Maine artist Abbott Meader turns 91 this month (August 2026). Abbott graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1957. He then went to France on a grant to continue painting, where he met his future wife Nancy. In 1958, he and Nancy went to graduate school in Colorado, where they became friends with Jane and Stan Brakhage. Among other things, Brakhage showed Abbott how to paint and scratch on 16mm film strips. Excerpts from such early works are seen here. Abbott taught art at Colby College for many years. He continued to make films until about 1985, when Kodak stopped making color reversal film stock. His last film, Parting Shots (1985-86) is excerpted here along with many notable films in between. I met Abbott in 1972, when he was animating Angel of the Hours, a series of 24 paintings, one for each hour of the day. Abbott's animation is lost, but we recreated it digitally for this film. I previously made two films about exhibitions of Abbott's paintings, Push Pins on Parade (2013) and Land Visions and thereafter (2021), both excerpted here. Universal themes run through Abbott's work with family at its heart. Abbott produced a series of ceramic masks working with Nancy, a potter, and he uses his children's artwork for a series of Inventions on a Child's Drawing. Musical passages include grooves by his son Darmon on piano and sax, along with a brief excerpt from the aria Nessun Dorma performed by Pavarotti, and wisps of Fleetwood Mac's Rhiannon among many other sounds and sweet airs.

   

Autobiography of B.B. Williams

The first films I worked on were at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, which, at the time (1966-1970), did not have a filmmaking program. They had cameras - a Bolex, an Eclair, a Canon Scoopic - and a Nagra tape recorder. They told us to experiment. I loved that Nagra. We called it "Mud Mud Oy Cuff." We made lots of films, at least five. At the same time, to keep the draft board at bay, I went to UCLA for two summers. UCLA at that time was one of the preeminent film schools in the country. They would not let me make any films at all. After graduation, I went to Cartegena, Colombia. My second day in country I met Joëlle de la Casinière of the Montfaucon Research Center, with whom I would eventually make Le Petit Touriste in Peru and Tableaux des Indes Galantes in Colombia (both ca.1975). In 1972, I moved to Maine, where I met Abbott Meader. With Abbott and Huey (James Coleman) we made several movies, including Snake Dance Teacher Dance (1977-78) with Arthur Hall of Philadelphia. In 1978 I filmed Arthur and company in Salvador da Bahia in Brazil, a film with A-B-C rolls, which I finally had the funds to print in 1982. I then spent several years crying in the wilderness of analog videotapes. In 1994, with Arthur and my wife Patrice Janssen, we formed Ile Ile Films and the Arthur Hall Collection, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, to support a proposed film on the thirty year history of the Arthur Hall Afro-American Dance Ensemble (1958-1988), which was never made. We did, however, gather and preserve some 250 hours of archival materials for the Arthur Hall Collection, which are now in the Special Collections Research Center at Temple University Libraries in Philadelphia. Arthur passed in 2000, but his nonprofit lives on, dedicated to the arts and education. I also worked at Orono as a sound preservationist for the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History. Early in the new century I got a high school English teacher's certificate and spent a decade bouncing around Maine's public schools, teaching everything from Kindergarten art through Latin II. Now, with substantial digital archives of Arthur's work, Abbott's work, and my own work, and with powerful digital editing tools, I am exploring what varied forms such a wealth of materials might take. The possibilities are vast! My best example of that so far is Nervous Casting Eye: Excerpts, details & reproductions from the works of C. Abbott Meader (2026).

Filmmaker's Statement

My work with Abbott Meader progressed through stages: appreciating his films as made by an individual artist with a Bolex and a tape recorder; then auditing his classes on similarly equipped filmmakers - Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, Bruce Connor; then collaborating on filmmaking as MICA (Maine Independent Cinema Arc), most notably American Odyssey for the American Orff Schulwerk Association; then as a preservationist helping to create a digital archive of his 16mm films; then making small changes to some of his films - removing splice marks, adding titles and editing as he directed (Abbott doesn't mind the splice marks); then producing two films documenting exhibitions of his paintings; and, finally, this composition, combining his films and his paintings - Nervous Casting Eye: Excerpts, details & reproductions from the works of C. Abbott Meader.