Westbrook Discovered Gala – Presented by Discover Downtown Westbrook
Date: Thursday, May 23, 2024 Time: 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM Location: BreaLu – 511 Main Street, Westbrook Tickets: $75.00 Per Person Join us for an entertaining evening at the First Annual Westbrook Discovered Gala! This event will take place on Thursday, May 23, 2024, from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM. The gala promises to be a night filled with elegance, entertainment, and a celebration of our vibrant downtown community. Attendees will have the opportunity to indulge in Westbrook cuisine, enjoy live music presented by Plush, and participate in the local artist auction! Tickets for this exclusive event are priced at $75.00 per person, with all proceeds benefiting Discover Downtown Westbrook initiatives. Your support will help us continue our mission to promote, enhance, and showcase the unique charm and offerings of our downtown district. Don’t miss this opportunity to mingle with fellow community members, business owners, and supporters while contributing to a worthy cause. Dress to impress and prepare for an unforgettable night in the heart of Westbrook. Tickets for this exclusive event are limited…to purchase yours today complete the form below!
THANK YOU to our 2024 sponsors!
Downtown Sponsors
Community Sponsors
Auction Artists
Ebenezer grew up in Ghana and says “I’ve always been fascinated with the power of lines, symbols, and designs. My father was an architect, and knew the importance of education. I will never forget him telling me, ‘The only legacy I can give you is your education. If I give you a car, you can crash it. If I give you a house, it can burn down. But with education, you can go anywhere and you can do anything.'”
He pursued a career in the arts and graduated from Maine College of Art, with a Bachelors of Fine Arts. His studies included metalsmithing and jewelry, He also has a Masters of Fine Art in Industrial Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Ebenezer has a studio in the Dana Warp Mill in Westbrook.
Fred Michel
Fred Michel explores Horticultural Art by creating still life images of plants and their parts. Inspired by a love of plants and gardening, Fred Michel’s images are broad and diverse, ranging from botanical to mandalas, patterns, textures, and designs made from plants he disassembles and rearranges.
Michel’s work has been selected for numerous juried shows including New York’s Salmagundi Art Club and Maine’s Barn Gallery, Irvine Gallery, River Arts, University of Maine Atrium Gallery, the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art 2014 Biennial. Michel has shown at Aucocisco Galleries, Hole in the Wall Studioworks, Stonewall Gallery, Saccarappa Art Collective and North Light Gallery. His works have been featured on covers of Science, Holland Herald, and Buried Choirs and include contributions to Architectural Digest and online by Styling Magazine and Abyss and featured in Motel One’s lobby at their Hotel in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Michel is married to landscape painter Caren-Marie Michel and lives in Westbrook, Maine.
Mary Brooking
Mary Brooking is now a mid-career full-time artist with a following throughout Southern Maine and elsewhere. Her collectors appreciate the spiritual and expressionistic direction of her landscape-inspired acrylic paintings. Her artistic vision employs reduction rather than embellishment, distilling elemental truths about the places she paints through interactive color, texture and form. Her work engages the senses of the viewer at the immediate, almost entirely intuitive, point of recognition, testing the balance between representation and abstraction. The process and intention of her work is to develop and deepen visual impressions and memories by exploring interactions of colors, textures and forms with human senses on a primitive level. To interpret landscape, She creates spaces meant to test the balance between reality and abstraction. The viewer is invited to enter these spaces mentally and emotionally. Acrylic paint as a medium forces immediacy in speed and execution, which fits her style and temperament. She uses many layers of paint, frequently obliterating certain elements as the painting progresses, challenging herself to always distill and reduce her original reaction to its essence and nothing more.
Mary has a BFA with a concentration in painting, Hiram College (Ohio) 1978. She had a career in the corporate world as a graphic design/illustration and art director 1981-2000. She taught painting from 2013-2023. She was Director for Continuum For Creativity, Westbrook 2015-2021. She has worked as a full-time painter since 2002.
She has shown extensively in Maine and New England and is represents by; Ocean House Gallery, Casco Bay Artisans and Art3 Gallery in Manchester NH.
