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    THE DRAFTING TABLE

    A House Painter of a Different Sort

    Marin Reinhardt renders her love of design in watercolor

    By

    Marin Reinhardt had always wanted to run her own business. For a few years, she brainstormed how to build on her background in interior design. Should she start a housecleaning service? Maybe interior painting or property management? Nothing felt quite right.

    Then she remembered something her stepfather suggested years ago: maybe a future business venture could involve the rendering skills she had gained in her B.F.A. studies at Savannah College of Art and Design.

    “Rendering was my favorite part of my degree,” says Reinhardt, who majored in furniture design and minored in interior design. “I loved being at a drafting table and doing technical drawings of furniture.”

    Marin Reinhardt works on house portrait commissions in her North Eastham attic studio. (Photo by Molly Jane Quinn)

    Of all her skills, Marin Reinhardt is most confident about her ability to draw. I can attest it’s one of her strengths. When we first met in middle school in Orleans, it was our love of art that made us fast friends.

    Last year, Reinhardt started to paint houses — but not in the usual way. She made a few watercolors of houses she liked and posted the pictures on social media to see if anyone was interested in commissioning a house portrait. She got 20 orders right away. Now she gets commission inquiries for portraits of houses across New England through her website, marinreinhardtdesign.com, and her schedule is full through June.

    “I love a T-square,” says Reinhardt. She takes pleasure in getting the architectural details right. (Photo by Molly Jane Quinn)

    “That first day, two real estate agent friends commissioned my paintings as closing gifts for their clients,” Reinhardt says. Since then, quite a few of her customers have been agents, but all kinds of people want her portraits. There are summer people who want to bring a bit of their Cape experience back to the city. There are year-rounders who are selling their houses and moving away and want paintings as reminders of their time here. And there are locals who have held onto their homes, some for generations, and want a lasting tribute to the family place. One of her portraits became a 45th wedding anniversary gift when a client commissioned a portrait of the house she and her husband had built together all those years ago.

    Some of her paintings have been used to raise money for causes Reinhardt cares about. They’ve been auction items at fundraisers for the Homeless Prevention Council, for example, where she also volunteers.

    Marin Reinhardt’s portraits capture a range of house styles including Capes like this one. (Photo courtesy Marin Reinhardt)

    Reinhardt’s art station is tucked in the far end of the small attic above the North Eastham rental where she has lived with her family for more than 10 years. Her husband, Matt Wetmore, is a lobsterman who works out of Provincetown, and their children, twins Owen and Teagan, 11, and Everett, 6, all attend the Provincetown IB schools. They feel fortunate to have an affordable rental, but they dream of owning their own house one day. In the meantime, painting allows her to indulge her appreciation of architecture and study a wide range of designs.

    She starts with a photograph provided by the owners (often just one, though more is better; they don’t have to be professional photos) and then does a consultation: What features of the house are they especially fond of? What season would they like for the portrait? Some people want hydrangeas front and center while others love fall leaves. It doesn’t matter if the photo is from the dead of winter; her paintbrush can make it spring. The conversations often turn emotional as people recount their memories.

    Hydrangeas abound in summer scenes of the Cape Cod houses Reinhardt paints. (Photo courtesy Marin Reinhardt)

    After making a pencil sketch based on the photograph, Reinhardt gets out her portable drafting table. Architectural details are meticulously rendered to scale (or “squared up,” as she says). A simple shingled half Cape gets the same attention as a grand waterfront spread. For new construction, she refers to house plans. Sometimes she looks at Google Street View or real estate listings for different angles on a property. She often looks at design books and magazines to make sure she’s getting particular materials just right.

    Then she brings the sketch to life with color. Watercolor is a particularly fussy medium; you have to paint fast and then let it dry as you go to avoid blooms. It’s slow work. “I love painting shiplap and shingles,” says Reinhardt, who doesn’t mind pausing to enjoy the process.

    Reinhardt is expanding her offerings beyond house portraits to include pet portraits. (Photo by Molly Jane Quinn)

    “I haven’t done a turret,” she says. “I would love to do one of those.” But looking ahead, she has aspirations beyond turrets. She offers prints of her work to those who’ve commissioned portraits and has in mind other ways to use the paintings, such as for personalized stationery.

    Reinhardt also has started painting a particularly important element of her clients’ households: their pets. Miss Ellie, the rescue cat who is a fixture in Reinhardt’s studio, seems to approve, at least in theory. She does seem a little dubious about all the attention Reinhardt has given the subject of one of her first pet portraits, a golden retriever.

    ARTISTS

    A Painter Works From the Edge of Combustion

    Dakota X turns muscle cars on rugged landscapes into objects of veneration

    By

    Dakota X ran a house painting business in Provincetown in the 1990s to support an artistic career. Back then, Dakota went by the name Deborah Martin, lived in town with women friends, and began taking the Polaroid photographs that ended up on display at the Driskel Gallery, which occupied the front of what was then the newly restored Schoolhouse Center.

    Artist Dakota X outside Joshua Tree in 2014. (Photo by Victory Tischler-Blue)

    “I used photography as a medium when I lacked studio space or time to focus on painting and drawing,” Dakota says. They had graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Tufts University in 1992, “but I’d been drawing since I was able to hold a crayon,” Dakota says. Growing up in Wayne, Pa., outside Philadelphia, they loved looking at paintings by “The Wyeths — Andy and Jamie. My first painting on canvas was around age eight,” Dakota says, at which point “my mother gave me her easel and paints.”

