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 For three decades, Sharon Arnold’s photographic work has yielded explosions of creativity rooted in vexed optimism and a vision of existence obscured by the surface of worldly life.

Arnold produces highly staged and manipulated images that conjure a dream-like state of both loss and strength. Her motifs favor the off-kilter and the bygone; the splayed, fallen and askew; and a hint of voodoo. Her models are humans as armatures that are draped with vintage garb and significant gestures, and surrounded and overlaid by symbolic props. Her themes have been consistent over the years – a dive into the human and natural nightmares of the world, a search for lifelines. But the images that invigorate those themes have evolved through many worlds of fantasy, paralleled by the fantastical evolution of her technique.

Growing up on a rural back road and living in a nearby fishing village all her adult life, Arnold is this year’s winner of a Gold Award in the metaphor/abstract category in B&W + Color Magazine’s single image contest; she is a fine art category finalist in the United Kingdom’s Julia Margaret Cameron Award competition. Most recently, her work has been seen at the University of Southern Maine Art Gallery in Gorham and the Palmina F. and Stephen S. Pace Galleries of Art at Fryeburg Academy. Galerie BMG in Woodstock, N.Y., will carry her photos, starting at the end of May. Her work can also be seen at voxphotographs.com, where she is represented by Heather Frederick. Her work has been shown in galleries, primarily in Maine since 1989.

Arnold’s creativity has been nurtured by rural solitude, family, reading, and a tendency toward self-invention. Her work doesn’t fit neatly into a box of coastal loveliness. There is no rendering of a familiar exterior of the ocean and boats and dense woods that populate the landscape surrounding her home.

Instead, her mind seems knotted by spectral imagery. Her deepest relationships are with lost souls, barely seen, once ascendant and now fallen. Her head is populated by antique toys, overblown roses, tragic celebrities, day-old bouquets, dim ateliers, fairy-tale totems, splayed limbs, bowed heads, featureless faces, distant horizons, occult atmospheres, grandma’s checkered linoleum, and angel wings. Her perception occurs just beyond the perceptible screen, making of life a ferment of signs and symbols. It becomes her task, as an artist, to sort and transform the ferment into a coherent body of work.

For the umpteenth time, Arnold did not get a good night’s sleep because of her insomnia. When I went to see her recently, she was cooking up a stir-fry and listening to music after stowing the dog, Cal, in the office of her husband, residential designer George Gekas. I arrived to the sound of Cal barking and the aroma of cigarette smoke on the semi-finished back deck of the couple’s home. Like many husbands who build, Gekas had designed a unique house – multi-level groundfloor, extended line of sight through the rooms, a spiral staircase – but, four decades in, hasn’t found the time yet to finish the exposed sheetrock and window trim.

Arnold gave the fry pan one last stir, and turned off the flame and the music.

“Would you like a cup of tea? Brandy? Scotch?” she asked, joking, but ready to provide.

With dog confined and husband off on an errand, the house was quiet. Arnold led the way to the living room, where the couch and side chair were clothed in makeshift white slipcovers. A wrinkled cotton throw rug anchored a marble-topped coffee table; the off-white walls were spotted with age and sparsely  hung with decor. On the mantelpiece of a cement fireplace sat a grandmother clock, an illustration from “Alice in Wonderland,” and six bunny figurines, one of them gold-foiled and presumably an old Easter treat.

The living room was Arnold’s workspace; her desk stood under a miniature cathedral window and a pair of thickly trimmed square windows. The desk held a personal computer, a laptop, and three external hard drives. A child’s gold crown and a professional camera light, mounted on a stand, were  nearby.

Arnold sat at her laptop, put on a pair of red reading glasses and pulled up the photo-editing program she uses to manipulate images. Her legs twined tightly around each other and her shoulders hunched forward. Her brown hair was tied up in a ponytail, a stray wisp hanging down on her neck.

Popping up on the screen were dozens of folders, each filled with dozens of iterations of each work in her latest series, called “Lost Highways.” Arnold peered intently at the screen and opened and closed folders and files to find those that still had a work-in-progress quality. She muttered, blaming herself and confounding the computer for not being able to  find the right thing right away. “Um” was the interspersed utterance of choice.

Like previous series, “Lost Highways” is highly staged and crafted. The images generally depict slender, female figures in vintage garb and set outdoors, usually on a shore or pier. A technique of her work, which evolves with new technologies, involves the use of layers. At the moment, she wanted to show the many layers that go into the making of a final product.

