When Paul Schulenburg was growing up in Schenectady, N.Y. his family came to Dennis Port in the summers, and that included an annual day trip to Provincetown. “I was always taken with the artists in the streets doing portraits and caricatures,” he says. He moved to the Cape in 1993 and has lived in Eastham for nearly 20 years, but “you know, you’re always a washashore on Cape Cod,” he says. When he was chosen as this year’s Provincetown Portuguese Festival artist, he says, “it finally cemented in my mind that I feel a part of the community.”
The Portuguese Festival chooses an artist each year to create a commissioned painting of the boat that will lead the Blessing of the Fleet, an annual event for the past 78 years. This year, Schulenburg was asked to make a picture of the F/V Pam & Todd, a lobster boat owned and captained by Todd Silva. An image of the painting will be featured on this year’s T-shirts and on the cover of the festival booklet, and the artist will be honored at an afternoon reception on Sunday, June 1 at the Provincetown Inn.
The Pam & Todd proved a serendipitous subject for Schulenburg. Since childhood, he has been a keen observer of his surroundings, and he often finds subjects for his paintings by walking around fishing piers, usually in Chatham or Provincetown. The Pam & Todd captured his attention because he knew a brother and sister in Schenectady with those names, and he had photographed the boat and sent pictures of it to them. When he was asked to paint it, it seemed like another sign of belonging.
In his painting, the boat, laden with lobster traps, cuts through a placid Provincetown Harbor. It rises purposefully from the water, angled diagonally. Waves erupt alongside its starboard side, gleaming in the morning’s light.
To create the painting, Schulenburg worked with photographs of the boat. Before devoting himself full-time to painting, he worked as an illustrator — a useful skill as he studies source material, like photographs, to make something of his own. For this painting, he lifted the structure of the boat from a photograph but created a different background. He included Provincetown and the Pilgrim Monument in the distance and incorporated wispy clouds in the sky and bright pastel blues throughout to convey crisp, clean air on a bright day. The painting expresses the optimism of the start of a workday on an idyllic Cape Cod morning.
Schulenburg received a B.F.A. in painting from Boston University in 1979. His training there was formal, with an emphasis on painting from observation. These days, he continues that discipline with a group of local artists during weekly painting sessions in his Eastham studio, a converted garage next to his house.
In Pam & Todd, he finds a range of white tones in the hull of the boat — information that one would never find in a photograph. He adds touches of yellow to communicate the warm light hitting the side, and his shadows incorporate greens, grays, and blues. In Sun Deck, another painting of a fishing scene, Schulenburg finds an equally vast range of color in the puzzle-like shapes of light and shadow falling across the deck of a boat. Schulenburg describes his work as painterly realism, but elements of impressionism seep into his approach to color.
Because he is a realist, Schulenburg’s subjects reflect his observations of the Cape’s people and its fishing industry. About 25 years ago, when he started transitioning from illustrator to full-time painter, he went out to try and find a suitable subject to paint.
“It was gray and early spring,” he says, and he wasn’t finding much inspiration until he stopped by a fish pier. “I saw the color of the boats and what the fishermen were wearing and the architecture of the pier and the boats and all that activity. I just thought this would be a really fun thing to paint.” He began painting such scenes, often from the vantage of standing on a pier looking down at boats that were unloading fish. He soon began showing the works at Addison Art Gallery in Orleans, where he continues to exhibit his paintings.
In Sun Deck, Schulenburg says, he created rough textures using impasto paint in order to convey the gritty atmosphere of the scene. In this and other works in the series, the figures exist as dynamic life forces — whether in rest or in motion — engaged in the ancient activity of making a living from the sea. They often appear both vulnerable and powerful, surrounded by industrial fishing equipment.
“These paintings are a way to paint the human condition and tie it to life on Cape Cod,” says Schulenburg.
In his portraits, Schulenburg also reflects on Cape Cod life. For his painting sessions he casts a wide net, often recruiting people he sees in the community, like Casey Clark, who worked on renovations at the Mary Heaton Vorse house, or someone with red hair that his daughter spotted at a store in Orleans. In his studio, he has a portrait of Jerome Green, another local painter, and one of a woman named Ruth whom he met on a flight.
One personality that captured Schulenburg’s attention was RaSh’aan Byrne. Last year on election day, Schulenberg and his group spent the day painting at the Brewster house of Kathleen Sidwell, an art collector, as a way to stave off election anxiety. There, Schulenburg met Byrne, who lives on Sidwell’s property, and painted his portrait. Later, Byrne sat again for the portrait group. During a third session, in which Schulenburg painted from a variety of photographic sources, he turned the portrait into a narrative encompassing what he learned about Byrne, who is from Trinidad and became “an American by choice.” The painting, in which Byrne leans against a wooden wall wearing a hoodie with an American flag, is Schulenburg’s attempt to show the complexity of Byrne’s experience of being an immigrant and a Black man in America during a time of political uncertainty.
“In my portraits, I’m trying to capture the spirit and personality beyond the likeness,” says the artist.
Meet the Artist
The event: A reception for painter Paul Schulenburg
The time: Sunday, June 1, 1 to 4 p.m.
The place: The Provincetown Inn, 1 Commercial St.
The cost: $20
