Alice May, Artist and Photographer

I was born and raised in North Carolina and graduated with a degree in English from the University of North Carolina in Chapel.  I have only recently returned to the South.  I worked for a year at The American School in Switzerland in Lugano and then traveled around the world on my own before settling in Boston and working as a brochure designer and copywriter for Allyn & Bacon textbook company (now an imprint of Pearson).

 

I put my English degree to work by freelancing a story to my hometown newspaper about the takeover of Harvard’s University Hall in 1969 to protest Harvard’s role in the Vietnam War and landed a job as a reporter/photographer for  the Bath Brunswick Times Record as a result.  I took a job with the Portland Press Herald when one opened up for a full-time photographer.  After a few years I left the newspaper and became a freelance photographer primarily for The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer working in New England.

 

In May 1977 I covered the 2,000 strong Clamshell Alliance occupation of the Seabrook Nuclear Power protesting the use of nuclear power for the Associated Press.

 

My love for photography was an expression of my lifelong interest in art.  When I married and moved to the Midwest I begin painting.  I studied under artists Bill Morrow Jackson at the University of Illinois and Donald K. Lake at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois and when I returned to North Carolina, I studied with artist John Beerman.

 

In Illinois, artist Toni Putnam introduced me to encaustic paintings, an ancient mixed media art using heated beeswax and oil paint.  In North Carolina I was lucky enough to study cold wax painting with Jeff Erickson, an artist based in Alexandria whose art has been widely exhibited.

 

I enjoy working with cold wax, oil paint and palette knives as well as traditional painting.  With the palette knife there is the loss of finite control which could be a disadvantage, but it frees one to follow colors in surprising ways.  The combination allows constant discovery of new shapes, directions and patterns.