    Schoolhouse Gallery in 2010 and later Kobalt Gallery in 2013 featured work from Dakota’s “Narrow Lands” series, nostalgic, haunting images of a Provincetown on the verge of a spree of teardowns and gentrification. A few years later, “Portraits of Autism” at AMP Gallery focused on paintings capturing childhood’s vulnerable yearnings.

    Dakota first started using photography as inspiration for painting during a 2006 road trip from Provincetown to Los Angeles. “I set out to document small towns across America in Polaroid,” Dakota says, and the resulting images were shown at the Phyllis Stein Art Gallery in L.A.

    Wonder Valley Ford by Dakota X (Photo courtesy Dakota X)

    Now Dakota lives in unincorporated Pinyon Pines, Calif. outside Palm Springs, where they’re building a painting studio. They describe the rugged environment as the perfect setting for muscle cars with big engines, which are central subjects in the paintings in the “Internal Combustion” show that opens Aug. 4 at William Scott Gallery.

    “Pinyon Pines is sort of like old P’town, a hippie throwback with artists and musicians but on a mountain and without a post office,” Dakota says. “There are no gas stations out here. It’s a big thing for a car to run out of gas in the middle of the desert.”

    Every muscle car, Dakota says, has a story: “I once traded my BMW for a 1989 Chevy Silverado 1500 454, big and black, with a V8 engine and large tires. It made a lot of noise, and I just loved it. I felt like myself in it.” People drive these cars until they’ve broken down and then leave them on the landscape. “Cars are just littered across the desert,” says Dakota.

    Sky Valley Nova by Dakota X. (Photo courtesy Dakota X)

    Dakota drives around Southwestern deserts hunting for abandoned muscle cars that can be photographed in situ and used, along with objects nearby — a school bus, a stove, even a small plane, also abandoned — as the basis for a painting. The cars become objects of veneration tinged with the erotic.

    Photography is part of Dakota’s process, but as reference. Otherwise, they purposefully keep photography and painting separate. “I am in no way attempting to be a photo realist,” says Dakota, who has also worked as a filmmaker. Indeed, there is something cinematic about these stranded-in-the-desert depictions. The viewer imagines a Sam Shepard — or a Dakota X — ambling by.

    Sky Valley Nova is an homage to a dusky blue Chevy Dakota encountered outside Palm Springs: “I used to pass by it every time I came home. The car was just beautiful, sitting on someone’s property but not being used. They sort of disintegrate over time. I finally photographed it.”

    Internal Combustion by Dakota X. (Photo courtesy Dakota X)

    When a scene ends up inspiring a painting, “It’s all about the light and the shadow,” Dakota says. “When I’m on a road trip through the desert, I get everything I can possibly get. I shoot and don’t leave anything out.” Wonder Valley Ford presents a layered scene of the vehicle, pivoted left of center, interacting with a horizontal and vertical landscape of industrial debris under a gray-blue sky. Deep shadow signals the unrelenting noon Sun.

    Dakota is a meticulous artist, working one painting at a time rather than jumping from one to another, preparing pieces that will eventually be exhibited as a series. “Internal Combustion” is a double entendre, connecting Dakota’s art and life. “In an internal combustion engine,” says Dakota’s artist statement, “the engine partially converts the energy from the combustion to work.

    “One might say I have teetered on the edge of self-combustion,” Dakota writes, the result, they add, of a lifetime of gender identity incongruence.

    This is their second Provincetown season exhibiting as Dakota X. The transition, they say, “has affected me in a very positive way.” Getting their emotional and physical health together has allowed them to focus on painting. “It’s all connected,” says Dakota.

    Light and Shadow

    The event: “Internal Combustion,” new work by Dakota X
    The time: Opening Friday, Aug. 4, 7-9 p.m., continuing through Aug. 16
    The place: William Scott Gallery, 439 Commercial St., Provincetown
    The cost: Free

    IN THE STUDIO

    Joerg Dressler Mixes Things Up

    Reflecting on Provincetown, personal narratives, and the natural world

    By

    On a summer morning in Provincetown, the door of Joerg Dressler’s Pleasant Street studio is wide open, easing the boundary between the controlled calm inside and the rhythms of pedestrians crossing between Commercial and Bradford streets. Light pours into the space through skylights. Dressler’s paint tubes are neatly ordered by color, and the wooden floor, splattered with paint, traces Dressler’s history here where he has been painting since 2001.

    Joerg Dressler in his Provincetown studio. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    The paintings on the walls span changes in his career, including an early atmospheric oil, a landscape with a three-dimensional mountain-like form, and several paintings in a style for which he is perhaps most known, in which realistic snippets of landscapes — often sourced from photographs Dressler takes while traveling — float in hard-edged abstract spaces, interrupted with splotches of color.

    On one wall is a new body of work he will be showing at Alden Gallery. He started the paintings in Miami, where he lives in the winter, but his inspiration is more local.

    “I wanted to bring in the experience of Provincetown but without the expected things,” he says. “But I think I lost track of that.” There are elements of the world right outside his door in these paintings, particularly in the imagery of water and male bodies on display. But Dressler moved freely in a variety of directions in this work, incorporating images from art history and cutting into the surfaces of the paintings to create a level of abstract patterning below the surface.

