Rice Polak Gallery (430 Commercial St.)
Greg Durio and Fred Klinker, from The Woodlands, Texas, are making their way down Commercial Street on Friday evening for the weekly gallery stroll. While they’re certainly here to appreciate the art, they’re also on a quiet mission: to find a piece to fill the blank stretch of wall in the bedroom of their summer place here.
Klinker and Durio say that in decorating their Provincetown home they like to choose local artists. But they try to avoid putting “nautical-themed” artwork everywhere.
Klinker kneels on the ground in front of a panoramic nighttime seascape — Christie Scheele’s Late Day on Tidal Flats — to see if it would look right above the bed.
Though the painting initially seemed a good fit, Klinker says he’s worried the landscape is too static for the bedroom. “Is there enough going on?’ ”
“The headboard is kind of high, so we have to imagine it up here,” Klinker says, raising an arm. That’s why he’s on the floor: for perspective.
Four Eleven Gallery (411 Commercial St.)
Holly Johnson of Belmont says she raced to Four Eleven Gallery as soon as she heard they had new art by Helen Grimm, whose show “All the Now” will be up until July 23. Johnson, who works at the New Art Center in Newton, says she already has several pieces by Grimm. “When you love something this much, you want more of it.”
Though she came to the gallery to look at the artist’s smaller pieces, Johnson says she’s captivated by the larger works.
“For me, big, gorgeous ocean scenes are my all-time favorite,” she says. “I love the fact that there are some that are abstracted, but you know exactly what it is — the sense of color and space and movement.” Grimm’s pieces are almost audible: like the roll of the tide over rocks and shells.
“It’s moving across the canvas — and beyond,” says Johnson.
Greg Salvatori Gallery (366 Commercial St.)
The Greg Salvatori Gallery is packed on Friday night for the opening of a new exhibit by Salvatori himself, and Brad Motta of Provincetown is excited.
He’s moved by the work: photographs and elaborate sculptural props made from the pages of manuscripts, dedicated to the artist’s husband, who is a writer.
One piece, called Page 1, especially draws his attention: a photograph depicting pages from a book engulfing a man’s arm as he reads.
“It just has that ‘to be or not to be’ quality to it,” Motta says. “It’s very uncertain about what is happening.
“Wearing the book, reading the book,” he says. “The way a book kind of grabs you.”
William Scott Gallery (439 Commercial St.)
Artist Jane O’Hara’s work is on hand at William Scott, where her work is on display. Every piece is inspired by something O’Hara read in the news, which she says is her method of “trying to cope with basically un-copeable situations.”
Her works show animals running terrified down highways and from fires — pigs and bears and cows, wildly afraid.
“I have a style that’s enticing, and then people go, ‘Oh, wait, what am I looking at?’ ” she says.
One of O’Hara’s favorite pieces — a portrait of a pig galloping down the road away from a city — was inspired by an article about animals escaping from a collapsed transport truck.
“I call it Breach,” says O’Hara. “The lights represent the cacophony of cities and trucks and sirens and that sort of thing.”
O’Hara usually works in isolation. Tonight, “It’s wonderful to put it out and see it all together,” she says.
She likes watching how people react to her art. “Everybody’s reaction is quite different,” she says. “I’ve done some pieces that were to me, clearly disturbing, and people were like, ‘Oh, that’s cute!’ ”
Gallery 444 (444 Commercial St.)
Bradley Pedro was trying to decide which gallery to enter when Mayumi Nakao’s Brooklyn Harmony caught his eye through the window of Gallery 444. A colorful portrait of life at the dining table, Nakao’s work threads the needle between the real and abstract, says Pedro, a Ph.D. student at Tufts University.
“I like when it’s real life, but you can tell it’s a painting,” he says. “There are stylistic choices being made, but it’s a real-life scene.” The piece, with its warped perspectives, is dizzying; the expressions of the subjects suggest they find the distortion funny.
“There’s an aspect of cartoonish-ness, but not too much.”
Cad Red Studio (437 Commercial St.)
Maureen Dalby of Wellfleet and her friend Irene Matthews say they were “forced” to make art in Mexico earlier this year when they stayed in a neighborhood where “there was really nothing to do,” says Dalby. All they had was art supplies.
Now, the pair — who are strolling with Patty Ivers, a friend and retired schoolteacher — find themselves in Cad Red Studio, debating whether Andrea M. Sawyer’s Stop! Open depicts Perry’s Fine Wines & Liquors in Provincetown’s West End.
“It’s not architecturally the same as the liquor store — you walk up higher into it,” Dalby says. “But maybe not.”
“I guess it doesn’t say liquor store,” Matthews admits after more closely analyzing the painting.
“But we know what it is,” Ivers chimes in.
The trio agrees that the work is beautiful. Dalby likes “the bright light on that one facade of the house” and how it contrasts with what might be the liquor store.
“It’s a beautiful area, the West,” Ivers says.