She opened an image that depicted a dimly discernible woman, dressed in a long gown and lying on the shore of an indistinct lake; angel wings extended from the figure. The image had a painterly quality, right down to the crackling effect of aging oils.

 “Normally when you take a picture, it wouldn’t have that crackle effect,” she said. “But what I’ve done is, I’ve made all these background…um…”

She turned away from the screen and opened up a non-cyber folder full of paintings, most of them a combination of oil washes on watercolor paper, some of them having ornamentation. The washes were done in drab hues such as olive and rust. The final wash was done with “crackle paint” – a type of clear finish that dries with small cracks and lets the base coat shine through.

Arnold had scanned the paintings into her computer, and used them as backgrounds or overlays for her photographs, to add a crepe-skinned texture.

“And then I decide which one I want to use in a picture to…um… let me go into this,” she said, as she looked for another example. “Let me find one that I can show you the difference between… a…um…layer…”

When she opened a photograph, a toolbar also opened that showed the many effects that were layered over the original image. These included her painted backgrounds, images lifted from other photos she’s shot, and standards seen with any photo manipulation program, such as exposure and tint.

 

She searched for an image that wasn’t “flattened” – a final merging of all the layers that could not be unmerged.

I said it was nice to know such a creative and kind of wacky person in the little village of Bass Harbor.

She chuckled.

“Wacky would be a really good word,” she said.

Perhaps, I said, if she lived in New York City, she would be the belle of the ball.

“You think?” she said. “I’d like to be the belle of the ball. I’d like to be Patti Smith.”

A book of the rock star’s latest photographs happened to be on the desk, so she plucked it out.

“I feel like I’m a dual person,” she said, opening the book to some of Smith’s photos. “I’m half Patti Smith and half fairy tale. The Patti Smith side is very rock-and-roll. In high school, I had two sets of friends. One set I read intellectual books with, and did poetry and artsy films with. And the other, I partied hard and I was a wild girl. When I grew up, I wanted to have stacks and stacks of comic books on one side and stacks of encyclopedias on the other side. So I have a funny, crazy side, and I have an intellectual side. I still read comic books.”

She turned back to the editing program.

 “Why can’t I find the frigging ‘Lost Highways?’” she said in a tone less of frustration and more like a show about being frustrated.

She opened an image that depicted a slender woman from behind, her hands over her shoulders as though hugging herself. The model was on a grassy shore; clouds scudded through the sky, reflected by the water. A woods and low-lying mountain were on the horizon. The lighting, ambience and texture gave it a classical look reminiscent of a Renaissance painting. The colors seemed to have the oil pigment quality of sienna, umber and ochre. Digital layering lent the illusion of the kind of depth that is achieved in painting by building colors through glazes.

Arnold disabled the layers one at a time.

”That’s what the picture looked like,” she said of the original shot, which showed Arnold as the model, in a short dress under a standard daytime sky, no clouds, the water’s surface an unexceptional bluish gray.

She turned to other images. “Untitled 4, Mount Desert Island, Maine 2011” depicted a prone figure, flowing red hair, harlequin-checked stockings, averted face, seeming about to be covered in darkness but reaching for a bright-green, coiled “lifeline.” In “Untitled 5, Mount Desert Island, Maine 2011,” a model, photographed from the shoulders down, stands on a dock holding out the flowing white skirt of her dress; clouds permeate her figure; her translucent skirt melds with the water.

“Lost Highways,” Arnold said, is about people getting older, feeling lost and alone, staring into the abyss, but trying to help themselves.

“I don’t like to be pessimistic,” she said. “I try to keep some optimism. Like the woman in the water, a little bit lost, but at least she was reaching for the lifeline. She wasn’t just going down.”

 

About five years ago, I was at the local post office when Arnold came in to get her mail and asked if I would consider modeling for her. With my olive skin-tone and bushy eyebrows, she said, I Iooked like the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. She was planning a series of photographs that evoked strong women.

I was thrilled. It’s flattering to be a subject of the lens. A year or two passed, and I figured maybe she had found someone else to be Frida. But, it turned out, that’s how long Arnold’s planning period takes. When she was ready, I drove to her house and walked into a living room filled with backdrops, lights, long strands of artificial ivy, yellow “caution” tape, floor-length petticoats and skirts, and chickenwire.

She asked me to strip down to underpants, and then she wrapped my hips and legs in lengths of gauzy material ornamented with large satin roses. She wanted to know if bare-breasted was okay. First I said sure. Then I realized the final product would likely go in a show, so I requested coverage. She proceeded to wrap me in caution tape and ivy. She had to get close, and she hoped I didn’t mind all the touching. She stepped back and grabbed her camera, but the lights were malfunctioning. It was also the wrong camera, she said; I seem to recall that she hadn’t yet mastered the digital equipment that was new to her at the time, after lifelong use of film.

