WALDOBORO — “Life is a Carnival: from the Figurative to the Abstract,” a UMVA (Union of Maine Visual Artists) art exhibition, opened at the Bill & Joan Alfond Gallery at The Waldo Theatre on July 6 and runs through August 4. The Gallery is open before each event, during the Waldoboro Artwalk, and by appointment.

Over a dozen artists are showing prints, photography, paintings and more in the spirit of one of UMVA founders, Carlo Pittore. Some of Pittore’s work will be included in the exhibition as well. The documentary film CARLO … and his Merry Band of Artists, by Richard Kane, the latest film in the Maine Artists series, will screen Thursday, July 25, at 7 p.m. There will be an artists' reception before the film, from 4:30 - 6:30 p.m. To purchase tickets for the film, go to: https://www.thewaldotheatre.org/film.

Pittore, In addition to being one of the UMVA founders in 1975, also created “The Academy of Carlo Pittore” in 1987 at his studio in Bowdoinham. Here he invited artists from all over to come and share their knowledge and talents in an academic forum, while he hosted drawing classes, painted and drew the artists (and models) and also cooked for them. The full film portrait of Pittore that emerges in interviews with those who knew him is a collage of Neal Cassady, Pablo Picasso and Emeril Lagasse.

A figurative painter in the modernist manner of Lucian Freud and Alice Neel, Pittore painted in the figurative expressionist and portraiture style; focusing mainly on the nude form of study. On account of this, critics and objectors occasionally viewed his work as “erotic” rather than objective art. Throughout his life, Pittore was extremely vocal toward such critics and what he perceived to be “ignorance” toward his art or art in general. The colors red and green (symbols of the Italian flag) were two essential components in Pittore’s work that defined his belief and understanding of complementary palette application.

The contrast of these two color schemes arise time and again throughout his works; as can be seen in “Portrait of Blair Tily” (1987), “Opera — Self Portrait” (1981), “La Buffonera” (1983), and “Portrait of a Skeptic” (1996). Pittore’s “Lincoln Portrait Series” was the only oil-on-canvas medium in which he worked without color. For this, he painted entirely in black and white due to the fact that the portraits were modeled after 19th-century photographs of Abraham Lincoln.