    Two Men’s Land by Joerg Dressler. (Photo courtesy Joerg Dressler)

    “I’m solving problems that I posed myself,” says Dressler, noting the incorporation of human figures — something new for him — and the merging of two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces in this latest body of work.

    In addition to painting, Dressler works as a freelance graphic designer — a job that involves its own kind of problem solving. “In graphic design you’re ultimately answering questions, and in art you’re asking the questions,” says Dressler.

    In 2001, when Dressler bought the house in Provincetown, he was working full-time designing a visual brand for a company in Boston. But with an art studio at his disposal, he cut his day job down to four days a week to devote more time to painting.

    Undulation by Joerg Dressler. (Photo courtesy Joerg Dressler)

    “I’m not going to wait until retirement to paint again, I thought,” says Dressler, who graduated from art school in 1994 in Germany, where he grew up. In 2014, he left his job to devote himself more fully to painting, but the experience of thinking as a graphic designer continues to inform his approach to painting, both as a source of influence and opposition.

    Dressler’s process owes a lot to graphic design, although his use of color is another story (“God forbid you use pink or muted colors in graphic design,” he says). Cutting and pasting visual elements together — so central to graphic design — is how Dressler begins a painting. Consequently, his paintings have a collage-like aesthetic, where the relationship among elements is surprising and stilted, without any deference to a traditional painting space that favors a unified whole.

    For his painting Salty Sailor, Dressler began creating the image in Photoshop, working with a photograph of his cat and still-life elements lifted from a painting by the Dutch artist Willem van Aelst.

    Salty Sailor by Joerg Dressler. (Photo courtesy Joerg Dressler)

    “I’m not replicating what I’m seeing,” he says. “I’m interpreting it in a way that I need for my work.” He pulls in diverse elements to meet the needs of his composition. In this case, a group of leaves helps activate the right-hand corner of the painting, and a passage of green water, which he painted from imagination, grounds the bottom third of the painting.

    In planning a painting, personal stories often lead the way. “My own personal story allows me to come up with the ideas and the elements,” says Dressler. He wonders, however, how important those stories are to the viewer’s experience.

    “I wouldn’t want a story to oversell the work,” he says. “I sometimes hear artists talking about their work and it all makes sense and it’s a great story but then I look at the work and it doesn’t show.”

    After a bit of questioning, Dressler opens up about the narrative behind his painting Stud, a picture of a gecko climbing up a leg surrounded by multi-colored flowers. Like the other paintings in this series, an abstract aberration literally cuts through the center of the picture.

    Stud by Joerg Dressler. (Photo courtesy Joerg Dressler)

    “As a kid, I looked like a girl, and I behaved like a girl,” says Dressler. “As an adult I don’t feel or look that way but there’s a feminine component in me.” He understands this painting as a personal commentary on gender stereotypes. “Even though you have a feminine side, you can still be entirely a man and be a stud and not be fazed by a little gecko crawling up your legs,” he says.

    The legs in this painting are culled from Caravaggio, and they aren’t the only element influenced by the 16th-century Italian. Dressler’s lush flowers and dramatic palette reverberate with Caravaggio’s sensuality and chiaroscuro lighting.

    Art history figures prominently in Dressler’s work. “I spent a lot of time as a teenager in Paris,” he says. “My stepfather took me to all the museums, and at the end of each visit he would buy me a book.”

    In Rabbit Hole, Dressler picks up on the conventions and themes of historic still life painting, albeit with a black-and-red pattern at its center that nods more to op-art. In the painting’s imagery of fruit, Dressler locates both sensuality and mortality. “The fruit are symbols of juiciness and youth but also impermanence,” says Dressler. “The passage of time is an important component of my work.”

    Rabbit Hole by Joerg Dressler. (Photo courtesy Joerg Dressler)

    Another key idea is humans’ relationship to nature. “If the work resonates with a viewer, they will recognize my love for nature,” says Dressler, who hopes that his paintings allow viewers “to look at nature in a different way and think about their relationship to nature.”

    Dressler starts each day with walking. “It grounds me and humbles me,” he says. In his paintings, however, nature is more distant and stylized: trees, turbulent seas, and flowers become visual symbols filtered through the synthetic processes of photography, design, and painting. Plus “there’s always the element of disruption that I’m after,” says Dressler. In the past it might have been splotches of spilled paint or the intrusion of flat, abstract shapes. In this latest body of work, the disruptions are shapes cut into the panels and the abstract patterns underneath.

    It’s Dressler’s use of stylization and disruption that articulates his commentary on humanity’s relationship to nature. There’s beauty here — that’s for sure — but unlike the porous relationship between nature and individuals championed by transcendentalists and Romantics, Dressler’s vision is more conflicted and more opaque, suggesting a relationship colored by the human impulses to both control and destroy.

    Exhibition

    The event: New works by Joerg Dressler and Ed Christie
    The time: Opening Friday, Aug. 4, 7-9 p.m., continuing through Aug. 17
    The place: Alden Gallery, 423 Commercial St., Provincetown
    The cost: Free

    ARTISTS

    For John Choly, Art Has to Have Heart

    With deceptively simple paintings, he sends a message of love

    By

    “I paint like a child,” says John Choly with a smile and a twinkle in his eye. “And I own that.”

    In his Provincetown studio, he is surrounded by shelves of paints, crayons, markers, beads, wrapping paper, shells, stones, ribbons, glitter, and Play-Doh. “Picasso once said that he made his best art later on in life, when he returned to painting like a six-year-old,” Choly says. “I really went with that.”