Muttering to herself, she adjusted equipment, then adjusted me in standing poses with my head tilted upward and arms spread slightly, inner elbows showing. It had to be just so. I wasn’t to look at her. I remember that, for a long while, my head and arms weren’t quite right; she asked me to look this way or that at just a bit more of an angle. She talked about past models. They didn’t like working with her, she said; she drove them all away with her demands. She was probably too bossy, she said. Her self-deprecation made me worry that she would stop the shoot. Reassuringly, she continued adjusting me and snapping away, all the while talking about how terrible and demanding she was. It was a warming experience to watch two sides of the photographer do battle – the person who undermines herself, and the artist driven to invent – and to watch the artist win.

The image of Frida became “King of Hearts: I Never Ride on Buses,” and it was one of nine pieces produced in the early aughts for the series “Icons: Women in the House of Cards,” which portrayed public and fictional figures. The final Frida has her head tilted up, jaw thrust out, mouth firm, eyes staring; she is swathed in gauzy skirts and equipped with a superimposed ladder that lets her escape from the scenario – a bus accident – that broke the real Frida’s back.

Other icons include “The Joker: Non Est Mea Culpa,” which depicts Eve, layered with apples, checked harlequin handbags, and playing cards. Her blonde hair is beehived, her face heavily made up, her bedroom eyes stare at the viewer.

Jackie Kennedy, in “Jack of Hearts: No Motorcade Just Roses” is seen through the margins of a vertical, rose-strewn carpet. She is elegantly seated amid surroundings of rumpled cloths. The top of her head and eyes are excised by the picture’s frame. Her barely pink suit is unbesmirched by blood.

 

Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz” juggles playing cards; in “52 Pickup: Alice Takes Back the Night,” Alice is accompanied by a dancing hound through Wonderland. The model for Marilyn Monroe was a clerk from a local boutique who had bleached her hair blonde. She is scantily wrapped, toga-style, kneels before a satin-quilt backdrop, and wears a birthday hat. Arnold tore the picture and then unevenly taped the pieces together again; part of the taping job stands out as a cross.

“Queen of Hearts: Queen for A Day, 1958” is a triptych of begowned and polka-dotted figures, arms and eyes upraised in supplication. The image is a tribute to Arnold’s mother and to her older brother, Chucky, who died that year at age 8 when he was hit by a car while running into the road after a football. The title of the image comes from a 1950s television “game” show of the same name. Contestants, mostly women, talked about hardships in their lives; judged by an applause meter, the woman who had the most tragic story won prizes.           

Earlier, in the late 1990s, Arnold produced a series of “fractured” fairy-tale figures. Little Red Riding Hood, in a series of four pictures, wears a wolf mask and eventually eats her nemesis. In “Lesson in Survival,” Snow White has her own basket of apples; she teaches a group of girls not to take apples from strangers. Among her earlier series are depictions of “Morning Demons,” circus figures, and an angel-like figure walking into the woods – her mother after she died.

The “Death of Childhood” series, in the late 1980s, wrestles with the death of her brother, when Arnold was only 5. The series includes a mummified Teddy bear and a mummified sock monkey. The centerpiece is three pictures of her brother’s Raggedy Andy, obscured by layers of gauze. Two show the figure turning away; in the third, it is gone.

Loss and a complex sort of optimism permeate most of Arnold’s work. Through her photography, she has sought to “rewrite women’s history,” as she says in an artist’s biography. Among Arnold’s motifs, the central figures don’t just turn the table on the wicked; they never get caught out in the first place. Jackie Kennedy was never in the motorcade. Marilyn Monroe survives her death date. Eve says “f— you.” Snow White comes equipped with her own apples. Little Red Riding Hood eats the Wolf. Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz” gets rid of the Scarecrow and goes solo. Alice in Wonderland cooks the rabbit.

“I always wanted the women to be the conquerors, taking care of themselves,” she said. “Instead of the wolf getting the girl, the girl gets the wolf.”

The theme of strong women is a reflection of her own personality.

