Buzz Masters Studio
Buzz Masters has lived and painted on Deer Isle for decades, volunteering with the local ambulance corps for 24 years while making layered, complex mixed-media works on wood panels. Her paintings investigate memory and narrative through materials drawn from the Maine seascape — rope, driftwood, beeswax, gold leaf, thread.
Masters works primarily on wooden panels prepared with a custom surface that mimics Roman fresco technique. Her materials list reads like a deliberate inventory of texture and time: casein emulsion, acrylic paint, gold leaf, graphite, oil stick, thread, beeswax, nails, varnishes, tinted gesso. The imagery is rooted in the Maine coast — tangled rope and beach flotsam sorting through memory, ladders and lobster floats marking time, water rushing through familiar interiors to show how loss changes what felt safe.
She's expanded more recently into mixed-media collage work on paper, which allows folding, distressing, drawing, and gilding in ways that panel work doesn't. The color palette and surface treatments draw from early Italian painting, but the narratives are personal and current.
Beyond the studio, Masters has been a working member of the Deer Isle community in concrete terms: 24 years as a volunteer EMT with the local ambulance corps, now serving as an AEMT providing community paramedicine services. She and her neighbor Sarah Doremus have also collaborated on outdoor art installations in the local woods, using discarded materials as forest décor.
Local Tips
- Visit is by appointment or by calling ahead — confirm current status before making the trip.
- The studio address (152 Dexter Farm Dr, also listed as 152 Fire Rd 730) is off the main route — directions from the artist are useful.
- Contact: bmastersc@gmail.com or (207) 266-2461.
Connected To
- Deer Isle Artists Association — community gallery that represents and connects local painters and studio artists
- The Turtle Gallery — gallery in Deer Isle showing established contemporary work; shows the kind of serious studio practice Masters represents
- Haystack Mountain School of Crafts — Deer Isle's internationally known craft school; many local studio artists maintain Haystack connections