Does a good artist ever stop emerging?

By its very nature, the plodding path of an artist involves reinventing or recreating oneself with each new project. Whether making paintings, writing plays or leading an orchestra, creative people are driven not to rest and repeat but to challenge themselves and their audience.

The phrase “emerging artist” often refers to younger artists, just out of college and in the early stages of a long journey. And some artists do find their stride right away, offering brash ideas, energy and a new way of looking at things. Others toil for years or decades before they catch a community’s attention.

Art and creativity have been part of the culture of this region for centuries, and Maine often is seen by the larger world based on the art and images created by the people who live and work here. We see that in the stories of the artists profiled here, chosen because each, one way or another, is an emerging artist. They share a deep commitment to their art and an unwavering need to keep pushing forward.

They’re making an impact in their communities now, and we think they’ll continue doing so for years to come.

Stephen Gleasner rode his latest art project to the gallery the night of the opening. He put in the key, turned the ignition and the motorcycle rumbled to life. Gleasner, who is best known as a wood turner and plywood wizard, made all the accessories for his retrofitted 1980s-era Honda Gold Wing from wood – the seat, fenders, gas tank and side covers. Even a funky-looking peanut helmet, which probably would do little to protect his head in a fall but adds nicely to the creative aesthetic.

“It’s pretty out there,” he said. “I like pursuing the next thing. I can’t help it. This was an opportunity to put out something that is not something I’ve done before.”

His pursuit of the next thing has left him an artist in transition, and always looking up to the next challenge. As soon as he masters one thing, he tries something new.

Gleasner’s insatiable desire to not repeat himself led him to the Gold Wing. He likes restoring neglected things, and he especially likes doing the unexpected. He’s an artist ahead of his time, taking chances, redefining his medium and creating things that leave people wondering how he did it.

As with many self-sufficient Mainers, he dabbles in many things and hesitates to call himself an artist.

“What am I?” he asks. “What do I do? I don’t even have a website, because I don’t know what I do.”

His medium is wood, but his work is more about layers than material. By building up and refining thin layers of plywood, he can make just about anything. His plywood bowls more closely resemble blown glass, so fine are his finishes. He makes wooden coffee mugs that could be ceramic. He makes. rings that look like gold or silver.

He turns balusters for contractors who are restoring old houses, and he builds furniture.

A little bit of this, a little of that. And now, a wooden motorcycle.

Gleasner, 53, lives in Appleton and teaches at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship in Rockport, which is where he showed his motorcycle this summer in a faculty exhibition.

He found the bike abandoned three years ago, but has envisioned this project for 15 years, which is about the time he moved to Appleton. (He grew up in Buffalo).

He doesn’t plan to stop with one. He has two other bikes waiting for his makeover. He put a $20,000 price tag on it in the Rockport show, and would have welcomed a sale, but part of him is happy it didn’t sell.

“Now I have a motorcycle,” he said. “I didn’t have one before.”

Winky Lewis usually gets you with the eyes. There’s brightness and joy in the eyes of the people she photographs. There’s sadness, too, and sometimes just emptiness. But whatever’s there lurking, Lewis finds it.

Lewis, 49, has been making photographs for as long as she can remember. Growing up, she made pictures of her family and her siblings. Now that she’s a mom with three kids at home, she mostly shoots her kids, their games and the lives they lead in the West End of Portland and on Isle au Haut, where the family spends its summers. She calls the island “a photographer’s paradise” with its wash of color, moody vegetation and boundless horizons. But what makes it compelling for Lewis is the effect of the island on children: They become free-range kids, wild in their play and endless imaginations.

She has made it her life’s work to capture the moments and moods of growing up.

In April, Down East Books will publish a collaboration with her friend and West End neighbor, the writer Susan Conley. “Stop Here. This Is the Place.” is a West End mother’s journal. Lewis took photos of the neighborhood and shared them with Conley, who reacted to the photos with her writing. Lewis has two sons and a daughter, and Conley has two sons. The book freezes 52 moments of childhood over one year, one moment at a time. In a stressful life of sports, school and work, “Stop Here” forces us to pause. The book is as much about motherhood as it is about childhood.

Lewis was the middle child of three, with older and younger brothers. They lived an idyllic life in the countryside of Maryland, until their mom got sick when Lewis was 8. When she was 13, her brother built her a darkroom. Photography was a way to cope. She studied photography at Princeton University and worked commercially in New York after graduating.

She and her husband moved to Maine in 2001 and began raising a family. She stopped working to raise her kids, but didn’t stop taking pictures.

The book is her coming-out party. She’s never shown her work in a gallery and has mostly shared her photos among friends on social media, to positive response and encouragement.

“What I am doing now reminds me of my own childhood,” she said. “I catch things. I’m good at catching moments.”

