The Bremen Library is pleased to host a retrospective of artist Barbra Beebe’s work for the month of August. Barbara Beebe (1931 – 2022) was a daughter of the Great Plains of North Dakota who found her heart’s home on an island in Maine. Barbara was a mostly self-taught artist whose creativity spanned jewelry, painting, ceramics, writing, toy theaters, dollmaking, costume design and sewing. In 1984 with her share of the sale of the North Dakota farm, she bought a Civil War era farmhouse and twenty acres on Friendship Long Island, Maine. The house had stood empty for twenty years, the roof leaked, and windows had been shot out. With her adult daughter Susan, also an artist, she moved to the island in 1985 and they started restoring the house. She and Susan spent three winters on the island, cooking and heating with wood, lighting with candles, getting water from the well with a bucket, and using an outhouse. One winter, Barbara slipped on an icy pathand severely sprained her right arm. It was impossible to get off the island to see adoctor for six weeks. By March she couldn’t move her right hand. Susan suggested she draw as physical therapy. She began drawing, then painting in gouache, an opaque watercolor. Eventually, she had several one-woman shows in galleries from Maine to Minnesota. Winters that Barbara didn’t spend on the island, she traveled on a shoestring and painted in Santa Fe, NM, Oaxaca, Mexico, Spain, Italy, France, Brazil and Costa Rica. She was awarded four painting residencies at the Vermont Studio Center.There will be an opening reception in the meeting room gallery on Thursday, August 7 from 4:30-6:30. There will be a reading during the opening reception of Barbara’s first children’s book, Chickadee Afloat, published posthumously by Barnswallow Press of Rockport, Maine. Free and open to the public!