The Artistic Journey of Maine Artist Jane Dahmen

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine. Today I have with me in the studio artist Jane Dahmen. And the reason that this is important is that you are one of our earliest Radio Maine guests, at the beginning or height of the COVID pandemic. And you joined us remotely.

Jane Dahmen: I did, from Newcastle. Number four.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yes. And so I'm so thrilled to have you here today.

Jane Dahmen: Well, I'm thrilled to be here. What a great place you have here. I went across two bridges. I didn't realize you were so far out. You go into these towns and you think you know them, and you don't know them at all. But anyway, I love where you are.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: There's a lot of nooks and crannies to the coast of Maine.

Jane Dahmen: Just like sailing down all these little inlets, when you drive down all these little places, you find all these hidden gems. And you're in one.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yes, we are. I grew up in Yarmouth, and even though Yarmouth is the town that we currently are in, Yarmouth is attached to Cousins Island by a bridge, which is attached to Littlejohn, which is where we live, by a causeway. And it's a very different part of the town. So I didn't even know Littlejohn that much when I was growing up.

Jane Dahmen: Oh, really? It's beautiful. I went over the little bridge to Littlejohn and all the rocks. The tide is low.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Little causeway. It's beautiful. Really pretty. I'm fortunate, I get to run over that every day and drive to bed. So it's a pretty nice place to live.

Jane Dahmen: And there's lots of fields and farms coming down here.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: We're pretty fortunate. It must be why people like to live in Maine, or visit Maine anyway.

Jane Dahmen: True.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: But you're not originally from Maine?

Jane Dahmen: No. My mother lived in Augusta all her life. I went to Colby College. That's how I, well, and my husband and I loved to sail, and we came up and kept a boat at Round Pond and sailed two or three days a weekend while the kids were growing up. So we spent a lot of time in Maine. My sister lived here, so if the kids didn't want to go sailing, they went and stayed with her and their cousins. And we let them use the boat during the week when we weren't here. So it was a good deal.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I don't think I knew about the Augusta connection with your mother.

Jane Dahmen: She went to Cony High School. I'm not sure it was Cony High School in those days, it was a long time ago. But my uncle was the head of Cony High School. He was the principal there. And all my cousins went there. And that was her sister.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So how did she meet your father?

Jane Dahmen: She met him in Marblehead at a card game, that's all I know. After college. She went to Wheaton College, then transferred to Colby College, missed Maine, and he went to Bowdoin. And they had some connection, the Maine connection. And they lived in Massachusetts when I was growing up.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So your family has the entire small Maine liberal arts college connection. You've got them all covered.

Jane Dahmen: Right. My father wanted me to go to Bowdoin in the worst way, but women were not allowed then. So I did the next best thing he thought, which was to go to Colby.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: He let you do that?

Jane Dahmen: He did. I didn't marry anyone from Bowdoin, though. Joe went to MIT.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Oh boy. Well, it is interesting, because, Jane, I interviewed Joan Benoit Samuelson, and she was from, I believe, the inaugural class of women admitted. Or soon thereafter. It wasn't that long ago that women were not on campus at all. So the fact that you actually had to choose a different college entirely, because it just wasn't even a possibility, is interesting.

Jane Dahmen: Well, mine was way back before Joan Samuelson. When can I see that interview?

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Oh, that was a different interview for a different publication. That was many years ago. But I could probably find it and send it to you.

Jane Dahmen: Yeah, I'd like to read it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: But speaking of interviews. You and I were kind of joking about this, that usually you like to be the one doing the interviewing, because you've actually done quite a bit of interviewing, particularly of artists over the years.

Jane Dahmen: I have. I did it for seven years at the Lincoln Theater in Damariscotta. I loved doing it, because I majored in art history. And so I like reading about artists. I like meeting them. I'm a little bit shy about meeting them in a group in a gallery, but when I can interview them, boy, that is fun. So I do my homework and I read up on them. I'm not doing it anymore, because after COVID we stopped doing it for a while. We took a break, and I thought, gee, I really like having all this time to paint. So I'm not doing it. But I did love it. And I met some incredible people.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: What are some of the surprising things you learned about some of these people that you interviewed?

