South Bristol freelance artist and educator Erica Qualey sits in her home studio in Walpole, from where she leads online classes for students all over the world. Qualey, who has been teaching art lessons since she was a teenager, said she might not be teaching online as actively as she is today without the circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. (Sherwood Olin photo)
Erica Qualey didn’t know didn’t know how lucky she was when she and her husband, Jason Bigonia, first landed in South Bristol.
The couple moved to Lincoln County from the New Hampshire seacoast area when Bigonia was first hired as a teacher at South Bristol School around 2007. Qualey said they were attracted to South Bristol because it was on the coast and in between Bigonia’s family in New Hampshire and Qualey’s in Aroostook County.
Though the move proved to be a stroke of good fortune, although the first impression was less than encouraging.
“I had no idea what a good choice we were making,” she said. “When we first came here for his interviews, no joke; it was so foggy that we didn’t even know what it looked like here: at all.”
After making the move, Qualey, a self-employed teacher, artist, and graphic designer, was pleasantly surprised with how quickly she felt at home. It helped very early on that she got a job as a decorator at the now-shuttered Damariscotta Pottery.
Qualey said her six years spent working for business founder Rhonda Friedman were inspirational. An artist and entrepreneur who made decisions on based on intuition, Friedman hired artists likes Qualey to decorate her pottery with their own designs.
“I felt very connected once I started working for her,” Qualey said. “The space that she kind of created within her business for all of the workers was really wonderful. It was exactly what I needed … She didn’t follow any rules about it, but because she didn’t, that’s why people wanted it so much. It was really powerful to see a woman running this business her way and how much it worked because of it. It’s a huge influence for me.”
In the years since, Qualey has applied the same follow-your-muse concept to building her business as a freelance teacher and artist. Qualey said she started drawing and painting as a child and was teaching art lessons when she was still in high school.
“I really love teaching for multiple reasons,” she said. “One is that I am a little too social to be a studio artist. It takes a really special kind of person who’s just a studio artist. For me, teaching strikes a balance and it challenges me also. I think it makes me better at my work.”
Born and raised in Sherman, Qualey was an artistic child in area where art was not a top educational priority. Her parents were extremely supportive, paying for private lessons and providing transportation as needed, but Qualey’s public school art education basically came down to one year of art appreciation in high school, a sampler platter of mediums taught by an overwhelmed teacher.
After high school, Qualey studied industrial design at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y. and took every art class she could fit into her schedule. She graduated in May 2001 and after working all summer as a lifeguard in Wells, she and a college friend ventured out on an epic road trip that September, leaving just a few weeks after 9/11.
Once they hit the road, they traveled for months, visiting every relative they could find, living out of their car and circling the country in big “zig-zaggy loops,” Qualey said. They had no itinerary, no commitments, and no schedule.
Years later the trip remains a treasured memory. So much so, Qualey said she would encourage her children to travel around the country when they are old enough.
“We just drove around and traveled, which I feel like should be mandatory for everybody to do,” she said. “We went everywhere and it just was such a good thing to do. Fresh out of college, we had nothing other than our sleeping bag and a beat-up old car. It was the best.”
Returning to Maine in 2002, Qualey worked briefly for her brother-in-law’s company in southern Maine, contributing graphic design and marketing photography. Within a year she transitioned into a freelance work. Not long afterward, she met her future husband and moved to New Hampshire.
“I kind of had a lot of jobs at once,” she said. “I did a lot of freelance graphic design and marketing stuff. I worked doing floral design and then I started teaching as an adjunct professor and I did that for a couple of years.”
When Bigonia decided he wanted to change careers from engineering to teaching, the couple took it as an opportunity to move a little closer to Qualey’s family.
Today, Bigonia and Qualey are coming on their 20th wedding anniversary. They share two daughters, Helena Bigonia, a first-year student at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle, and Liesel Qualey, a second grade student at SBS.
While Bigonia has made his career as middle school science and math teacher at SBS, Qualey has developed her own business as a freelance art educator. Online and in person, she offers a variety of themed courses she has developed.
Occasionally she is hired by a venue to provide an art program. At other times, she develops the program and hires the venue to host it. Other classes she leads online from her home studio in Walpole.
In recent years, she has added traveling workshops, leading one in Italy in 2024 and one on Monhegan in 2025. In June, she will return to Italy to lead a workshop in Cinque Terre.
Erica Qualey has worked in many mediums but she prefers painting in watercolor for her own work, like this view of Osier’s Wharf in South Bristol. Watercolor is an interactive medium, Qualey said, describing the mixing of paint, paper, and water as being “like a dance.” (Sherwood Olin photo)
Qualey said she might not have become as active teaching online as she is without the COVID-19 pandemic. In early 2020 she was teaching for the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. When the pandemic lockdown began in March, the Farnsworth strongly emphasized online learning.
“During the pandemic, they really pushed very hard to switch to online teaching,” Qualey said. “I’m not sure I would have done that without them sort of helping me get there. Once I did that, I was able to get a grant from the Maine Arts Commission to sort of set myself up with the technology and stuff to be able to do a good job.”
As it turned out, online classes worked well for Qualey, as she could set a schedule that perfectly fit her needs.
“It ended up being, like, the most perfect thing that I could have fallen into,” she said. “I would schedule them at night, after work hours. It didn’t matter if people were sick or not sick or in quarantine or not in quarantine … We were all in our separate places online and it just sort of created this. It just created a whole new thing for me that I don’t think I would have discovered.”
Collectively, over the years her online classes have become their own little community, Qualey said. Her students are located all over the world, but many of them have taken classes with her before and a good many have some fond connection to Maine.
However they found her, Qualey said she has worked very hard to create a welcome space for her students. Her charges are encouraged to converse with her and each other, show their work, and share and receive feedback in a supportive environment.
Building on this feeling of community, Qualey is currently focused on establishing the ArtKin Collective, a new feature she hopes to develop into an extensive video archive of lessons that subscribers can view on their own schedule.
“It’s sort of serving to help me create a balance and be a little bit more organized and planned out, but it’s also helping, I think, create a nicer space for those people who want to be part of that,” Qualey said. “They can organize it, search it … like if they want to learn as a technique or whatever, like everything’s going to be able to all be there for them.”
While she has worked in many mediums, and she offers workshops in things like silk screen printing and Pysanky egg decorating, Qualey prefers working with watercolors. Not only does she find acrylics uniformly boring in their modern consistency, she also prefers the visual appeal of watercolor work.
Watercolors, she said, have a lot of qualities that can’t be fully replicated by other mediums.
“I get very bored painting with acrylics, because they are very predictable,” Qualey said. “With watercolor, you’re constantly engaged because you have the water on your paper engaging with the paint and it’s changing and moving things all the time. So there’s always this, like a dance, you’re always trying to work together with the water.”
Qualey said she is been asked many times about getting her teaching certification and becoming a school teacher. While she occasionally does in-school residencies, and she enjoys them, she has never wanted to teach art that way.
“For me, I get to make a lot of choices in what I’m teaching and who I’m teaching and how that feels, if that makes sense,” she said. “I think this feels a little bit truer to who I am than working in a school.”
More information about Qualey and the courses she is teaching is available online at ericaqualeyart.com.
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