Beginning Thursday, June 20, landscape painter Kevin Beers joins ceramicist Tim Christensen for two new shows at Gleason Fine Art’s Boothbay Harbor gallery. For Beers, this will be his 12th solo show at the Gleason gallery, and for Christensen, his second solo show in Boothbay Harbor. A public reception for both artists will be held at the Townsend Avenue gallery from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday, July 5.

Each summer, Brooklyn resident Kevin Beers returns to the rock-bound island of Monhegan to paint for five months. Monhegan has come to mean a lot to Beers. It is where Beers transformed a passion for painting into his life’s work. It is also where Beers met his wife, Amy Raye, who, in a scene right out of a Hepburn and Tracy romantic comedy, literally ran into Beers while admiring a magazine article about Beers painting on Monhegan. Fittingly, Beers and Raye married on their island a couple summers after their serendipitous meeting.

To his many collectors, a Beers painting represents everything they love about Maine: intense blue seas and skies, puffy white clouds and sunlight dancing off neat clapboard houses. To Beers himself, “Monhegan is a dazzling place with incredible, beautiful light. I love to paint the buildings on the island – the color and structure of weathered buildings, the patterns of sunlight and shadow, and the sharp contrast between a red roof, white clapboards, and bright blue sky.”

In 2008, ceramic artist Tim Christensen took to the Maine woods to reinvigorate his artistic muse. Settling into an off-the-grid homestead in the far down-east coastal village of Roque Bluffs, Christensen found himself surrounded by the very things he wanted to incorporate into his pottery: dragonflies, salamanders, chickadees, and all manner of sea creatures.

Although Christensen now lives in Ellsworth, it was that move to Roque Bluffs, and his immersion in the natural world, that allowed him to focus on his art in a way he never had before. The result of that immersion is some of the most arresting pottery to be made in Maine.

Christensen’s pieces are nearly always black on white, with perhaps a little color now and then such as with the beautiful blue-toned “Blue Ocean.” Christensen applies a layering of black slip into which he carefully scratches his design. The technique is called sgraffito, an Italian expression from which the word “graffiti” is derived. The scratching is free-hand, an astonishing achievement given Christensen’s complex designs, often both inside and outside his vessels and sculptures.

Both “Kevin Beers: Monhegan Island” and “Tim Christensen: Drawings on Porcelain” open on Thursday, June 20, and run through July 27. For more information, call the gallery at 207-633-6849.