studioe

Gail Spaien
Website | @gailspaien

EXHIBITIONS
Through the Looking-Glass, Group, Dec 2025, studio e, Seattle WA
Gail Spaien & Heather Wilcoxon, Duo, October 2023, studio e, Seattle, WA
Seattle Art Fair, July 27 - 30 2023, Seattle WA
TINTE: 2022, Seattle WA
In here: August 7 - Septemenber 11, 2021

BIO
Gail Spaien is an American artist and former educator based in Maine. Her studio practice centers around the idea that a painting is a site of connection, an object that transmits emotion from one person to another. She is of a lineage of artists who believe craft and beauty help to imagine and build a more relational world.

Spaien has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Ucross Foundation, Varda Artist Residency Program, Djerassi Foundation Resident Artists Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has received grant funding from the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Foundation, the Maine Arts Commission, and the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions, including Taymour Grahne Projects, Dubai, UAE (2025); Mrs. Gallery, NY; Nancy Margolis Gallery, NY; Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK; Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME; Ellen Miller Gallery, Boston, MA; and Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME. Group exhibitions include Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; 1969 Gallery, NY; studio e, Seattle, WA; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA; University of New Hampshire Museum, Durham, NH; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, ME; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; and the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA.

Spaien received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and BFA from the University of Southern Maine. After thirty years as a faculty member at the Maine College of Art and Design, she is now full-time in the studio.


VIEW SELECT AVAILABLE WORK︎

My paintings are places, and I approach them as such. As a painter, I turn my back on the external world and enter the world of the painting. I hope a viewer might do that too. When people say, “I want to go there,” I feel I have hit the mark in some way.

The way I make my work is a performance of slowness. Created through repetitive handcraft, my process reflects an intimate, intentional way of experiencing and translating my surroundings. Blending still life with landscape, often depicting a unification between the interior and exterior, the paintings are compact reductions of lived experiences — permeable arenas of contemplation. Spectators become inhabitants of a world in slower motion.

Marked by decorative patterning, flattened space, and slightly skewed perspectives, my paintings are inspired by the landscape that surrounds me — both observed and imagined. They celebrate beauty in the ordinary and suggest that attention to the rhythms and activities of daily life, rooted in the well-worn paths of routine, can be a form of quiet resistance and renewal.

Painting the invisible substance of daily life is like arranging a bouquet — a small, visual reminder of the relationship between the spiritual and familiar earthly rhythms that keep us rooted and connected.