World of Wheaton: BETSY EBY AND BO BARTLETT

It is not difficult to learn about Betsy Eby. There are books. There are articles galore. She and her husband, artist Bo Bartlett, recently released a documentary film called See, which follows them on a highly visual cross-country adventure gone ironically awry. Over the past year the traveling exhibition, Betsy Eby: Painting with Fire, has been moving viewers in Columbus, Georgia, Augusta, Georgia, and most recently, in Maine, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in Rockport this past summer. After poring over her work, I went, equipped with my own questions, to Wheaton, the Maine island where she lives and works with Bartlett in the summers. I wanted to hear her speak about her art, but also about her life. I wanted to see this woman in action, in silence, at work in her studio on a speck of land in the Atlantic.