Jane Dahmen: Surprising things. Well, that they're all human. They're all quite modest. They're all, except maybe for Alex Katz, who has tremendous strength of what he likes, and not in a bad way at all. He's just very, he'll never give in. He did work that nobody liked after he graduated from Cooper Union. And he kept at it, even though he was poor. He was giving up awards and so forth. But it meant so much to him to do what he felt in here. And I value that a lot when I heard it. But there were many fun things we learned about them. All quite different. Everybody's unique. Lois Dodd really impressed me, because she was in her eighties and she drove down herself and came in. She's so natural, unaffected, and just wonderful.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Now, did you interview William Wegman?

Jane Dahmen: I did. I said, dogs are welcome. But he said, well, I can't bring my dogs, because they're pretty active. And it gets complicated, and I can't talk easily. But he called me the day of the talk. He came very early. It was like three o'clock in the afternoon. I was just having a cup of tea. And he said, I'm here. And I brought my dogs. And I was so excited. I said, well, bring them over, because I have a nice long way down to the river where I live, and we'll let them out and let them run. And boy, what great dogs, and they love him. And he said, I need to take a nap. And I said, okay, come on upstairs. And the dogs went up with him, and they got up on the bed with him. And then they got off, and they ran all over my yard. They went down, I have a dock, and they ran down the steps to the water. I never took one picture of them. I was just happy to be there with them, while his wife and I had tea. So that was fun. But he was very funny. The dogs got up on the stage and they performed. And then his wife took them out for a walk, because they love to entertain.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I have two small dogs myself. And they don't pay any attention when I try to get them to pose for anything. So that was why I was always really impressed with William Wegman, because he was able to create these compositions with animals.

Jane Dahmen: Well, it might be something to do with Weimaraners, because they're very calm, and he gets them dressed up. And they'll sit there like this with all this paraphernalia on. And if one of them is doing the acting, the other one gets jealous. And so they want to both do it. It's interesting.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Really like children.

Jane Dahmen: Exactly. And he had some earlier tapes that were hilarious, talking to the dog and saying this and that. And the dog would look around like this, make these dog looks. But it sounded like he was responding to what William Wegman was saying. It was really funny. So if you ever have a chance to watch one of the early William Wegman videos.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I'll go back and I will watch it.

Jane Dahmen: It's hilarious.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: One of the things I like about doing Radio Maine is that I come away often feeling really kind of inspired. In my other job as a doctor, it's inspiring in a different way.

Jane Dahmen: What do you mean?

Dr. Lisa Belisle: In my job as a doctor, I work with really intelligent, passionate, hardworking people who show up every day to keep pushing the boulder up the hill. And that inspires me, because as anyone who has intersected with the current healthcare system knows, it is not easy. And particularly with the pandemic, people have been understandably very upset and anxious and angry. And sometimes the person in front of you, if you're angry and upset.

Jane Dahmen: Is the doctor.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah.

Jane Dahmen: And trying to help you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Is the person that you're sometimes going to project information and emotions onto. So when I show up, and it's not just doctors, nurses, other healthcare people who work with patients, I'm just amazed. I'm amazed at the resilience, and I'm amazed that this is a group that never got to take a pause. Because the people who are working in healthcare.

Jane Dahmen: Oh, I know.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: We're all still working.

Jane Dahmen: It's amazing to me that there are still any nurses left, after what they went through. And doctors too.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Really. And so that is inspiring. And also, I love coming and having these conversations, because I come away and I go, oh, that's so interesting. That person's career path is so different than I would've thought. I learned so many things about choices people make about the education that they took and how they applied it. So I'm wondering if you felt the same way when you were interviewing artists, if you took away lessons from your conversations that had an impact on your own art.

