Book artist Rebecca Goodale will give an illustrated talk, “Threatened and Endangered: An Artist’s Books,” on Tuesday, June 9 at 7 p.m. at River Arts Gallery. This is the third in the Sheepscot Valley Conservation Association’s (SVCA) Art and Nature speaker series, sponsored by Bath Savings Institution, Legacy Properties Sotheby’s International Realty and King Eider’s Pub. Thanks to their generosity, the series is free and open to all.

Goodale has been working for over a decade on a remarkable series of artist books, depicting and documenting Maine’s threatened and endangered plants, birds, insects and animals. Via research with naturalists and fieldwork in Maine’s forests, waterways and marshes, and using a wide array of artistic techniques and approaches, Goodale’s painted and printed books may be traditionally bound, or may unfold and expand into astonishing, colorful sculptural forms, including the shapes of the plants and animals themselves.

Some examples of Goodale’s books include “Fifteen Maine Birds,” “Four Maine Butterflies,” “Twenty Maine Sedges,” “Vernal Pool” and “Extinct; Extirpated; Endangered.”

For more on Goodale's books, visit www.vampandtramp.com/finepress/g/rebecca-goodale.html.

Goodale teaches at the University of Southern Maine and is coordinator of the Kate Cheney Chapell ’83 Center for Book Arts at USM. Her work is in the collections of the Portland Museum of Art, Bowdoin College Library, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, the U.S. Library of Congress and the Maine Women Writers’ Collection at the University of New England. 

There will be a solo show of her botanical books at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay Harbor from June 5 to July 30.

River Arts is located at 241 U.S. Route 1 in Damariscotta.

For more information, call 207-586-5616 or visit www.sheepscot.org or www.facebook.com/sheepscot.