Deborah Wing-Sproul wants us to question everything.

Tacked to the wall of Buzz Masters’s studio is a piece of paper ripped from a sketch pad. Like a child’s copybook, the page is covered with a repeated line of text written in cursive: This is not your emergency. “That’s the mantra of emergency medicine,” she explains. “Stay calm, don’t get involved in other people’s grief. It’s a way to keep working.” Since moving to Deer Isle 23 years ago, Masters has volunteered with the local ambulance corps. “My family was very big on community se

Found in Translation Painter Elise Ansel interprets the Old Masters with a modern female voice “I took this work by Titian and I turned it upside down.”  Elise Ansel is sitting in her studio in Portland’s West End, the walls covered with her large-scale abstract paintings. Pinned by some are small reproductions of works by the old masters: Titian, Michelangelo, Tiepolo. She picks up an image of Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia in one hand, rotates it and sets it alongside a catalog photo of her

Interdisciplinary artist and celebrated children’s book author Ashley Bryan finds inspiration off the coast of Maine. The mail boat ferries passengers and provisions from Northeast Harbor, Maine, to Islesford. Only six miles from the mainland, the island feels worlds away from nearby Bar Harbor, with its bustling tourist shops and restaurants. About 50 or 60 people live there year-round, with five times that number during the summer season. Fishing is the only industry; stacks of lobster trap

Brunswick, Maine, sculptor John Bisbee transforms common carpentry nails into an array of uncommon artwork. “Seriously, guys, pull your head out of your ass and look at that thing. It’s amazing, isn’t it? The best ever.” John Bisbee pauses briefly in his work to stare at his latest creation, hung on the wall of his shop in Brunswick, Maine, earlier that day: a 19 × 30 in. steel sheet cutout of the United States, covered with clusters of “Bitsbees”—a play on the digital currency

NORTH ADAMS — In Mass MoCA’s hangar-size Building 5, a 300-foot swath of old railroad ties gently curves across the worn concrete floor. Sunlight streams through the rows of windows lining the brick walls of the former factory, projecting bands of light down the building’s length that mirror, and engage with, the stretch of track — a crossroads of the natural world and the manmade. “I work on the edge between nature and culture,” says sculptor Richard Nonas, walking through the cavernous galler

Listening to artist Jim Shaw describe his work, one yearns for an encyclopedia. “I wanted to do something about the river as a barrier between this world and the next,” explains Shaw, standing in front of a large vintage theatrical backdrop of a river scene. On it he’s painted dozens of ghostlike, comic characters. “I’d been working on William Blake, and I realized that Blake was riffing a lot on the figurative work of Michelangelo, so most of the male figures came from a Michelangelo sketch f

NORTH ADAMS — In the basement of Mass MoCA, artist Jena Priebe and an assistant stand at a wooden worktable, carefully gluing vintage book pages onto long, narrow strips of flexible metal covered in construction paper. “There will be a room with an easy chair and ottoman, a lamp and a rug,” says Priebe, describing “The Secret Lives of Books,” her new installation. “And there’s an open book on the ottoman erupting with pages — spilling onto the floor and climbing up the walls. There’s so much en