Gleason Fine Art opened two new shows  June 29: Andrea Peters: In Living Color and Kevin Beers: From Manana To Havana. The opening reception for the artists will be held on First Friday, July 7 from 5-7 p.m. Everyone is invited to join Andrea and Kevin in a glass of Monhegan Brewing Beer of fine wine. The shows will run through July 25.

East Boothbay artist Andrea Peters’ world is outside her windows – salty inlets, mossy ledges, towering spruces, and abundant flower and vegetable gardens. It is a quintessentially Maine landscape, where the keen-eyed Peters sees more in a glance than many of us would see in a lifetime. Look at a Peters’ spruce trees and really see one for the first time – dark, rugged, and wild. Or marvel at a drift of yellow daylilies spilling over mauve ledges.

Andrea loves color. She dazzles us with her passion for paint. Her yellows sizzle, her reds pop, and her blues make us swoon. Perhaps the late arts writer Phil Isaacson, a great admirer of Peters’ work, says it best “Peters’ Maine coast wriggles with color, hues pile up in layers, and they ease their way along the hide of the land. Her style is gestural, spontaneous, and that quality builds a visual tempo. The Maine coast has become a center of visual energy” (Isaacson, Maine Sunday Telegram).

A petite lady of Italian heritage, Andrea Peters approaches everything she does with style and enthusiasm. Tea with Andrea means delicate, homemade Italian pastries served on colorful matching plates. Outdoors, tomato and basil plants vie with perennials for space, and both wild ducks and pet chickens benefit from her natural generosity. Andrea and her husband Mark have lived in Little River, East Boothbay, for nearly two decades, just about as long as she has shown her paintings at Gleason Fine Art.

When Kevin Beers first walked into Gleason Fine Art nearly 20 years ago, he had just given up his Manhattan position as an art director in order to follow his passion, becoming a full-time artist. He had just begun to paint landscapes, but, "motorhead" that he is, he focused primarily on old cars and trucks that had caught his eye. Beers studied each vehicle to discover its story, so each painting became a kind of portrait. A pea-green truck with lots of missing paint became "Rusty," and a car with a particularly ferocious looking grille became "Vampire."

Kevin Beers grew into one of Maine's most respected landscape painters and one of Gleason Fine Art's most popular artists. His magnificent paintings of Monhegan Island's stark white buildings against clear-blue skies came to symbolize the Maine that visitors and residents alike love. The cars and trucks took a backseat. However, one place, a country where old cars have been repaired and reused for over half a century, lived on in Beers' mind; that place was Cuba: “As a child I was mad about cars and developed my drawing skills by drawing the cars around me. And those were the 50s cars that are everywhere in modern Cuba. So going to Cuba, something that I have wanted to do for as long as I can remember, was a dream come true.

“I love the sense of going back in time, finding a place that is so locked into a different era. It's a glimpse of such a different world. I find that same sense of another time on Monhegan. Monhegan is life in 1880 and Cuba is life in 1958. It causes you see life differently and it opens your eyes up to see everything.”  

Both shows, plus the gallery's entire inventory of contemporary and estate art, may be viewed on the gallery's website: gleasonfineart.com. For further information, call Dennis, Marty or Andrew Gleason, or Diana Kerr at the gallery: 633-6849 or send an email:  info@gleasonfineart.com.  Summer hours at the gallery (31 Townsend Avenue) are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.