Jane Dahmen: Oh, always, always. I learned a lot. I can't tell you specifics, but I know I learned something from every one of them that I took away and took into my studio and thought about when I was in my studio. They were inspiring. Most of these people were pretty well known. And they had been at it for a long time. But I think you'd be a very good doctor, because you're such a good listener. And not all doctors are. So if I meet a doctor who isn't a good listener, I change doctors, because they can't be creative and figure out what they need to do to help. So I'm just saying, after watching all your interviews, I think, wow, she's a good doctor too.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, it is important to be able to listen to people. Because sometimes one person's high blood pressure may not be the reason for another person's high blood pressure. So trying to tease out the story, there's always a little subtlety involved in people and their wellness. I'm enjoying the fact that every time I start talking about you, you come back and start interviewing me. So thank you, Jane. That's a very funny thing to have, the two people who are used to interviewing other people kind of jump in and act the other way. It's a great dynamic. I'm really liking it. So when I went to your studio, and it's probably got to be ten or eight years ago, it was quite a while ago.

Jane Dahmen: It was about eight years ago. Eight years ago, before Joe died. So it was six or seven years ago.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yes, that's right. I was impressed by, you have these pieces, many of them are very large. And so it was such a different sense of scale than I would've thought in visiting other people's studios. And you're not what I would say a particularly tall person, and yet you're working on this very large scale with these pieces. And you wear like a suit of.

Jane Dahmen: Tyvek suits.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Tyvek suit.

Jane Dahmen: It's great.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: To protect your clothing.

Jane Dahmen: So I don't have to wear old clothes. I can just go out there at a moment's notice in my pajamas or in a ball gown. And if I have that Tyvek suit on, no paint gets through that stuff. It's amazing. It's a wonderful suit.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So if you're out there with these very large pieces in your Tyvek suit, it's essentially like entering into a space capsule or something, and putting you in kind of this contemplative space.

Jane Dahmen: A hazmat area.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: A hazmat area.

Jane Dahmen: I used ladders, and Joe had made me a, I don't know what you'd call it, but it was a metal lift, and it would go up and down. Actually he drilled a hole in the ceiling and one on the floor. But we have since rectified that, we've gotten rid of it, because we rebuilt the room. But it was helpful, because then I didn't have to go up and down a ladder. But I don't mind going up on a ladder. And I'm not making such tall paintings. I made one really tall one for this latest show, but most of them are sixty inches. And I can reach that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So how did you decide to work on that larger scale?

Jane Dahmen: Well, somebody gave me an eight foot by eight foot canvas when I lived in Concord, and I had a studio at the Emerson Umbrella. I had a big studio there, because I burned my studio at home. That's a whole other story. But I looked at that canvas every day when I went in to work, and I couldn't figure out, I thought, how can anybody paint that large? But I was going for walks in the morning with Joe before he went to work, and then I'd go to my studio. And I loved walking out in the woods and thinking, oh boy, it's so spiritual and I just feel it right here. I want to paint it. But I couldn't do it. It never worked. And then one day I walked in, I don't know what made the difference, I just felt something. And I started painting these vertical lines from the top of the canvas to the bottom. It had a frame on it, so it was solid. And then I went across this way and painted the water and the sky and the land, and it worked. And that was the first one I did. And then I started doing them a lot.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: And you and I, I think, had a conversation at that time about trees. And how you paint a lot of trees, but trees are not as easy as people might think. It's not as easy as just putting lines on a canvas.

Jane Dahmen: Right. Because a lot of stuff is going on in the woods, falling-down trees and branches and debris everywhere. And so I kind of have to make sense of it. But I've decided I don't really need to make so much sense of it anymore. I'm kind of thinking to go a little more intuitive about it, because it is pretty messy in there, and it's okay.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So why did you feel the need to make sense of it before?