Callie Kimball wanted to be an actress, but it was tough on her ego. To shield herself from the spotlight, she learned to write plays instead.

“Playwriting was the door that kept opening,” she said.

More accurately, Kimball keeps forcing it open. She’s been writing plays for about 10 years and admits that her graveyard of dead scripts is getting crowded. Lately, she’s found success as an emerging voice in Maine theater. This week, the New York theater collaborative Team Awesome Robot stages her play “Rush” about the Yukon gold rush of 1899, the secrets of Frank and Belinda, and the difficult nature of escaping your past. In March, the Halcyon Theater in Chicago mounts “Dreams of the Penny Gods,” about a 13-year-old girl with a criminal past.

Her futuristic play “May 39th” has been produced at fringe festivals from D.C. to L.A.

“2015 has been a huge leap forward,” she said. “It’s gratifying that people are interested and responding.”

Kimball lives in Springvale. In 2012, she was among the first graduates of Hunter College’s master of fine arts program in playwriting. She’s received a MacDowell Fellowship and was an O’Neill National Playwrights Conference semifinalist. In Maine, Mad Horse Theatre Company produced “Alligator Road” and Snowlion Rep included “Hungry Like A” in its Maine Dish plays-about-food festival.

Kimball’s schedule proves that an emerging writer never takes a break. Her life is back-and-forth between Springvale and New York. “Luckily, that’s just a five-hour bus ride,” she said.

A recent six-day run of work looked like this: Friday, she turned in the first two chapters of a book she is ghostwriting. Saturday morning, she was on the 6:30 bus to New York. She cashed in rewards points at a hotel and hunkered down all day Saturday and most of the day Sunday to work on a play she began this summer. Sunday afternoon, she took the subway to Harlem to crash on a friend’s sofa. Monday morning, she attended a reading of a new play called “Things That Are Round” at the Lark Play Development Center, where she will return in February for a winter residency.

After the reading, she spent an hour with the director brainstorming where they might get the play work-shopped or produced. Her next stop was a coffee shop, where she began promoting “Rush.” Monday night was a rehearsal for “Rush,” and Tuesday she had an all-day meeting with her ghostwriting client.

She attended another play Tuesday night and was on the 9:30 a.m. bus back to Maine on Wednesday.

This week, she’ll go back to New York for Friday’s opening of “Rush” at the Paradise Factory in the East Village.

“My schedule’s been like this for the last year or so,” she said. “It’s a ton of fun, but it takes a lot of careful scheduling to protect writing time and to maintain balance in my life. I feel like I’ve hit a sweet spot with the things that are happening in my career, and how I’m able to manage all my deadlines. The truth is, you work hard in solitude for years – in my case, a decade – and then, if you’re lucky enough to get a break, you then have to have enough reserve to push even harder to make the most of those opportunities.”

She moved to Maine after graduating from Hunter. She was born in Florida, and moved around a lot after her parents divorced. She spent her grade-school years in Kittery Point. She knew Maine, loved it and chose to base her professional life here after college. Maine represented a nostalgic ideal.

“I think I went to 12 schools by the time I graduated high school, even moving in the middle of my senior year,” she said, adding that the experience “probably served me well as a writer.”

Like a lot of kids who grew up in Maine, Brian Swasey couldn’t wait to leave. And like a lot of his peers, he finds himself back in the state for professional and personal fulfillment. Swasey, who graduated from South Portland High School in 1991, returned to Maine this year to take over the No. 2 job at the Ogunquit Playhouse.

Swasey, 42, is finishing his first season as associate producer. His job entails making sure everything comes together on opening night – and every night thereafter. He touches every element of the theater: He works with actors, directors, choreographers, musicians, costume and set designers, sound engineers, marketers and back-office staff.

If there’s a problem, he solves it. When a star brings her dog to rehearsal, Swasey walks it.

“My job touches on everything,” he said. “I am a good multitasker, which is important because that’s what this job is all about. I don’t get stressed. I don’t tend to panic.”

He worked as artistic director of the Astoria Performing Arts Center in New York from 2001 to 2008, and as a director and choreographer at New York and regional theaters, including Arundel Barn, Seacoast Rep and Maine State. He was directing in Maui when he heard the job in Ogunquit was open. He almost didn’t apply, because he knew the amount of work involved.

But he also knew the payoff: the chance to come home to Maine and bolster his resume.

Ogunquit has a stellar reputation in the theater world, he said. To get to the next level – to work on Broadway – he needs to get people’s attention. “Ogunquit is the top of the food chain as far as regional theater goes,” he said. “It’s a place people want to work.”

Swasey was a latecomer to musical theater. He was in high school before he got serious about performing. When he graduated in 1991, his long-term goal involved law school. Music and dance were fun, but he assumed he would become a lawyer.