    Love and Stripes Forever is a 28-by-28-inch acrylic on wood that Choly did in 2017. He explores shapes and symbols in his work, hearts being the most important. (Photo John Choly)

    For the past three decades, Choly has been painting bold, colorful hearts. His fascination with this simple shape goes back to 1989, when he began to paint hearts on handmade greeting cards. “One day, I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and saw a huge heart painting by Robert Rauschenberg,” Choly says. “It was dark and bloody, but it was still a heart. I realized then that I can use hearts in my artwork, not just in pretty little handmade cards.”

    Since then, painting hearts has become his “grass-roots underground movement of love,” he says on his website, cholyheartsandmoons.com, where he sells his work. Choly also puts hearts on mugs, T-shirts, greeting cards, and other items that he offers for much less than a painting.

    “I’ve had thousands and thousands of pieces of my art go out in the world,” he says. “Every now and then, someone sends me a story about how my work has touched them and brought joy into their life. When I hear that, I know that I’ve done something positive.”

    Though Choly says that he sometimes worries that his work is “too cute and trite instead of deep,” his hearts are neither clichéd nor commercial. À la Picasso, they have some of the magic parents recognize in their children’s art. Such uninhibited creativity usually disappears at age 10 to 12, when the belief that, to make art, you “have to be good at it” takes over.

    Choly’s hearts also contain messages. The word “FRAGILE” is painted across one bright red heart in light brushstrokes. Choly is the main packer at his retail day job. “Shipping has nearly doubled since Covid,” he says. “I found myself putting ‘FRAGILE’ stickers on many boxes, and I thought about how fragile our hearts and lives are.”

    John Choly in his Provincetown studio. (Photo Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher)

    Another heart is made up of colored stripes with a striped background, representing “the oneness of the entire universe,” Choly says.

    Born in 1959, the son of second-generation Ukrainian immigrants, Choly grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., then Connecticut. His mother, a former nun, introduced him to art, crafts, and museums. By the time he was 12, Choly knew that he wanted to lead a creative life, and spirituality and art have remained at the center of his world. Though he’s not religious anymore, he believes in “something that connects us all,” and aims to make this manifest in his art.

    He attended an all-boys Jesuit high school, an experience he still values. “The Jesuits are philosophers and educators,” he says. “I took classes on atheism, death, and dying. We were taken to museums in New York City. Our teachers wanted us to think and to challenge our minds.”

    One art teacher became his “guiding light” — Betty Kachmar, who believed all her students should experience making art and be free to “just try things out.”

    Moon of May 23, 2010, by John Choly, is a 3-by-3-inch watercolor on paper. Choly has been painting the cycles of the moon since the 1990s. (Photo John Choly)

    Undecided about whether he wanted to become a writer, artist, or actor, Choly studied theater and elementary education at Saint Leo University in St. Leo, Fla. But instead of pursuing acting or teaching professionally, Choly took jobs that would give him the financial security and free time to focus on his art. He took a watercolor class and did landscapes that, much to his surprise, sold well. “I was like, what? I didn’t want it at first,” Choly says and laughs.

    He spent a decade living in Providence, R.I., where he began an ongoing series of moon paintings in watercolor inspired by nighttime walks. In 1997, he painted the moon every night for 365 days, a project that was shown at Cortland Jessup Gallery in Provincetown in 1998. Choly’s moon paintings explore the shape’s expressive potential the same way as his heart paintings. As the moon waxes and wanes, he sees it mirroring complicated human emotions.

    “I have known mild depression since my teenage years,” he says. “There is always darkness and light in everyone, and, in darkness, the light has to find a way to come through.”

    In the fall of 1999, Choly decided to look for a year-round rental in Provincetown. In what he calls “one of the many miraculous moments of my life,” he found both a place to live and a job.

    Fragile, by John Choly, is a new 35-by-28-inch acrylic on wood. (Photo John Choly)

    “When I was coming out in 1983, a friend brought me here for a week,” he says. “And I thought, oh, my God, what an incredible place. What drew me even more than the gay community is the way artists are honored. Even car mechanics understand artists here. I’ve lived in places where people look at you like you have three heads when you say you’re an artist.”

    It’s more about people for him than the landscape. “I joke about this,” Choly says. “You know how artists say there’s a certain kind of light here that they love? Well, by the time I get to the studio after work, it’s dark. So, I have to paint with my inner light.”

    He chuckles and adds, “I say funny things, but it’s true.”

    PAINTING

    Erna Partoll’s Art Distills the Brilliant Colors of Her Emotions

    Provincetown has been her home and inspiration for 50 years

    By

    “I think of painting as capturing time,” says artist Erna Partoll. In the sunny kitchen of her Provincetown home, where she has been holed up during the pandemic, Partoll points to an image of one of her best-known paintings, The Green Wave, on the cover of Deborah Forman’s Contemporary Cape Cod Artists: On Abstraction. “When I went to the beach that morning, the sun was coming up,” Partoll says. “There was the air and the water, the ocean. Of course, those elements are here in the painting, but I also expressed the emotions I was feeling.”

    Erna Partoll, at home in Provincetown. (Photo Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher)

    Partoll runs her finger along deep blue and vibrant green shapes in the painting that might be waves or rolling hills. “This is where scenes from my childhood home in Switzerland were activated in my mind,” she says. “I was moved by something unconscious, an association. You don’t have to paint the waves exactly as you see them, but if you are able to transpose the energy of that moment onto the canvas, that will resonate within another person.”