Jane Dahmen: You know, I don't know. It was just the way I was thinking, I guess. I'm trying now to get my mind out of my work, so that the God inside me, or the uncaused cause, or whatever you want to call it, that lives in here, comes out without any mind-altering fear or criticism. You know what I mean? And if I can keep my mind out of my work, I think it's a lot better for me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So you brought with you some of your recent pieces. Well, you didn't bring them with you, you brought your binder that talks about them. And you currently have a show up at the Portland Art Gallery. And I'm interested to hear you describe them, because what I've loved with your work in particular is that it evolves, and then it evolves again, and it evolves again. And I think the last time I interviewed you, I told you that we have one of your earlier works, and it looks completely different from the works in your show now. So tell me about the works that you most recently put in the Portland Art Gallery show.

Jane Dahmen: Okay. Well, they're very colorful, and they show, I would say, I'm trying to get my intuition to be the most important thing about this work. So they're very colorful. They don't always make sense. I like indigenous art, which is very organic. And I like the little stripes and the marks and the dots that they put on in the work. So I let myself do that. And the trees don't look like real trees. They look like trees that I made. And it just made me so happy to be able to be free like that and do that. Because before, I felt a sense of trying to make them look real. I don't know why, I just did. But now I don't want to do that. So they're very colorful, and they're, I would say not abstract, but they're my trees. They don't look like other trees. And also, I took a break after my last big amount of work that I did, and went into fertile laziness, as Bo Bartlett calls it, which I love that term, because it's so full of something. You don't have to be working, but you're still thinking, and you're still mulling things over. And I was looking at Matthew Wong's work. He died very young, but he did some beautiful work. And he happened to like Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, both of whom I interviewed, and both of whose work I like. And David Hockney, who I like. And I thought, wow, he likes the people I like, I like what he's doing. I'm going to extend what he's doing and keep going with it. So that's part of the reason I had the confidence to do the dots and the lines without making too much sense of them.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You also have a piece that is a different color than you use oftentimes. And this one, I think, is called Yellow Hill.

Jane Dahmen: Oh, right. Quite a few people have mentioned that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You use a lot of great colors. A lot of them are very bright. I'm actually wearing this color, as I've already told you, in honor of Jane Dahmen, because you use a lot of pinks and reds. But you created this piece, Yellow Hill. What inspired you to do that?

Jane Dahmen: Wow. It just came out of me. I don't know, because I haven't really done something like that before. And I did it with pen and ink and acrylic paint. But this is what's happening, and I'm happy about it, because I'm making paintings that maybe don't make a lot of sense, but they are coming out of something, which is what I'm after. I want to get to my soul and get that showing on the canvas somehow. Does that make sense?

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah. It's interesting that at some point something inside you was saying, I'm resonating with yellow today, and I'm going to use this particular color. And when I think about how that connects back to your soul, it just makes me wonder.

Jane Dahmen: Well, colors are very, red gives me energy and talks to me about excitement. Blue is more peaceful, calm. Green is very natural and kind of soothing. And yellow is very happy. It's like the sun. So color means a lot to me that way. And I don't know if it means the same to everybody or not, but that's what it means to me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So the fact that in some of your other pieces you use so many different colors. You have one that's called River Landscape, for example. Colors galore on that one. So does that mean a sort of a mixture of emotions? Does that mean a kind of a multicolored version of your soul?

Jane Dahmen: Maybe a multicolored version of my soul. I painted under that one a whole lot of orange paint. I've never done that before. And it kept creeping out behind other things I put down. And I loved the way it looked, so I just kept up with it, keeping my brain out of the work. Ordinarily I would've said, oh, you better not do that, that's another color you're putting in there. I just let it happen. And that's what I'm trying to do, because I think it's very freeing to feel like I can do whatever I want to do in there. And there are no rules. We are meant to, I think, let the creativity out. That's what we're all meant to do. I love, you know, Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident, has said that creativity is part of human nature. It can only be untaught. I love that. And he's going around the world, because he's worried the Chinese educational system is actually making it impossible to develop critical, unique thinking. And he's right. These people are all in a system. And so we need to value our freedom here in this country, of being free to do whatever we want to do without anybody telling us, you can't do that. So I'm on a big something of freedom, trying to be free, and valuing it, and knowing it's very fragile in this culture. It's fragile. And we're having some problems with people who want to tell other people what they should or shouldn't do. And that's a slippery slope.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I worry about that too. Even when it comes, arguably, in some cases, people believe it's coming from the right place, that they should tell people what to do. Because they think their way is the right way.