Those plans changed when he showed up in Durham, New Hampshire, on a campus visit. He fell in love with the University of New Hampshire, and instead of studying pre-law, he learned how to move and sing, earning a degree in musical theater and dance.

People say it takes 30 years to learn conducting. It takes 10 years to learn the repertoire, and another 10 to learn technique. The last 10 are spent bringing it all together.

Norman Huynh, 27, is just beginning his journey. This week, he starts his third season as assistant conductor and community liaison for the Portland Symphony Orchestra, continuing a career path that he hopes will lead to a post at one of the world’s major orchestras. Someday. Until then, he’s humbling himself at the feet of classical music gods, burying himself in the music and learning all he can about Beethoven, Strauss and Stravinsky.

He conducts the orchestra’s Discovery Series of family concerts, youth and education concerts and most of the pops concerts. But he prepares for all the classical concerts as if he were at the podium instead of Music Director Robert Moody.

It’s all part of the learning process.

“I must prepare this music in such a deep and profound way,” he said. “I have to understand the composer’s intentions and know what the composer was feeling when he wrote it. To whom was it dedicated? What was going on in his life at that time? It’s the conductor’s job to present the intentions of the composer.”

To prepare him for the next step in his career, Huynh spent most of August with Kurt Masur, music director emeritus of the New York Philharmonic, in the cradle of classical music.

Huynh traveled to Leipzig, Germany, to study with Masur at the Mendelssohn Academy. He was among three students selected for the program, and the only American. Leipzig was home to Bach, the birthplace of Wagner and where Felix Mendelssohn established Germany’s first music academy. The experience was invaluable, because it gave him direct contact with the music. “Being in the country where the majority of the classical repertoire comes from, you see where the composers lived and have a better understanding of how to present their music,” he said.

Huynh represents the youthful face of classical music in Maine. He arranges before- and after-concert parties at local nightclubs targeting young professionals, works with students and teachers in Portland schools and conducts the orchestra’s popular Discovery Series of concerts, which are geared to families.

This past spring, the Yale University School of Music recognized Huynh and Portland Public Schools music teacher Alyson Ciechomski for their partnership, inviting them to attend a national symposium at Yale on music education. Huynh works with music teachers to use music as a teaching tool across the curriculum.

“I see him truly as a community liaison,” Ciechomski said. “That word ‘community,’ from my angle as a music teacher, he is the epitome of that. That connection is so important for a group like the Portland Symphony, which wants all ages to love music.”

Huyhn shatters the perception that conductors are unapproachable, she said. “Sometimes I think of conductors as all-knowing beings, so superior. But he is open to furthering his knowledge and his techniques. He’s a good listener. He’s inquisitive. He knows he has more to learn, and knows how to ask questions and reach out.”

Moody has announced he will leave Portland in the spring of 2018, when his contract expires. Huynh could be Moody’s replacement. That’s an intriguing prospect, Huynh said, but it’s too soon to speculate.

“It’s an option for me, but I’m focusing on what I have to do better for the position I am in now and how I can best serve Portland and Maine right now,” he said.

Huynh graduated in 2010 from the University of Alabama, where he performed in the marching band. The next year, he began studying orchestral conducting at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, where he received his master’s. He has conducted orchestras in Baltimore, Toledo and Charlotte, and served as assistant conductor for Opera Carolina and Lyric Opera of Baltimore.

He and his wife live in town. He is married to Rachel Hester-Huynh, consumer marketing manager for MaineToday Media.

As community liaison, part of his job is bolstering the orchestra’s presence among people in their 20s and 30s. He launched the orchestra’s Symphony & Spirits parties at Portland nightclubs before or after concerts. For $20, you get a ticket to the concert and a drink designed around a concert theme. The next one is the season-opening concert Oct. 11 at Merrill Auditorium. The program continues the orchestra’s three-year focus on the Beethoven symphony cycle – it will perform all the composer’s symphonies over three seasons – and the specialty drink will be a German beer at Novare Res in the Old Port.

Huynh is comfortable talking about the orchestra to anyone willing to listen, especially people his age. He draws energy from talking to people about music, in any context – with elite conductors in Germany or over a German beer in a Portland bar. He sees himself as an ambassador for classical music, building bridges to new audiences with bricks laid by the masters.

Edwige Charlot lives for “unexpected discoveries.” They occur at the printing press, when she pulls a print and finds something that surprises her. “That’s when I do my celebration dance,” she said.

Charlot, 28, makes art that combines printmaking, painting and drawing. She calls it her “visual Creole,” because it often reflects her French and Haitian background in color, energy and content. Her work, she said, is about finding home. She was born in France to Haitian parents and moved to Connecticut at age 9. She’s been in Maine 10 years, settling in Portland after graduating from the Maine College of Art as a printmaking major.