    The Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown has represented Partoll for more than two decades. On visiting Partoll’s studio for the first time, Walker says, “I immediately responded to Erna’s ‘words of communication’ through her circles, portals, waves of thought, and feeling expressed in a myriad of colors.”

    Partoll sees abstraction simply as a way of organizing what she sees and feels. “Even in a realistic rendition, you can’t ever put everything you see onto the canvas,” she says. “You have to choose what to emphasize.”

    She doesn’t paint plein air — outdoors with her subject before her — and, instead, returns to her studio. “I usually start a painting with an idea, with focus on an emotion, an impression, or an intention,” she says. “There has to be an essence out of which an image can develop and grow.”

    Partoll was born in St. Gallen, Switzerland, near Lake Constance, in 1932. Her parents took her hiking in the mountains, nurturing a passion for nature. The family also made regular visits to the local art museum. When Partoll was six or seven, she saw a painting there of a scene near a lake. “There was a yellow in that painting that has stayed in my mind to this day,” she says. “I was so moved.”

    The Green Wave (2009) is a gouache on paper by Erna Partoll. Her abstract landscapes blend images of Provincetown with memories of her childhood in Switzerland. (Photo courtesy Berta Walker Gallery)

    She soon began to visit the museum on her own. Though she painted while growing up, she never considered art to be a professional possibility. “My father’s idea was that I should become a secretary,” she says, “so I found a job in an insurance company after school and hated it.”

    Demonstrating remarkable independence for a young single woman in the early 1950s, Partoll left that job after a year and set off on a journey that would take her to London, Paris, Montreal, Toronto, New York City, and, in her late 30s, Provincetown. “I was interested in languages and curious how people live in different places,” she says.

    Everywhere she went, Partoll found a way to support herself. “I worked hard, and, at times, it was difficult,” she says. She was a mother’s helper in London, a translator in Paris. She took courses in literature and history at the Sorbonne and spent countless hours in museums.

    Green Portal (1999) is a gouache on paper by Partoll. (Photo courtesy Berta Walker Gallery)

    “I wasn’t painting yet — I was looking,” she says. When Partoll reached New York in the early ’60s, she was ready to study art. She found a night job and enrolled at the Art Students League. “I took classes from nine to three and worked from three to midnight,” she says.

    “Erna studied with Theodoros Stamos, who was working on color fields like his good friend, Mark Rothko,” Berta Walker says. “She grounded her understanding of color work in this environment.” Other influential teachers were Will Barnet, Stephen Greene, and Robert Brackman.

    It wasn’t until her move to Provincetown in 1970 that Partoll found her signature palette of bright colors. “I loved the 10 years I lived in New York and what the city had to offer, but all my studies and artwork were done at indoor studios,” she says. “I believe this accounted for expressing myself in more muted colors. Once I started living here, I felt almost overwhelmed by the dramatic beauty of the landscape and the ocean, the expansion of the views, and the beautiful clear colors in the brilliance of the special light on the Outer Cape. Moving into a great natural environment was the beginning of a big shift, and it has been sustaining me ever since.”

    New Day’s Promise (2010) is a gouache on paper by Partoll. “Looking out over the ocean,” she says, “gives you a feeling of eternity.” (Photo courtesy Berta Walker Gallery)

    Partoll has worked at a number of Provincetown galleries, including Walker’s. “I loved working in galleries, especially where accomplished artworks are being shown,” she says. “I never tired of looking at the paintings. It gave me energy.”

    In Partoll’s bright and sunny studio, light floods onto the painting sitting on her easel. Nearby, a bouquet of brushes and tubes of paint in neat rows stand at attention. Though she’ll turn 89 this year, Partoll still paints regularly and has no plans to slow down.

    “I imagine it’s just a fact that when you get into your 90s, your energy will be somewhat reduced,” she says. Then she adds, with a sparkle in her eye, “But I’m not everybody. It’s still exciting.”

    Laura Shabott Finds Virtual Inspiration for Her Paintings

    By

    What would Hans Hofmann think of Zoom? That may sound like a silly question, but it’s one that is conjured up by Laura Shabott’s paintings at the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown, on view through Aug. 8 in a group show with work by Salvatore Del Deo, Romolo Del Deo, and the late Elspeth Halvorsen. Shabott, who was invited to join the gallery this year and who is heavily influenced by the late Hofmann’s teachings, created several pieces in the show during the last few months, using a model who is live online, via Zoom.

    Shabott in her Provincetown home studio. (Photo Laura Shabott)

    Shabott has taken a somewhat circuitous path to becoming a full-time painter. After graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1995, she spent 10 years working in the theater, then 10 more years as an arts writer. She committed to being a visual artist at the age of 57.

    “My soul was a painter, and my truest need was to make paintings,” she says. “I have not had one moment of doubt.”

    Shabott thinks of her past “not as time wasted, but as history as preparation for this moment.” Indeed, art cannot be created in a vacuum. As an older artist, she says, she can “let go of the investment,” taking risks and experimenting with different styles and media. But she’s always aware of the traditions and influences that precede her.

    She describes Hofmann, and his famous push-and-pull technique, as key to her approach to art. She traces her lineage to the great abstract expressionist teacher through her own mentor, Wellfleet artist Robert Henry. Hofmann’s spirit is especially present in Ode to Hofmann #6, a painting in Berta Walker Gallery’s far room.