Caren-Marie Michel
Caren-Marie Sargent Michel was born in Portland, Maine is a lifelong Maine resident and a devoted plein air painter working in acrylic and pastel. Michel is Past President of the Pastel Painters of Maine, past Treasurer of the Union of Maine Visual Artists and past President and current Treasurer of Westbrook Arts and Culture. Michel earned her B.F.A. in painting from Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art.) Michel’s work has been selected for juried shows throughout the US and Canada.
In Maine, Michel’s work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery at University of New England, Bates College Museum of Art, Aucocisco Galleries, USM LA Atrium Gallery, Carver Hill Gallery, The Jameson Gallery, North Light Gallery and Littlefield Gallery. Michel’s work has been juried for publication in the University of Southern Maine’s 2002 and 2004 Words and Images. “Bangor and AR” was included in David Little’s book Art of Katahdin hardcover 200 pages Down East Books (May 16, 2013) and “A Mountain Rises: The Art of Katahdin” at the University of New England Art Gallery.
In 2013, Michel’s first international solo exhibition “New Brunswick Panorama” was shown at the Saint John Arts Centre, St. John, New Brunswick, Canada. In 2015, Michel’s work was featured in a solo exhibit in Augusta, Maine through the Maine Arts Commission’s Art in the Capitol program. Michel was awarded a residency at the Stephen Pace House in Stonington, Maine by Maine College of Art in 2016 and in 2018 at Baie Ste. Marie in New Edinburg, Nova Scotia. Michel’s work was selected for the 2018 release of Paintings of Portland (Down East Books) by David Little and Carl Little. Michel is represented by Littlefield Gallery in Winter Harbor, Maine, Hole in the Wall Studioworks in Raymond, Maine and Yarmouth Frame & Gallery in Yarmouth, Maine.
“I have become a dedicated plein air painter exploring locations on the coast, in New Brunswick and the interior of Maine. Painting plein air can be intensely quiet; the many challenges of plein air painting draw me to the outdoors as one would think that they repel. I travel around Maine to paint what I see and experience in the landscape, to see color and to paint it. I am also drawn to paint the manmade landscape, buildings, bridges, and structures that we see and pass by every day. I love the changing effects of light, shadows and weather and sharing what I see with paint.”
Michael Shaughnessy
Since 1984 Shaughnessy has created installations and exhibitions nationally. He is known for his large-scale sculptural works of woven and bound hay. He has shown at museums and contemporary art centers such as the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Southeast Center For Contemporary Art, Exit Art and PS 1 in NYC, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art/KCMO, Mesa Contemporary Art, Portland Museum of Art, Maine Center for Contemporary Art, Decordova Museum, Lincoln MA, Wyoming Art Museum/, and recently the Craft Alliance of St. Louis. As well he has exhibited at many Universities. These include Michigan State, University of Missouri, Colorado State University, Indiana State University, Bates College, Rice University, University of Memphis, Penn State, and Virginia Commonwealth University. He won the jurors award in the Portland Museum of Art 2011 Biennial. His most impactful work was the Hay Ball , A large perfect sphere of hay seemingly precariously placed on the top of his car. He drove it around locally and across the country. Now that Shaughnessy has retired the Hay Ball will be returning in 2024.
For over thirty-five years Michael Shaughnessy has taught sculpture design and drawing at the University of Southern Maine. He has a long involvement with political and community activism. He is the President of the Friends of the Presumpscot River and was one of its founders. He and Malory have four grown sons and five grandchildren. They live on a small farm in Westbrook in a house overlooking and the Presumpscot River just above Saccarappa Falls.
Sarah Knight-Webber
Sarah Webber’s Art is multi layered. She describes her community based work as “creative facilitations”. In this she sets a prompt from which numerous images are made, She then takes them and assembles them into a larger piece. Effectively facilitating a collaboration. This work often carries themes of individuality, community and place. The latter can be seen in the large painting “Our Paper City” where numerous interpretations of windows are developed into a quilt inspired collage.
Her personal work draws from this community work but also folk art traditions, abstract expressionism and pattern painting. She employs a keen sense of color with a vigorous and intuitive mark that seems utterly spontaneous but are applied with both purpose and control. These are frenetic in the application but ultimately have a cohesiveness that sneaks up on the viewer.
Sarah lives and works in Westbrook.
Patti Ham Campbell
Glassy Art LLC & Tumbled Glass Creations
Thank you for donating your art work to the gala, Patti!