Jane Dahmen: Sure. They're well-meaning, maybe, but it's very, very dangerous.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It shuts down conversation. It causes people to retreat back into themselves, so that you can't actually have a back and forth about a shared experience. So I'm with you. I feel troubled by that.

Jane Dahmen: Yeah. It's very fragile, this freedom we have. I don't think people always think about it that much.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You're trying to explore that in your art, it sounds like.

Jane Dahmen: I am. It makes me incredibly happy to feel that I am free in my studio, with nobody, including myself, telling me what I can or can't do, because of this thing I feel in here that I don't really know where it comes from. It's not out there, but it's all the answers to my problems. It's all the creativity that I have. I think it lives in your soul. That's my feeling. I don't know how true it is, but it's what I'm going through right now.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: To me, it reminds me of the idea of the still small voice, and acknowledging the still small voice. And it is hard. It's really hard to do that. Because I think when we hear so many other people's, sometimes much louder, much bigger voices around us, then it's easy to say, oh, okay, sure, that sounds good.

Jane Dahmen: That's so true. Oh my gosh. And now with all these devices, to use a device, you're using your brain, you're not using your intuition. And then I worry about AI, and I think it's wonderful what's happening, but it's also scary. But can a robot ever have a soul? I don't think so. I don't know. I've been thinking a lot about that. How would they get a soul? What is a soul? What is the God in you? And where does it come from? That kind of thing.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: These are big questions you're asking. I love these big questions, because I sometimes think about them too. But I think they're the kind of questions that you could give up on pretty easily, because you don't have the answers. You're like, well, I don't know what the answer is. Probably will never get to the answer, I suspect.

Jane Dahmen: Well, not in my lifetime. I don't know that you could ever have a robot that had a soul. I don't think there's too much going on in there, and we're all too unique. I think you could get pretty close to it, and you could maybe do a lot of damage and a lot of good. But I don't know if you could ever have a soul in a robot. But I'll be long dead and gone by the time that answer comes around. Maybe. Everything's happening so fast, maybe I won't. I don't know.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see on that one.

Jane Dahmen: But I try not to use my devices as much as I'd like to. It's very tempting. But I think it's better to be quiet and put those away a little bit, at least once a day.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: That's what I actually enjoy about spending time with patients.

Jane Dahmen: I bet.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Because I don't bring my phone into a patient encounter with me. And particularly when I am doing acupuncture with patients, I don't even turn the electronic health record on, so I don't turn the computer on. And that's great. So it's just that space. It's just that interaction. It's just that conversation, and that ability to work with healing in a really different way.

Jane Dahmen: I love acupuncture. Do you ask them to take their phones out?

Dr. Lisa Belisle: That is an interesting question. I try to respect where people are coming from. I never want to say, don't use your phone. Because if they have a grandmother who's in the ICU, it's going to cause them stress not to be able to connect. However, if somebody has a phone with them, I'll say, would you like me to put this over here for you? If they already have needles in, would you like me to press the turn-them-off button for you? So give them the opportunity to do that. But I think there's also, in interactions, when you have that separate device over there, it actually changes the human interaction. And particularly in something like health and wellness. There's the physical electromagnetic field. But you're also impacted by this idea that both people's brains are kind of always distracted by something external to them.

Jane Dahmen: That pinging. You hear the pinging. Even in another room, I can hear it if I am not careful. So I have to put it far away. But yeah, it's the world we live in. So much good is done on the phone, but I think it's valuable to realize that that isn't everything. That doesn't answer everything, and not to forget about this other stuff.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I agree. So one of the pieces that you have currently, and I actually hope that nobody buys it, because I'm actually hoping my husband will buy it for our house.