    Laura Shabott’s Ode to Hofmann #6 is part of a series based on the same still-life tableau. It’s on view at Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown. (Photo James Zimmerman)

    That piece is part of a series, painted between the winter of 2016 and spring of 2017, all of the same still-life tableau: a clay pitcher, a vase, an ink jar, and palettes. At the same time, it seems to evoke the human form: a foot, a vulva, a face.

    Shabott’s analytical nature makes her an excellent teacher as well, especially for older students. In the courses she offers, she emphasizes principles rather than technique, so that students don’t copy a style and, instead, create their own personal language. She is currently teaching a class in push-pull still life at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, and one in figure drawing at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Both are “virtual open life,” held via Zoom.

    Indeed, Shabott is not at all averse to new technology. “Since Covid, there has been a real sense of disruption, and I’ve allowed it,” says Shabott. The proof is in works such as Waiting, a four-by-five-foot canvas that graces the Walker Gallery’s front window, one of several pieces in the show to use a model on Zoom.

    The four-by-five-foot oil on canvas Waiting depicts a pregnant model, posing via Zoom. (Photo Laura Shabott)

    “This painting had many incarnations, with all of the work for the figure done on Zoom,” she says via email. “The model just had her baby, and this was finished a month before the birth.” The figure’s round belly and breasts are done with such authority, there is not an ounce of hesitation in the bold strokes.

    “One benefit of virtual open life is being able to use paint, spread out, and make noise,” Shabott says. “The collage-making sounds of ripping, cutting, and gluing can happen without disturbing a room full of other artists.” Such is the case with He Was a King in a Past Life, which uses fabric, found materials, oil paper, and archival glue.

    Though it’s not apparent that Waiting arose from a subject on Zoom, there is something eerie and beguiling about Window, another painting in the show. “Zoom open life reduces the figure to a screen the size of a laptop, so the model feels as if they are in an alternate reality,” Shabott says.

    In Window, white oil pastel lines suggest dimensionality, but the perspective feels alien. The figure thrusts forward, as if part of a diorama, and the window is surrounded by a halo of light. A plug socket on the wall reminds the viewer of how the painting came about.

    Window, by Laura Shabott, reveals its Zoom-session origins in its unusual perspective. (Photo Laura Shabott)

    Aglow, another Zoom work, similarly focuses on light. The reds, whites, and teals in the figure cause it to come forward. The title of the piece gains new meaning when one realizes that the computer screen from which it was painted is a source of light.

    In these works, Shabott combines Hofmann’s basic tenets — light, color, dimensionality, form — with the technology of the 21st century. But they mesh well: the computer screen is, after all, just another rectangle, another frame, like a window or doorway.

    And the eye always perceives some degree of separation between itself and the object, whether it be the air, glass, or, in this case, an electronic screen. Shabott views painting from Zoom simply and directly: “Everything I paint is from life,” she says.

    Model Behavior

    The event: An exhibit of artwork by Laura Shabott, along with work by Salvatore Del Deo, Romolo Del Deo, and Elspeth Halvorsen

    The time: Through Aug. 8; gallery open by appointment (calendly.com/bertawalker), Wednesday-Saturday, noon to 4 p.m.

    The place: Berta Walker Gallery, 208 Bradford St., Provincetown

    The cost: Free

    ARTISTS

    William Ciccariello’s Paintings Play Ball With Lost Time

    Archival photos are reborn as heroic portraits

    By

    If you’re a baseball fan, William Ciccariello’s paintings of players will soar like a home run sailing over the Green Monster, up into the light and then gone, into the dark of night.

    Hank Simmons is a 11-by-8-inch oil on board by William Ciccariello. (Photo Warren Lenoir)

    This series of small portraits of great players from baseball’s golden era, part of a group show at Rice Polak Gallery in Provincetown through Aug. 5, transcends the familiar historical art of baseball, because Ciccariello isn’t actually concerned about depicting the players themselves. In these paintings, as in his other work, with such subjects as shipwrecks, soldiers, and still lifes, what he’s interested in is time. Specifically, he’s concerned with what time does to our heroes: our athletes, majestic sailing vessels, warriors, and, by extension, us, when time overtakes us all.

    “I’ve always been concerned with time, how long things take and what the passage means,” Ciccariello says. “All of these subjects are dead and gone. I think everyone feels time has a precariousness to it, because it’s your life.”

    He was born in 1954 and raised in Port Washington, N.Y., on the North Shore of Long Island, what Ciccariello calls a “really nice, sleepy town.” His father repaired jewelry in New York City, and his mother worked from home for Publishers Clearing House, later getting her degree in library science and becoming the town’s librarian. With six brothers, it was a busy household. It also was one filled with paintings. Ciccariello’s grandmother, who died five years before he was born, was an artist who studied with Hans Hofmann in France, and whose work in the 1930s morphed into social realism.

    “She was a serious painter, but never had any recognition or notoriety,” Ciccariello says. “It made such a strong impression on me that someone you did not know could leave so much behind for people to look at.” It seems that, even as a child, Ciccariello was noticing time and history and art, and the dimensions they occupy.

    During the warmer months, painter William Ciccariello moves part of his studio to the front porch of his home in Jamaica Plain. (Photo John Greiner-Ferris)

    He was shy as a child, and art became his way to discover the world on his terms. The young artist displayed natural talent, and when it came time for serious study, he enrolled at a state university that offered a respectable art program. But it wasn’t enough of a challenge for him, so Ciccariello transferred to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he finished his training.

