Lilacs By The Pond Through The Field" 2000, Framed

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Majo Keleshian
Lilacs By The Pond Through The Field 2000

Provenance
McGrath Dunham Gallery
Castine, Maine

Majo Keleshian
Since first … Read more Majo Keleshian
Lilacs By The Pond Through The Field 2000

Provenance
McGrath Dunham Gallery
Castine, Maine

Majo Keleshian
Since first showing her work in the late 1980s, Keleshian was a part of the Maine art scene. Over the years she worked in a variety of mediums and techniques, including oil pastel, encaustic, crayon, collage, and several print formats, including monotype.
Over time, Keleshian also developed a signature style that celebrated the impermanence and beauty of the world: lichened rocks, the trunk of a birch tree, a night sky. Her abstract images, created through rubbing, scraping, and layering, evoke natural forms under beautiful duress.
In a Maine Times review of Keleshian’s show at the Carnegie Hall Gallery at the University of Maine in 1996, critic Donna Gold remarked on her transition from a group of fruit studies she had shown the year before at the Judith Leighton Gallery to a new series of non-objective images that marked a great change in vision. These new pieces go “much deeper,” Gold observed, “as if in eschewing reference, Keleshian can delve into the material itself, dealing directly with color, with the resistance of paper, and with the act of drawing.” She found the work “profoundly meditative.”
In 1997, Keleshian was awarded a Carina House artist residency on Monhegan, “a gift of time,” she called it, “five weeks to explore the island and to work.” With no distractions or expectations, and with plenty of art supplies, she began a series of small paintings on paper called Mnemonics, which broke new ground for her.
Keleshian donated Mnemonic 7 and Mnemonic 8 to a fundraiser for the North Dakota Museum of Art in 2002. Describing the process of creating these pieces in the catalog for the auction, curator Madelyn Camrud noted how the work conveyed “a sense of history and texture in the tones of each piece—a feeling of old painted walls, or wood grain.”
In a profile by Ellen Hathaway in the Ellsworth American in 2006, Keleshian described her technique as a “hybrid of painting, printing, and drawing.” The process entailed using a water-soluble and waxy Swiss crayon—Caran d’Ache—to draw a few lines on a thick, non-porous Japanese paper. She then scratched lines into the surface of the paper and added water. The crayon, she explained, “works like watercolor when smudged and like crayon when left alone.” Since she didn’t use fixative, she framed the pieces under glass.
Keleshian also shared some thoughts on her art with Hathaway:
I like to say it’s landscape-based, a lot of the influences of landscape coming together. Sometimes they become quite figurative. Most of the time, I like to think I’m moving away from figuration, direct figuration, even though this work is not an abstract expressionist de Kooning or a drip Pollock, or even a person I admire so much, a Rothko, those colors you want to just dive into.
Keleshian sought to create “a spontaneous and informed image—that place where surprise and intention meet,” she once noted. Writing about her work at the George Marshall Store Gallery in York in 2008, a reviewer for the Portsmouth Herald put it this way: “Depending on how you view Keleshian’s colorful, iridescent small paintings, they can be pure abstraction or absolute reality.”
Keleshian also thrived as a graphic artist, designing materials for the Maine Sea Grant Program at the University of Maine where she had taken courses in the art department, determined to develop as an artist. She eventually taught drawing at the university and helped hang shows in the campus art gallery (she curated Mimmo Paladino: The Prints in 1997). She also provided graphics for the university’s New Writing Series founded in 1999 by English professor Steve Evans.
In the summer of 2001, Keleshian spent a week on Great Spruce Head in Penobscot Bay as a guest of Anina Porter Fuller, host of the annual Art Week (the records of this thirty-plus-year program recently entered the collection of the Archives of American Art). “Her work was beautifully expressive, filled with wonder in color and shape,” Fuller recalls. “MaJo was a warm and generous member of our art group, helping always where she could and sharing her knowledge of art.”
Fuller also remembers that MaJo enjoyed sailing and that she was “paving the way” for her husband, poet Sylvester Pollet, to attend Art Week the following summer, which he did—and wrote a series of “kechiks,” haiku-like images that describe instants of revelation on the island: “blue rubber workglove / where’s your / lobsterman?”

Over the years, Keleshian showed at some of the best-known galleries in Maine: Judith Leighton in Blue Hill, George Marshall Store Gallery in York, Courthouse Gallery Fine Art in Ellsworth, Elan Fine Arts in Rockland, McGrath-Dunham in Castine, and the Maine Art Gallery in Wiscasset.
Keleshian also was a regular featured artist in the basement gallery at John Edwards Market in Ellsworth. That’s where I ran into her from time to time, at openings that doubled as wine tastings. The market gallery always had a few of her lyric pieces on display. Their incised surfaces and warm tones drew me across the room. See less