Printmakers whose work travels from coast to coast
When people walk into Beyond the Sea, the first thing they usually say is something about the walls. We have built them slowly, layer by layer, the way a proper collection gets built — one print at a time, swapped out when an edition sells through, replaced with something fresh that still feels of this stretch of Midcoast Maine. The six printmakers we keep coming back to are the ones whose work keeps travelling well, whether the hallway in question is in a Camden bungalow, a Surry Hills terrace, or a weatherboard in Hobart's Battery Point.
Australians have always had a soft spot for the kind of handmade thing that comes out of a cold-water coastline. There is a kinship between a foggy Penobscot Bay morning and a brisk one along Tasmania's east coast — same granite, same gumption, same scruffy little fishing towns getting on with it. So when a print from our walls lands in a frame in Sydney or Melbourne, it tends to look like it has always been there.
Why a hand-pulled print still earns its wall space
Digital prints have their place. So do posters from the museum shop. But there is something about a hand-pulled original — the slight registration wobble, the burr of a wood block, the inky thumbprint in the margin — that gives a wall a different weight. You don't need to be a collector to notice it. Friends do. The postman does. Even the cat does, eventually.
Prints also do what paintings can't always do: they let you live with a living artist's work on your walls without remortgaging the house. Editions are limited, often signed and numbered, and they sit comfortably in a hallway or a kitchen or above a reading chair. For Australians furnishing rentals or first homes, where the walls start out brutally white and the landlord frowns on nails, prints in a neat row do the job of a gallery without the freight bill from New York.
A good print also ages well. The ink is oil-based or archival pigment, the paper is heavy, and the artist's hand is baked into the surface in a way that a flatbed printer can only fake. We have prints on our walls from fifteen years ago that still brighten the room like the day they were framed.
How the work is actually made
The artists we work with mostly use three or four traditional methods, and a few newer ones. The thing they share is patience. A single lino block can take a week to carve, and a multi-colour woodcut can take a month from sketch to signed edition. None of them are in a hurry, and none of them are interested in cutting corners once a piece starts to sell.
What we look for, more than the medium itself, is how the print sits in the hand and on the wall. Does the colour hold up across the run, or does the third pull go muddy? Is the edition honestly small, or is it a sly open edition dressed up as a limited run? Are the margins wide enough to mat, or has someone tried to squeeze a centimetre of extra image out of the block?
Most of our makers live within an hour of the shop. Some come in regularly to drop off fresh editions and stay for a flat white at the café counter. Others ship from further up the coast or down in Portland, and we catch up with them at open studio events when they pass through town.
A few things you will hear us say about a new arrival:
- Carved by hand, inked by roller, pressed on a manual press or burnished with a wooden spoon.
- Signed, titled, and numbered in pencil along the bottom margin.
- Printed on cotton or heavyweight mould-made paper that will outlast us all.
- Sold unframed unless noted, so you can choose your own moulding.
Six studios we keep on rotation
The table below covers the six local printmakers whose work shows up on our walls most consistently. Prices are in USD and reflect what we typically charge before framing; artists adjust edition prices roughly once a year.
| Artist | Medium | Common subjects | Typical edition size | Price range |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cara Winslow | Linocut | Penobscot Bay at dawn, herring weirs | 25–40 | $85–$165 |
| Henrik Aalto | Woodcut | Acadia forests, beech stands | 30–50 | $120–$220 |
| Mira Bouchard | Screen print | Wild roses, apple blossoms, tide-pool algae | 50–75 | $75–$140 |
| Theo Cormier | Etching | Lighthouse towns, dock pilings | 20–35 | $140–$260 |
| June Pelletier | Cyanotype | Rockpool life, eelgrass shadows | One-of-a-kind | $95–$180 |
| Felix Yoon | Risograph | Coastal birds, terns, plovers | 40–100 | $55–$110 |
We mix and match these on the floor. A Mira Bouchard rose above a stack of cookbooks. A Cara Winslow horizon opposite the café door. A Theo Cormier etching next to a reading nook lined with paperbacks.
Four printmakers we never run out of
Cara Winslow grew up in a fishing family in Stonington and carves her lino blocks at the kitchen table while the kettle goes. Her dawn pieces — long horizontals of pink water and a single trawler — are the prints people photograph and then come back the next morning to buy. They ship flat in a reinforced sleeve, which makes them easy to send across the Pacific to a share house in Newtown or a flat in Fitzroy.
Henrik Aalto is a Finnish-born woodcut artist who moved to Mount Desert Island in the late nineties and never left. His beech stands feel Swedish and Maine at the same time — the kind of forest that looks like a friend. He pulls each colour separately, which is why his greens have that layered, breathing quality. Editions sell through fast, and we keep a waiting list running most of the year.
Mira Bouchard runs a small screen-printing studio out of a converted boat shed in South Bristol. Her florals have a Bauhaus crispness to them — flat colour, clean edges, no fuss. They sit beautifully in a hallway where the light is tricky, because the inks hold their saturation without going chalky.
Theo Cormier is the etcher of the group. He works on a copper plate the size of a laptop lid, and his lighthouse-town prints have the kind of detail you only get from acid biting into metal. They are the most expensive in the rotation, but they also feel the most like a small black-and-white film still, and they look their best in a thin oak frame.
A few Australian-friendly reasons these four travel well:
- Flat-packed, so international postage stays reasonable to Perth or Brisbane.
- Available unframed, which dodges the timber quarantine rules that snag some incoming frames.
- Priced below the duty-free threshold most of the time, depending on the order.
- Small enough to slip into a parcel with a stack of secondhand books from our Persephone Books corner.
Pairing prints with a Maine afternoon
The other two in the table — June Pelletier and Felix Yoon — we see less often because their methods don't lend themselves to quick reorders. June's cyanotypes are one-of-a-kind sun prints, exposed on the rocks at low tide and developed in seawater. No two are alike, and she makes about thirty a year. Felix's risograph birds run in slightly larger editions, but the colour registration on his press is finicky, and he would rather bin a sheet than sell a duff one.
If you would rather take your art sitting down with a flat white, our bookseller has put together five Maine authors for spring reading, and the list pairs neatly with any of these prints. A Cara Winslow horizon and an Annie Proulx novel is a hard afternoon to beat. A Mira Bouchard rose and a stack of Elizabeth Strout does something similar. We keep all of it on the same shelf, near the front window, so you can flip between paper and paper.
Australians in particular seem to appreciate the slow pairing — buying one print and one book at a time, then building the collection over years the way we built our walls. There is no rush. The editions will be here next season, and if a particular piece sells through, the artist usually pulls a small reissue within twelve months.
For anyone who finds themselves within cooee of Penobscot Bay, the prints are even better in person. You can hold them up to the café window light, check the registration against the wall colour, and decide on the spot. The artists whose studios are within driving distance often pop in on a Saturday, and there is usually a piece or two in the back room that has not yet made it onto the floor.
Six fresh Cara Winslow linocuts arrived in the shop this week and are hanging opposite the café door until the next edition comes through. Spring open-studio weekends on the Midcoast begin in late April.