    He has worked as a fine arts painter his entire adult life, developing a mature body of work, never wanting or needing to dip a toe into the commercial world. “The ideas and feelings I address in my painting are ones of fragility, balance, precariousness, decay and ruin, permanence, and the transitory quality of time,” he says. “I like to impart some hard effort to make them worthy of memory and merit.”

    Ciccariello’s process begins with the imagery. “Many historical images are compositionally arresting and are of an era that’s long gone,” he says. “I like trying to portray that.”

    First, he traces a photograph on a piece of Mylar. He then coats the back of the Mylar with charcoal, in essence turning the Mylar into something like carbon paper. Placing the Mylar over the board, he retraces the image, transferring it in charcoal onto the board. “It’s an old-school method,” Ciccariello said. “There are other ways of projecting images, but I don’t think like that. I like the methodical process of doing it by hand.”

    This simple image (Ed Walsh) of a baseball gripped by the hand of a pitcher highlights the conceptualism of Ciccariello’s work. (Photo Warren Lenoir)

    What’s left behind is a clear piece of Mylar with a tracing on it that Ciccariello sometimes will then paint (some examples are at Rice Polak). “They have kind of a ghostly look about them, because they’re grayed out, and I find them really interesting.”

    Ciccariello reduces the found images he uses to a simple set of elements that he balances against backgrounds of two sets of complementary colors. This goes beyond representational art — the effect is a visual impression of light and space that belongs to Ciccariello alone.

    Lefty Grove is a 10-by-7-inch oil on board by Ciccariello, part of a show of his work at Rice Polak Gallery. (Photo Warren Lenoir)

    The painting Lefty Grove is a good example. The unexpected comparison of the blue or blue-violet at the top and the dark sepia at the bottom is how Ciccariello conveys his concept — his idea — of time: colors have shifted and faded, like they do on old photographic color film. The strong, fat diagonal of the fan-filled bleachers that presses down to the left is brought back up by the lever of Grove’s body, his hip the fulcrum, his gaze at the viewer the locus of the painting.

    By incorporating conceptual elements, such as archival photography, along with his meticulous brushwork, subdued palette, and tight compositions that ground the paintings into their own liminal spaces, Ciccariello presents heroes who we all recognize, and who are calling to us from another era.

    Diamonds Are Forever

    The event: Exhibit of artwork by William Ciccariello, part of a group show with Nick Patten, Sean Thomas, and Robin Winfield

    The time: Thursday, July 23, through Aug. 5; gallery hours, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, and Friday-Saturday evenings

    The place: Rice Polak Gallery, 430 Commercial St., Provincetown

    The cost: Free

    ARTISTS

    Amid a Pandemic, Robert Cardinal Finds Peace in Painting

    A Provincetown patriarch moves his Kiley Court Gallery to new digs

    By

    The current work of Truro-based artist Robert Cardinal is a solid series of mature paintings, simple scenes of manmade objects in nature. His harmonious compositions blend complementary colors with definite, deliberate, and controlled lines and confidently rendered shapes lit by morning or evening sunlight. Despite the current pandemic and moving his Provincetown gallery after 28 years in the same location, the 83-year-old Cardinal continues to probe his art, experimenting with new ways of rendering his subjects.

    Robert Cardinal takes a break in his Truro studio. (Photo Camille Cardinal)

    Born in Montreal, Cardinal moved to Greenwich Village in the 1960s. He speaks fondly of working the counter at Café Figaro on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal streets, remembering with amusement the assembled painters arguing the “big” questions of the day, such as “Why are we artists?” Those were the days, perhaps, but success didn’t come immediately for Cardinal.

    “The beginning is tough,” he says. “Knocking on a gallery door and asking if they want to show your work, they give you that look that makes you feel like a bug. But if you stay with it and you’re very true to the way you paint, eventually, things come around.”

    He lived his life riding an artist’s trajectory. He followed his peers to Paris, thinking it was a good idea, since, as a Quebecois, he spoke French. He lived in Montparnasse, studying for five years at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière before returning to New York. There, a bunch of his friends were going to Provincetown, a place he’d never heard of, where they could make money doing portraits on the street.

    “In those days, you could trip over the easels on Commercial Street,” Cardinal says. That’s how he discovered Provincetown.

    This was the 1970s, and Cardinal says that there were two things working in an artist’s favor in Provincetown: the light that all artists rave about from being surrounded by water, and a market for art. “There weren’t many galleries in those years, but you could make a living selling paintings,” Cardinal says. “We’d find a building, take it over for a weekend, and display our art.”

    Shore Road, View From Above is a 48-by-60-inch oil on canvas by Robert Cardinal. The Truro sunset colors are classic Cardinal, though the piece is unusually large. (Photo courtesy Kiley Court Gallery)

    Cardinal became a Provincetown fixture. He continued painting and opened Kiley Court Gallery, which at one point represented 21 artists. (Now, there are 12, including his son, Julian; the gallery is moving because of reduced space at its former location.) Cardinal’s work is heavily influenced by Maxfield Parrish and Edward Hopper, he says — the former for his palette, and the latter for how he could render a complex scene with simplicity.

    Cardinal starts with 9-by-12-inch studies painted on location in oil, working quickly, maybe only for 20 minutes per sketch, because the light he wants doesn’t last long. Then it’s back to the studio, where he’ll determine what to work on.

