In Provincetown, the tide’s comings and goings are always in view. But in a small fishing village on Paros Island in Greece, where Barbara Cohen had an artist residency this past summer, “The water was always there,” she says. Low tide and high tide weren’t very different at all. “It added to the whole sense of being in this distant, foreign place.” Cohen swam in the ever-present water in the heat of the morning and in the early evening. She painted all day.
Cohen’s work from her residency in Greece, which was sponsored by Cycladic Arts, an artist-run nonprofit, will be exhibited at Farm Projects in Wellfleet from Saturday, Sept. 21 to Sunday, Oct. 6, with an opening reception on Sept. 21 from 5 to 7 p.m. The show is titled “Not Perfect.”
“I turned 75 last summer,” says Cohen, who lives in “the Kibbutz,” also called the Waterfront Apartments, in Provincetown. “As I get older, I realize I don’t want to have anything to do with perfection. It ties me up.” She used to paint landscapes and still lifes. “When I try to do a still life now, it always comes out abstractly.”
At Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts, she had to make one trompe l’oeil: a perfectly realistic still life painting. “I did it,” she says, “and I kept it for years.” She moved to California and stored the piece outside under a tarp. “It mildewed and was ruined,” she says. She likes to think of it as a symbol now: “Yes, I can do that, but I don’t. I don’t have the desire or the patience. It doesn’t interest me.”
Most of the paintings in “Not Perfect” are decidedly abstract. Some are very large — her studio in Greece was big enough to accommodate canvasses nearly five feet tall and wide. The smaller ones are no less striking. Bright white meets deep peach in the corner of a piece called Paros Island Cactus II. Powdery blue is outlined in blazing orange. Everywhere, clashing colors seem to get along like a pastel-colored house on crimson-colored fire.
One series of paintings in the show is on paper. Cohen says she was inspired by two women and their sourdough bakery near the place she lived in Greece. The series depicts the sketched outlines of loaves of bread that surf, lounge on beach chairs, and tan on towels. Some of those paintings are titled Red Bread. The scarlet loaves look hot.
It was hot in Greece. “Always around 86 degrees,” says Cohen. When a breeze came, she says, there was a feeling of exhilaration. Her paintings from Paros “have a real passion, a real sense of life,” she says. “Because of the heat.” Several are named for it — with titles like Summer Heat and Hot Summer Breeze in Paros.
When people on the island asked if she spoke Greek, says Cohen, she told them she didn’t. “I said English wasn’t even my first language,” she says. “It was painting and drawing.” She carried around a pad of paper and drew the things she needed.
That strategy wasn’t entirely new to her. “When I was growing up,” she says, “people had to talk to me in very visual ways.” While earning her B.F.A. at Tufts, she struggled to get through “a big fat English literature book.” It wasn’t until then that she got tested and diagnosed with dyslexia.
The way Cohen paints is consistent in at least one way: “It’s always a lot of motion.” She’ll go in with a lot of brushes — small ones for the small works and big ones for the big works — and attack. “It just sort of comes out of me,” she says. “None of my paintings are ever planned. As far as I know.”
Her enthusiastic swipes and strokes of paint are the first stage, she says. “The second stage is when I really look into the painting and try to pull certain things out of it.
“I’m very drawn to loops and circles and squares,” she says. “I’ve always been attracted to boxes.” As a child growing up in Lancaster, Pa., she collected them — tiny gift boxes filled her mother’s attic. “I liked the wrapping of them,” says Cohen. “I like to tie things.”
Those basic shapes appear in her work and evolve in whatever way she chooses. In one of the larger pieces, In the Heat of the Day, square blocks of thick pigment are stacked like a blown-up, nonsensical mosaic. Look hard enough at many of the paintings and a square becomes a house; a cluster of them is a village.
Cohen photographs her work as it progresses through each stage — it helps her envision it from an outsider’s perspective. Once informed of the piece’s true character, free of the enveloping tangle of in-process artistry, she’ll go back in and add more color, more paint. “Moving the paint,” she says, “making the lines more diverse or the shapes more diverse, larger to smaller, thinner to wider. It’s always a kind of push-pull.”
Cohen says she used oil paint for years until the toxicity got to her. She uses acrylic and gouache now. The paintings in “Not Perfect” are mostly made with gouache. The difference between gouache and acrylic “is like the difference between silk and cotton,” says Cohen. “Silk just flows. It has a drag about it.”
One of the larger pieces is called First Woman President’s Dinner Party — USA, the title a departure from themes of summer heat. The highlight of the piece is a pink oval — a loop — in the center of the canvas. “I don’t do people at all,” says Cohen. But when she added the loop, she says, “it reminded me of people around a table.”
Up close, the piece devolves into a dizzying spectacle of color and semi-recognizable shapes. But from a distance, the faces of women wink into existence, gathered around a table, and their bodies take shape, too. The piece becomes logical — but still not realistic. Blink and it comes undone.
Be There or Be Square
The event: Barbara Cohen’s show “Not Perfect”
The time: Sept. 21 to Oct. 6; opening reception Saturday, Sept. 21, 5 to 7 p.m.
The place: Farm Projects Gallery, 355 Main St., Wellfleet
The cost: Free
