One of America's most highly regarded painters of contemporary realism, Bo Bartlett has spent summers on remote Wheaton Island, 23 miles offshore of Port Clyde, Maine, for more than twenty-five years. "It just feels like the way that life is supposed to feel," he says. "You don't have any outside influences, so you are just one with nature out there, and in that regard, you are so much more alive. Out there, you're given the opportunity to not be distracted. You're brought right up to the cusp of life. And it's a beautiful, beautiful way to live, waking up with the sun and going to sleep when it gets dark." For the remainder of the year, Bartlett lives in his hometown of Columbus, Georgia, where his Southern roots inspire paintings of family and friends posed in grand contemporary narratives or in intimate private moments. Cinematic in scope and grounded in the figurative tradition, Bo Bartlett's paintings speak to his training as a filmmaker and to the work of his mentor, Andrew Wyeth, who first introduced him to Maine in the early 1990s, as well as to artistic forebears Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singleton Copley, and Benjamin West. 

The exhibition, "Eye of the Beholder," takes its title from a work by Bartlett depicting a camera on a tripod poised on a rock over the windswept sea, its lens looking out to the open ocean and the world beyond. Painted in gouache on paper, a highly pigmented, water-based medium the artist frequently uses for directly observed works, "Eye of the Beholder," exemplifies his close relationship with nature and his ever-observant eye. The exhibition includes a selection of recent gouaches, new oil portraits, and two large-scale narrative paintings, "The Debutants," and "Shotgun Wedding."