She shows her work across the Northeast. She’s had two solo shows in Portland and others in Connecticut and New Jersey. She also won an award recognizing emerging artists from St. Botolph Club Foundation in Boston.

Charlot uses her prints as a starting point for her art. The prints serve as source material for larger projects. “For me, printmaking is a way to let the prints and the press tell you what’s next,” she says, terming the process “controlled chaos.” After making prints, she adds other elements, including paint, so the print serves as a foundation for a larger image.

Being an artist means being open-minded to an unforeseen outcome and accepting something unexpected as a gift. It’s about solving problems and being flexible and adaptable.

That’s true not only for the art itself, but for the life of an artist, and especially a young artist trying to establish a career and a path forward. It’s not an easy road, and success is based on commitment, self-confidence and a desire for self-expression. To help support her art, she also works as a freelance designer.

Charlot grew up in a family of high-achieving athletes, and it was expected she would study to become a doctor or lawyer or something similar. She found comfort in art, where her teachers gave her the breathing room to find an activity that she enjoyed and in which she demonstrated natural ability. When she enrolled at MECA, she first studied graphic design and moved to printmaking because the process of making prints felt more aesthetically pleasing and creative.

Studying printmaking is one thing. Doing it after graduation is another. At school, she had 24/7 access to printing presses and materials. After graduation, she lost that. Few artists own printing presses, and it’s expensive to join a community press.

To make prints, Charlot applies for residencies that offer the use of a press. When she gets one, she prints “like a maniac. I print and print and print. When I am in a residency setting, I am cranking. There’s not a lot of thinking. There may be conversations, but the thinking comes later.”

At home, she considers the work she started and how to proceed. She is between projects now – or as she phrases it, “I am in the thinking part of the artist’s creative cycle.”

Lately, she’s thinking about the issues of the day: race in America, immigration and a living wage, all of which touch her life directly. As a woman of color in Portland, she feels she stands out “like a sore thumb.” Portland may be a diverse city, but to her that is code for more black than the rest of Maine, which isn’t very much.

As a French native of Haitian background, she is sensitive to immigration issues in a way that many of her peers are not, because she is one. And as an artist just starting her career, she understands what it’s like to cobble jobs together to make a living. Her mother took three jobs to support the family when it resettled in Connecticut, and Charlot began working at age 15 to ease the financial strain on her household.

Her next body of work is evolving, and it likely will reflect some of those themes.

She is not complaining. Being an artist is a privilege, she said, and not something she takes lightly.

“In my eyes, artists from the beginning of time have been thought of as leaders and activists,” she said. “An artist’s job is to tell the truth and keep us accountable.”

People at the Maine College of Art have known of Matt Hutton’s skills as a woodworker for years. Now the rest of the country is catching on.

Hutton, 39, has earned recognition from the Society of Arts and Crafts and the American Craft Council. The latter named him a finalist for its Emerging Voices Award, which recognizes the most promising young craft artists in the country.

He didn’t win, but the publicity has brought him recognition in woodworking circles. His tables, benches, chairs and other pieces are showing up in Architectural Digest, Artful Home and other national publications.

In addition to teaching at MECA, Hutton designs and builds custom furniture in the workshop behind his Portland home. Everything he builds is unique, and most of it he designs himself. He learned his skills at Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and San Diego State University on the West Coast.

But he didn’t develop as an artist until he studied as an exchange student in Japan. “I thought I knew everything about woodworking. But I got there and realized I didn’t know anything at all about wood,” he said. “Everything I do now has been informed by that trip.”

Specifically, he learned the properties of various kinds of wood, and he began to better understand the nuance of aesthetic and the importance of detail. Designs that are subtle, simple and quiet are his hallmark. He rarely makes anything that is square or symmetrical. “Everything is round or shaped,” he said. “I love carving and shaping.”

He also loves teaching. He’s been at MECA since 2002, when department head Jamie Johnston recruited him to Portland.

Together, they built the woodworking program, writing the curriculum and guiding the school through the accreditation process. They established the major in 2004 and graduated the first woodworking-degree students two years later.

He built his studio in 2009, enabling him to execute more of his own designs. He’s starting to sell a lot more in Maine, which is gratifying. Until recently, nearly all his sales were to clients who lived elsewhere. Business is so good, he’s contemplating hiring an employee. The toughest decision he faces is figuring out what projects he can take on and what he has to decline because of time constraints.

His challenge now is balancing his own work with his teaching. He enjoys working with students, and appreciates the opportunities that have come his way through MECA. His wife, Erin, was recently named director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA, so the couple are firmly committed to the school and to Portland. “I love that place, and I love the people there,” he said.

He and his wife have two children, ages 9 and 5.