“I think I came out kicking and never stopped, never took surface answers, or ‘this is why it is.’ I think I was a rule-breaker, but I think it’s because I didn’t know there were any rules. I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to say that or do that. Boys didn’t really like me very much because I was so outspoken, and so, like, ‘Why are you treating her that way?’ I didn’t know it was more acceptable for girls to have boyfriends and for boyfriends to tell girls what to wear and what they could do. So I was always questioning, ‘Why did you let someone do that to you?’ I think I’ve always been that way and I think I was that way as a child, about, ‘Why can’t I do that? Why can’t it be done this way?’ My dad used to say, ‘Don’t ever do anything you don’t want to do.’ And my mom pretty much let us do what we wanted to do.”

With icons and the time period of her childhood figuring large in her work, and with family an important part of her life, I asked Arnold if I could see some of her childhood photos. She pulled out a  1980s newspaper article about her father, which began, “Want a door knob? Lavatory? Iron bar ? Lumber? Windows of any shape and size? Charlie Arnold’s got them, and what’s more, he can find them in the enormous storage area behind his home on Indian Point Road near Somesville.”

Charlie Arnold was a demolition specialist and junk dealer who owned a good chunk of land in Bass Harbor, started a campground there, and has a road named after him. Among his demo jobs, he tore down a 100-room Rockefeller summer home called The Eyrie.

“In our kitchen, we had the beautiful cabinets from the Rockefeller’s house,” Arnold recalled.

The family lived “on a back road,” she said. “I like to say I’m the heathen from Indian Point Road. I kind of grew up as a barefoot heathen, and sometimes I’m okay with it, and sometimes I’m like, Oh my God, I really grew up as a barefoot heathen out on a back road where there were no laws, no rules, no discipline, no anything. And then I was thrust into a world where there were rules and there was discipline. I ended up blurting out misnomers or whatever and people were like, ‘She’s crazy. She’s craaaazy.’ And you know what? I wasn’t.  I was really very normal. But I was very outspoken and very feisty, and I just beat on my own drum. I didn’t know I was a rule-breaker because I didn’t know you had to play by the rules. And I pretty much conducted my whole life that way.”

 

Black-and-white photographs show Arnold with her younger sister, who was born two months after their brother died. Arnold said her little sister was “my pride and joy. I watched over her like you wouldn’t believe.”

A couple of pictures show Arnold elegantly dressed up and perched on a chaise lounge in sultry pose. There was a picture of her best friend, who was poor as well.

“I used to go to her house all the time,” Arnold recalled. “I don’t think anyone in her house had a license. But they had a car in the yard, and we used to sit out in the car and sing country-western songs. She’d strum the guitar and I think she thought she was Dolly Parton. She’d sing ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ and  ‘Last night I went to sleep in Detroit city.’ We would sing country songs and smoke cigarette butts that we found in ashtrays.”

 

As adults, the four sisters get together every March.

“One is as nutty as a fruitcake as the next one,” Arnold said. “We have quite a hoot. Our husbands, I think, are not quite sure about us, but we have a really good time when we get together, and we’re really close.”

One hand-tinted photo, which has been in the same frame since 1958, shows Arnold with her two older sisters and with Chucky.

“It was taken just prior to my brother being hit, and it came in the mail after he was dead,” she said. “But we always had it out in the dining room. I grew up and I told my mother that was the only thing I cared about that I got, so I got it.”

Chucky and Sharon were closest in age, and he used to look after her.

“There’s just no moving on from it. It’s the deepest, darkest part of a person, and it’s there. There  are just things that there is no healing from,” she said. “It’s one of those things you think, ‘Oh my God, get over it, it’s been 50-some years. But there are some things that just become a part of you and it will always be there.”

Arnold’s approach to photography hasn’t changed in essence since she was a child, when she wielded a Brownie camera and sourced materials for dioramas at her father’s junkyard. As a young adult, she turned to creative writing, but in 1988, she again picked up a camera. She immediately returned to the diorama concept to create twilight or fairy tale worlds “hoping it will seem strangely familiar,” she wrote in her biography.

From the beginning, Arnold has invested a great deal of thought into each composition – the models, props, lighting, background, costumes, ambience and, ultimately, the imponderable “feel” of the piece. Once the scenes are composed and lit, Arnold shoots in black-and-white, then applies dyes and oil tints, rubbed on with cotton, to the archival prints. Her earlier images are reminiscent of 19^th-century, hand-colored monochromes. Today, she uses both a 35-millimeter Nikon with slow speed black-and-white film, and a Nikon digital SLR; her digital and film collages are then produced as pigment prints.

She began to build on the sculptural look of her images through the use of transparent overlays of additional images, and by cutting up prints and taping them together; the taping jobs are deliberately uneven and the tape itself becomes part of the image.

Mismatched edges have become part of her signature look. But that wasn’t entirely intentional.