Jane Dahmen: He doesn't hear this, of course.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It's also one of his favorites. It's called Run. And I think what you're describing is the way that I feel when I am running. And I love the fact that, and actually it was my husband who brought this forward, for those of you who don't know, my husband is Kevin Thomas. He owns the Portland Art Gallery. So there's that, just full disclosure. But he actually sent me a picture of this piece, and I was in the middle of my medical day doing medical things, and I was like, wow, that just makes me so happy. Because it reminds me of how I feel when I run, when I'm out in the woods, when I'm out on the trails, and the freedom that you're describing, and the interacting with the nature. Because there isn't really a way that I can be continually looking at my phone as I'm running. That wouldn't really work.

Jane Dahmen: Thank goodness.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yes, exactly. And oftentimes I won't even listen to music, or it'll just be quiet.

Jane Dahmen: That's good.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So to me, and this is just my take on this particular piece, it really did speak of freedom.

Jane Dahmen: Oh good. I'm so glad. I love exercise. It's one of my loves. I love painting and I love exercise. I don't run, I used to run. I play pickleball and I lift weights and I have done some yoga, but I don't know if I'm going to keep doing it, because it's really strenuous for my knees. But I'm going to try and find some poses that I can do in the morning early, because I just like getting exercise. But that particular one, I had actually painted it before I put the runner in it. And I thought, this looks like a runner. So I'm glad you felt that way.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: As you're talking about the idea of the soul, and you keep coming back to here, and it's sort of the heart and the center. One of the things I've always loved about Chinese medicine and acupuncture is the idea that you have energy running throughout your body, and it's all connected. The meridians are kind of bringing this energy to your extremities, to your brain. And so there's a knowing inside your body that is outside of what we think of as our hearts or our brains. And your piece kind of suggests that this freedom, this exercise, it's a way for our bodies to kind of continue to exercise. So whether it's pickleball or yoga or running, I think it's not just about, let's keep the cells healthy and the heart pumping and the blood flowing. It's also about connecting to the wisdom that we all carry in ourselves, that's not just the neurons.

Jane Dahmen: I love that idea. I think there might be brains throughout our whole body. Not brains, but sensitivities. And I don't think we know all that. We will find out eventually, because things like acupuncture do such a good job. Chinese medicine is really very helpful. And I think they look at it a little differently, maybe, you're describing that. I don't know enough about how the body actually works. I just think I've read before that there might be thoughts throughout our whole body. Like maybe our stomach is telling our brain to do something different. We have a feeling in our stomach. Maybe we shouldn't do that. It's not coming from the brain, it's coming from the stomach.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah. Think about all the, you know, you have to listen to your gut.

Jane Dahmen: That's the thing I heard. I listened to my gut, and that's why I didn't do it. And maybe there's some truth to that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: And I agree. It's not just Chinese medicine, it is Ayurvedic medicine, as you've described. There are also indigenous cultures that have their own healing systems, and they really do think about medicine in a less reductive way. What's wonderful about what we know about medicine, we'll say Western medicine, is that we can get down to the neurons and the cells and the biochemistry, and that is wonderful. And it's also a little bit reductive. So it kind of disconnects us from the larger systems approach. So I agree with you. I think there's something that we can learn from the way that other systems have approached healing over the years.

Jane Dahmen: And they can learn from us. We've done amazing things with broken bones and all kinds of drugs. But yeah, indigenous people and Ayurvedic people and Chinese medicine and all can teach us something too.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yes. So we can all listen to our own selves, and we can engage in our art and our creativity, and integrate what other people have to say and other systems have given us, and also believe in our own ability to have knowledge.

Jane Dahmen: I think so. I think your own health is really important. And I think you have these gut feelings and these intuitions that lead you to good health, sometimes. Of course, everybody suffers. It's just the human condition. But some people are victims, and other people suffer, but they think, okay, what will I do about it? And then I'll move on. And so those two ways of dealing with it are very different.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yes. The way that we frame things, it does make a big difference. So what else should I know about your art, and what else do you think people who are listening would like to know about your art?

