Joshua Ferry by Edgar Allen Beem
This essay was originally commissioned to appear in Maine Art New, a selection of essays and artist profiles edited by Edgar Allen Beem. The Quimby Family Foundation awarded a grant to the University of Maine Press; however, after a long, difficult history, the press canceled the book. The new book on contemporary art in Maine, was meant to update Beem’s 1990 Maine Art Now. The artist gratefully received the author’s permission to share the unpublished essay here.
In 2005, the same year Joshua Ferry stepped onto the Maine exhibition stage with a large painting in the Portland Museum of Art Biennial, he created a painting entitled "Delegates" that spelled out his Maine aesthetic heritage. In a painted word style reminiscent of Robert Indiana, Ferry listed the Maine painters who had influenced him - Lynch, Bray, Ross, Cambronne, Bradford, Indiana, Hartley, Jacquette, Dodd, Bell, Welliver, Wethli, Parker, Mayers, Cady, Higgins, Frederick.
The painting also contained numbers of significance to Ferry - 71 (the year he was born), 87 (the year he moved to Maine), 92 (the year he committed himself to painting), 97 (the year he left Maine for New Jersey), 05 (the year the painting was painted).
The painting that propelled Josh Ferry to public attention in the 2005 PMA biennial was "Casket," an abstracted image of a flag-draped casket, just three receding red stripes and four white against a field of green. Part of his 2004-2006 War Series, 'Casket" embodied Ferry's ongoing commitment to painting along the edge between representation and abstraction, informing his formalism with social and emotional content.
Born in Massachusetts and raised in New Hampshire, Ferry moved to Augusta when he was 15 and graduated from Cony High School in 1990. Art was always part of his life. "I'd come home from a long day at school, close the door, and draw. It was a way to take control of the chaos of the day, a way for me to regroup and regain a sense of control."
As a student at Maine College of Art (BFA, 1994), Ferry studied with James Cambronne and Johnnie Winona Ross. Ross, who now lives in New Mexico, was well known and respected in Maine for abstract paintings built up and sanded down with many layers of paint. Ferry, too, took to sanding his work, especially after he spent a couple of post-graduation years sanding Windsor chairs in Lincolnville.
"To this day, it's carried into my work," he says. "Eighty percent of my painting process is sanding. I don't really enjoy it, but your painting process can become about something you don't expect. I think of myself more as a manual laborer than as a painter."
ln 1997, Ferry relocated to New Jersey to do graduate work at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers Universify (MFA, 1999). While working on his master's degree, he also served as a studio assistant in New York City for Donald Sultan, an artist known for his larger-than-life still-life abstractions.
Though Ferry has been based in New Jersey since 1997 [until 2012], he said, "not a day goes by that I don't think about and long to move back to Maine." He does return to his family's cottage in Northport each summer to recharge his batteries, however, and he has primarily exhibited in Maine. Since the 2005 PMA biennial, Ferry has shown at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Perimeter Gallery and Aarhus Gallery in Belfast, and Aucocisco Gallery in Portland.
The War Series that first brought Joshua Ferry to public attention was a response to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and to the fact that the artist had three older brothers in the military. Wrestling with war and thinking of Maine, he created paintings that imagined Maine under altack, bombs being dropped on Bangor Intemational Airport for instance.
When George W. Bush was re-elected in 2008 despite, or perhaps because of the protracted war, Ferry says he began to lose heart and took refuge in a more formalist approach to painting. What began as grid or checkerboard abstractions soon morphed into paintings of multiple crosses such as "Pros & Cons," a painting featured in the 2008 CMCA biennial.
"This painting started as a grey grid," Ferry explains. "Then, I painted color crosses into each square. I was thinking about altar cloths, quilts, and religious banners. Later, I thought of the crosses as plus signs and responded by painting minus signs over them."
The fact that Ferry's father is a minister probably explains some of his attraction to the cruciform, but it does not explain it away. "Crosses are definitely a motif I'm familiar with, an image I grew up with, one I felt a connection to," he says, "but I'm not sure at this point what that connection is."
Ferry's most recent paintings have been single crosses. He cites a comment painter Katherine Bradford once made as informing his thinking about his own work. "I like to think of works of art," Bradford is quoted as saying in Maine Art Now, "as having the same drawing power as the lighted hearth in the kitchen or the lone cross in the corner of a monk's cell."
"As I move farther away from my education," admits Ferry, "half the time I don't know what the work is about. For me, that's a good place to be. I'm more interested in the investigation and when they're completed I enjoy being with these images."
April 2012