“I’m not real good at lining things up, but people think it’s part of my creative process.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “It’s really just because I can can’t cut straight.” She laughed. “Of course, it’s become a quirk in my artwork and people look for the things that are off. And that’s okay because it becomes totally me.”

The prints, reprints, scans, layers, and digital editing gradually pile onto a final scene that may have been several years in the making. Final images are printed in large, 20-inch by 30-inch format.

Digital techniques have allowed her to expand on basic ideas, particularly the classical feel of her images.

“I always wanted my pictures to have a certain look,” she said. “One thing I tried was to have a crackle effect. Old paintings have always mystified me and I always thought the texture was so beautiful. I tried everything in the darkroom with the enlarger and with the hand-coloring, and I could never do it. So when I came across making these layers and scanning them, I could get for the first time the texture that I really wanted to have. That was a really good feeling. But now I’d like to go even further with it. Let’s say I want to paint a person’s lips red. It’s almost impossible to paint it in Photoshop because it’s a little image and you’ve got little tools to work with. What I’d like to do is make a set of lips on a transparency, scan it and then overlay it on the piece to give that feeling of another dimension to the picture, like bits and pieces of things that are parts of the picture. I’d also like to do things with ripped pieces and scan and overlay them.”

In the midst of all her technological advances, she ended up dispensing with the camera all together, at one point. “After the Wedding Flowers” came about several years ago when she was working a summer day job at a historic inn that is popular for weddings. After the receptions, the flowers are usually left behind. It seemed a shame to throw them away. Arnold, working the evening shift, would bring them home, put  the flowers in a vase directly on the scanner, lay a cloth over them for background, and hit the button.

 

“I would play all night, scanning flowers,” she said. “That’s why I have insomnia, because I work at night.”

After “After the Wedding Flowers” came “After the Wedding Dresses,” a series that depicts extravagant gowns in eerie settings, beset by spectral light or the hues of a primeval world. The series came about a few years ago because Arnold had accumulated so many outfits and baubles, but had exhausted all her potential models.

“Nobody who models for me ever wants to do it again, because it’s very stressful and I put a lot of demands on them,” she said. “My sister is the only one who modeled for me more than once.”

She conjured a number of scenarios with names like “Sticks and Stones Will Break My Bones,” “Nesting,” “Fireworks,” “Sinking” “A Room of One’s Own,” and “Wicked Games.” But it seemed like the wedding dresses needed people in them, so she began the “Lost Highways” project – a continuation of her homage to women, to their plights in life and to their possibilities for the future – but also something of a departure from that thought. The women in “Lost Highways” aren’t quite as sure of themselves, said Arnold, who began the series when a loved one was suffering from a serious illness. It was a time of uncertainty in her own life.

“I really don’t like putting that message out there, because I really like strong women,” she said. “But I guess it was a stage in my life I was going through, and I had no other way to express it….I felt pretty lost,” she said.

Today, the rhythm of Arnold’s work is layered on the quiet of the neighborhood and the patterns of long relationships, forming an image of depth and lucent significance – not unlike the shimmering apparitions of her photographs.

“Lost Highways” still has quite a bit of possibility, she said. The next costume to use will be a flowered, silk kimono that she acquired a year ago; the model will have a suitcase in hand and the setting is tentatively set to be at a nearby rocky beach by the ocean. Now she’s looking for the additional elements that will complete the scene.

 “I’ve just been waiting to get the right kind of clouds or the right kind of fog or the right day to do it, and the right person who will model it for me,” she said.

Once “Lost Highways” is finished, she plans to do a series of women in close-up shots, heavily made-up and hair-sprayed, their makeup running. A setting that attracts her is a nearby eatery that has a back pool room with “funky” velvet curtains, perfect for posing.

“I’m not quite sure of where I’m headed with that and why I want to do that,” she said. “I used to do more close-ups of women, and now I’ve tried to move back, but I think once I’m done with ‘Lost Highways’ I need to get back in close.”

Over three decades, Arnold’s work has become a little more freaky and dark, a little more foreboding. Perhaps that’s because her recent work centers less on obvious symbols of the bizarre – toppled dolls, Pierrot frills, garish makeup, dice and cards, lace and teacups – and more on an ambience that merely suggests the bizarre, and seems all the more portentous. “Lost Highways” represents that ambience – the spectral imagery that populates her mind realized in a vast yet obscured landscape.

“It’s that abyss, that internal forever, but maybe almost like a sadness,” she said. “I think it’s part of being lost. Being faceless, anonymous. It goes on for eternity, but you’re not really sure what’s out there.”