Leaning against the wall in one corner of the Gorham art gallery are six paintings, all in various stages of completion. There’s also a record player and a comfortable old yellow chair speckled with paint.
Empty coffee cups, album covers, and paintbrushes are strewn about the drop cloth surrounding an easel, and stale tortilla chips crunch underfoot.
Gideon Bok, this semester’s artist-in-residence, has taken over this corner of the gallery-for the spring, it’s his studio, his classroom, and his show.
Bok, a Maine native, began painting in 1987 while, coincidentally, he was a student at USM.
“George Burk started me off,” he says of his first painting class, which is still taught by Burk.
Since his intro-to-painting days, Bok has gone on to achieve national recognition for his work.
Walking through the gallery is like walking through a photo album: the subjects of Bok’s work are the various studios he’s inhabited over the years.
They include whatever people, dogs, and beer bottles happened to be in the room while he was painting.
Any visitor might find him or herself in his next work.
The static objects in the studio-windows, furniture, even other works of art-appear as the most solid in his paintings. Objects that move-like people-have an unfinished, transparent quality.
“It’s kind of like chasing something you’ll never catch,” says Bok, explaining how he paints moving subjects in a slow medium.
Some of the people are solid, some you can see through, some appear multiple times and others don’t have legs-evidence that they didn’t stay long.
Often, he paints someone only while they’re in his studio and then paints over him or her as soon as they leave.
In one of the unfinished paintings in the corner is the figure of a student sitting in the paint-spattered yellow chair.
“I will probably eventually paint him out,” says Bok.
Far from being staged, Bok’s style is organic-his paintings just happen.
“It started back in grad school,” says Bok of his subjects and his style. “I would stock up on coffee, beer and whiskey and people would just come and hang out; they would move around the space and I would observe and paint them.”
Here at USM, he doesn’t mind when students come by just to chat, read, or play the guitar – he encourages it.
Portraying studios from Manhattan to Rockland, all of Bok’s paintings have a story.
“That was one of my favorite times,” he says, motioning towards a large painting of ghostly musicians jamming in the corner of a studio.
The summer it was painted, a friend and record producer had invited some musicians to his Rockland studio to record.
Bok grins as he looks at the painting. Musicians, he says, make interesting subjects-and music seems an important part of his life.
An old Fender guitar sits next to a large amplifier in the middle of the floor. If you look hard enough, you can spot the guitar in most of his paintings.
And like a true connoisseur, he prefers vinyl to CDs. Elliot Smith, Tom Waits, R.E.M., and Sufjan Stevens can be found in his milk crate of music.
When asked how he likes it here, Bok points out that there are no windows.
“I like it here, the light stays the same regardless of the time of day.” In past studios, he was always starting over as the light changed throughout the day.
Like the ghostly images in his paintings, Gideon Bok’s time here at USM is fleeting. If you have a few minutes between classes, stop by the Gorham gallery and shoot the breeze. If nothing else, you might end up in one of his paintings.