“Proserpine’s Visit to the Underworld,” Michel Droge, oil on canvas, 75 x 110, 2020, from the Metamorphoses series Image courtesy of the artist

A few days before Maine’s slow-roll reopening began, Michel Droge got an unexpected call to help uninstall an exhibit that had been sitting/hanging in limbo in the Bates College Museum. Droge was not only grateful for the work, but also sympathetic to the situation: With the state’s shutdown, one of Droge’s own exhibits ended early, the other canceled entirely. Also suddenly terminated was Droge’s temporary use of a large studio in Brunswick, providing them the space needed to create the lushly atmospheric, highly conceptual abstract paintings for which they are best known.

Michel Droge Photo by Catherine Frankel-Droge

With the two art classes (at two different colleges) Droge was teaching for the semester coming to a close, the freelance preparatory and archivist work that financially gets them through the summer on hold and a Hewn Oaks residency that would have provided much-needed studio space canceled, the Portland-based artist is uncertain about their immediate future. But like their art, which examines environments unraveling and reforming, Droge approaches their personal challenges by looking forward with hope.

Q: What was it like to return to an old workplace (Bates) for the first time since everything closed?

A: The adjustment was really weird. I left on the first day so depressed because we always hug when we see each other and we couldn’t. We always talk about all the cool stuff we’re doing in our personal lives, and there was nothing to talk about. We were packing up a show and there’s nothing planned to go in, because we don’t know when the museum is going to open. It was nice to be out of my apartment and I was happy to get a couple days of work, but there was this hollow feeling of what’s left out there.

Q: What are you teaching right now?

A: I took a year off from teaching full time at (Maine College of Art) to focus on public-engagement projects. I’m currently teaching a foundation drawing class there, and a class at (University of Maine at Farmington) called Print Activism and the Environment. That’s more of a social-engagement class with printmaking, but we’re not even using a print shop for it. When COVID hit, I said, “OK, let’s just focus on making COVID posters.” So they did reduction relief posters about all sorts of issues that have come up in terms of safety and health, and also economic justice.

Q: So a print class that doesn’t involve a press.

A: I designed the class so nobody has to use any printmaking equipment except a carving tool and the linoleum. The other name for it is the Kitchen Activist, because it’s teaching students to be able to go out and be activists on their own so that they can make a print in their kitchen using simple tools.

A poster Droge made for their UMF art class. Image courtesy of the artist

Q: That must have made the switch from in-person to online teaching pretty straightforward.

A: It was so easy. We even set up an Instagram account, kitchen_activist, so they could post their final prints online. The only problem was that, over the last few weeks, it’s been hard to keep students engaged. I think it’s because emotionally, somebody that age can’t see past what’s going on right now — they haven’t lived through a lot of trauma. Some of them financially aren’t set up to handle this or their home situations aren’t great. So I give a lot of pep talks.

Q: The class dovetails nicely with your year of public-engagement art projects. Tell me about the Farm Tools Project with the Maine Farmland Trust.

A: That’s a collaboration with Sarah Loftus, an archeologist. We’ve been traveling around Maine to different farms, talking to farmers about their relationship with hand tools and their connection with the land. It’s basically a living archeology. We’re making cyanotype prints with the farmers, a process that takes sun and water to generate the image, the same elements needed for plants to grow. They choose the tools and they help us make the prints right on the farm.

We installed the show in January; it shut down in mid-March. The fortunate thing is that we’d made plans to move that exhibit to a few other venues. And we also have a Kindling Fund grant to do a book about the project.

Q: You also had an exhibit coming up with the Maine Audubon Society of your Native Plants Project.

A: I was studying native and endangered species with James Kennedy, a naturalist who works there, and making prints at Gilsland Farm in Falmouth, where they do a lot of conservation. I was supposed to have a solo exhibition that coincided with their spring plant sale, but the exhibition was canceled. That was a year’s worth of work.

Q: What are you doing with the prints?

A: I asked Maine Audubon and Portland Art Gallery, who represents me, if they’d collaborate on promoting that work online. A percentage of my sales will go to the Audubon Society and the gallery gets half of whatever it sells.

“Little Bluestem,” by Michel Droge, cyanotype, 22 x 30, 2020, from the Maine Audubon Society Native Plants Project,. Photo by Jay York

Q: Both projects involve cyanotype, a photographic rather than painterly process. What drew you to that medium?

A: I’ve used cyanotype for three public engagement projects so far, all documenting something that exists now but that we’re in the process of losing. Cyanotype records the impression that an object makes, so the resulting image is haunting, ghostly, the memory of the object that was once there rather than an illustration of it.

Q: Your website says that your work “engages with the environment and the human condition in an era of uncertainty.” That seems very relevant to what’s going on in the world right now.

A: Yeah. In my most recent body of work, the Metamorphoses series, I draw from Ovid’s “Metamorphosis” and look at systems both biological, like microscopic systems and root systems, but also capitalist systems, political systems, and take them apart and think about how they could be rebuilt. That work was almost prescient, with everything coming apart now.

Q: Are you thinking of making work about the virus?

A: I probably will, but I don’t know how just yet. Even though my work focuses on environmental issues, it tends to be very hopeful. It’s more about understanding stuff and then making good things out of it.

Also, my studio work suddenly stopped in the middle of March because I was in a 10-month residency (in Brunswick) that got cut short — and I had just given up my Portland studio. I work really big, so I can’t set up just anywhere. I live in a studio apartment; I’ve been working out in the garden when it’s warm and dry, and doing things on a smaller scale.

Q: Will you have any money at all coming in this summer?

A: I’ve applied for a couple of the COVID grants because my income is completely shot. I usually work in museums in the summer. I work with the Hartley Collection at Bates doing framing, and pick up odd jobs like installation work all over the state. But now that’s gone. I’m also not sure about teaching in the fall. MECA said they were having low enrollment and there might be issues with contracting adjuncts.

I think I’m still showing at the Portland Art Gallery in July. Last year, the year that I was off, was super productive. I had a bunch of exhibitions, and a lot of sales. I’m hopeful that I can have another good year.

But I’m not a stranger to not having any clue where my money’s coming from. When I moved to Maine I had no money. I took out loans to go to MECA. I worked at Whole Foods. I gardened for people. I can work. I’m scrappy. I’m hoping to get in a tent and go backwoods camping, live on the cheap, and make it a really productive summer.

Stacey Kors is a longtime arts writer and editor who lives on Peaks Island.