Jane Dahmen: Well, I wrote a few notes down. This one thing I noticed when I was looking at my art was, there's rivers in every one of the paintings. Maybe not in the runner, let's see if there is. It's because I live on a river, and I absolutely love the river. It's very comforting to me. Ah, there's a river in the runner. There's river in all the.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: The runner.

Jane Dahmen: It's the runner.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Okay. The runner. All right, well good. Now everybody's going to know, and they're going to buy it before I get a chance to get it. But anyway, the runner.

Jane Dahmen: But rivers are imbued in me somehow. I don't know how, but I look out there every day, and it's a tidal river. So I'm looking at the different looks. Low tide is beautiful, high tide is beautiful. I love the ripples. I love to be able to go out in my kayak on it. And it's very safe, because it's a river, it's not the ocean. We tried to buy a house on the ocean, but it was very expensive, all of these houses we looked at. And we were visiting my sister in Damariscotta, and they said, why don't you go look across the river, there's a house for sale. And I thought, oh, another house, because we'd looked at about fifty houses, and my husband had practically given up that we would ever find one that I liked. And the minute I saw it, I said, I could live here. I love it. It needed a lot of work. But what we both loved was the river. And we hadn't been there five minutes, but Joe went down and got some oysters off the shore. Just wonderful oysters, these tiny delicious oysters. And the whole river is a working river. They have oyster farms up and down the river, and some of the spat falls off and comes to the shore. We went to the town office to see if we needed a license, but at the time we moved here, in 2004, you did not need a license. Now you do. But it's not very expensive, and it's worth it, because they're delicious oysters. They're all a little different. So I love the river. And it had brick built along the river, because it's very dense mud and clay in that river. It's very clean now. The Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust has done an amazing job of cleaning the river. It's just very clean. You can swim in there, and it's wonderful. And there was one other thing. Oh, I know, the Darling Center and Bigelow Laboratory are along the river, and they do so much good. Bigelow Laboratory is doing stuff that's going to change the planet. And the Darling Center is the University of Maine marine laboratory, which is wonderful, studying crustaceans and fish, climate change, all that. So it's a really great river.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: And it's well represented in your work.

Jane Dahmen: It's in every painting. I can't believe it. Isn't that funny how that happens? And I didn't realize it till I was thinking about what I would talk about. And I thought, wow, there you go.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You're connecting to the flow.

Jane Dahmen: Well, and the other thing I was going to say is that being an artist is like running a small business. And so the gallery is very helpful. Some galleries are more helpful than others in helping run this business, because artists are usually good at painting, but the other part of it is not easy. So I'm very grateful to the Portland Art Gallery for supporting us in that way, so that we can be free to paint.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I'm glad that you say that, because I know that they work very hard, and the people that are at the Portland Art Gallery feel the same way about the artists as you're describing feeling about them.

Jane Dahmen: It's a good relationship. They do their job, we do our job, and it all works. It's wonderful.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It's a good ecosystem.

Jane Dahmen: Really is.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, Jane, I'll have to have you come back in another few years. We'll have another podcast. You'll probably have another completely different body of work, because you just have so much inside of you. It's wonderful that you took the time to come here and have this conversation with me today.

Jane Dahmen: Well, I enjoyed it. I always learn something from you, Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You do a lot of good in the world. So I think the feeling is quite mutual. So we're a mutual admiration society. Thank you. And thank you for teaching me as well.

Jane Dahmen: Thanks.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I've been speaking with artist Jane Dahmen. I encourage you to go to the Portland Art Gallery and see her work in person if possible, because the scale that we keep referring to really does something different than seeing it online. However, if you go online, it is also equally wonderful. And please do not buy the runner, however, because I would like that for my own house. That's my final pitch on this topic. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you have been listening to or watching Radio Maine. Thank you, Jane.