At Hurricane Gallery in Waldoboro on Saturday, July 26, a new exhibition will open, “From the Bay of Bengal to the Gulf of Maine.”

Artist and gallery owner Robert Macdonald called the new show “a hurricane, a hurricane of art.”

In this year's exhibition there are new pictures from Burma of lovers, mermaids and Buddhas. In addition are works by local artists Pam Cabanas, John Lorence, Elaine Niemi, Lois Hill, Roz Welsh and Alan Hynd.

A newcomer to Hurricane Gallery is Carol Wiley whose work, said Macdonald, has a compelling improvisatory feel. Figures only partially realized merge with other figures demarcated with often strident color, creating, he said, provocative dreamscapes.

Macdonald said his own paintings for this show “are nothing if not disturbing.” In the largest of these, measuring 4 feet by 8 feet, is “Droned,” in which the president presides over a drone attack. In another, a nude Edward Snowden is shown draped in a python, holding thunder bolts aloft.

“Figure it out,” Macdonald said, adding he expects more than a few sparks will fly this summer at Hurricane Gallery.

Macdonald has sought to broaden the scope of art in the gallery. From the moment Hurricane Gallery's doors opened in 2011, the focus has been on art outside the mainstream of derivative realist art so ubiquitous in Maine galleries. Maine artist Macdonald's first show was of works painted and exhibited in Japan, during a 20-year sojourn there, of hulking Sumo wrestlers wrapped in one another's arms and of the gods of Japanese mythology engaged in some very naughty antics. In 2012 the gallery turned to works by Midcoast artists who did not repeat the same trite themes and images made popular over the last 100 years.

In 2013, new winds blew in from the Far East. The gallery featured paintings by two Burmese artists from a village on the Bay of Bengal where Macdonald spends a part of each winter. Subjects of the works included calm Buddha faces and serene Burmese beauties, workers cutting fish, goats among the lobster pots, and kittens born in Grandma's attic. These Burmese works, Macdonald said, even looked at “at home among Alan Hynd's rude political black and white pen and ink drawings.”

Hurricane Gallery is located at 175 Quarry Road in Waldoboro, near Route 1, just off Depot Street. Opening reception at 5 p.m. Saturday, July 26. Hours daily but call first: 207-832-4062 or 207-741-7477. For more information, email nyiako@yahoo.com.