    “Not all small paintings can become big ones,” Cardinal says. “The more you labor on a painting, it just dies in front of you. The poor little painting is telling you, ‘Please leave me alone.’ ”

    He continues to experiment to this day. He’s now painting larger canvases and more minimally, which makes him concentrate on his colors. The larger works demand more physicality, but, Cardinal says, that also gives the painting more energy.

    And the more he can leave out of a painting, the better he feels about it. “I like to let the viewer finish the painting, so I stop a little earlier. That way, the viewer doesn’t get bored with it,” Cardinal says. “You have to realize that when we paint a painting, we might spend a week or two on it, but the person who buys it will spend years looking at it. Eventually, that person will know the painting better than I did.”

    The Covid-19 pandemic has, of course, affected Cardinal. His age makes him vulnerable to the virus, so he has isolated himself from his family, sequestering himself in a cottage he’s fortunate to have on his property. There’s a garden where he can meet at a safe distance with his family.

    “At the beginning it was tough to paint,” he says, “because I’d be thinking of other things, as we all were. But I’m getting used to it. I try not to watch the news too much and come to the studio for peace.”

    Morning, Wellfleet Harbor is a 36-by-48-inch oil on canvas by Robert Cardinal. (Photo courtesy Kiley Court Gallery)

    Cardinal laments the new, different world. “Provincetown was famous for its Friday night openings, but that’s not going to happen this year,” he says. His wife, Barbara, and daughter, Camille, run the family’s gallery, and they’re in the middle of dealing with the opening of the new space, down the block at 398 Commercial St., during the pandemic.

    “We are ready to open with the approval of the state and the town, and our plan is to allow one or two people in at a time,” says Camille via email. “Thankfully, we have two French doors and a deck with seating that will allow people to comfortably wait and view the inside. We will continue to use our website and social media as a means to connect with people in a safe way. Right now, it’s a wait-and-see situation.”

    OBITUARY

    Artist Elspeth Halvorsen Vevers, an Alchemist in the Studio, Dies at 90

    By

    Elspeth Halvorsen Vevers photo
    Elspeth Halvorsen Vevers in her studio in 1995. (Photo courtesy Vevers family)

    PROVINCETOWN — Elspeth Halvorsen Vevers, an icon of Provincetown’s art community and a resident since the mid-1950s, died peacefully at home on Nov. 17, 2019, her daughters Stephanie and Tabitha holding her hands. She was 90 years old.

    She was known for her luminous box constructions, finely wrought from the humblest of materials. Until being diagnosed with mesothelioma a year and a half earlier, she was still working in her studio, taking mile-long walks along the beach, and occasionally seen pruning errant tree branches from atop a weathered ladder. Many referred to her as a true Provincetown original.

    Her meditative artworks were featured in the exhibition “Image in the Box: From Cornwell to Contemporary” at Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York in 2008. In 2013 Varujan Boghosian curated a major survey of her most purely spatial work, titled “An Intimate Cosmos,” at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. He wrote that her works “stand on their own two feet beside Joseph Cornell…. At their core they are very dynamic pieces that call to mind Myron Stout’s totemic works, or Naum Gabo’s … close to god-like work.”

    She was something of an alchemist in the studio, transmuting spare and raw materials such as burnished aluminum, glass lenses, hidden mirrors, orbs, shifting sand, and horseshoe crab shells into metaphors for landscape, emotion, and the otherworldly. “When I surrender myself to solving the problems and intricacies of these somewhat labor intensive, architectural constructions,” she wrote, “I find the revival that only ongoing creating can provide…. I strive to create a meditative space in which the viewer may wander.”

    Elspeth was born in New York on Feb. 23, 1929 to Colette Finch Pratt, who was from England, and the Norwegian immigrant chemist and inventor Arthur Halvorsen. In her teens her decisive, iconoclastic spirit meant she was not a good fit for a scholarship year at St. Mary’s Episcopal boarding school in Peekskill, N.Y. She was expelled for skiing out of bounds and after curfew on what she called long “bucolic and perfectly innocent” afternoons of rapture.

    Elspeth Halvorsen Vevers self portrait
    A self-portrait of Elspeth Halvorsen Vevers.

    Her father died not long after she returned home to Purdys, N.Y. in 1944, leaving her mother with four children to support. Wartime austerities were the source of Elspeth’s lifelong commitment to improvisation and thrift, which guided both her resourceful use of materials and her innate desire to leave a small carbon footprint.

    After high school Elspeth joined her sister Hildur in New York’s East Village, where she began her studies at the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research. In the summer of 1953, after a year in Paris drawing and painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, she visited Monhegan Island in Maine. There she spotted the young Tony Vevers, also just returned from art studies in Europe, as he entered the local dance hall. During their brief island courtship they carved woodcuts printd with ink made from seaweed. By September they were married, living and painting in an unheated loft on New York City’s Delancey Street.

    Elspeth and Tony frequented the Cedar Bar, a popular Abstract Expressionist think tank and watering hole in Greenwich Village. In 1955 their first child, Stephanie, was born, and feeling that “New York was no place for an infant,” they decided to move to Provincetown. Milton Avery told them about a winter home on Commercial Street overlooking the harbor, and they were quickly befriended by the community, from the local librarian to Portuguese fishermen, from artists to carpenters. Along with their second child, Tabitha, born in 1957, they became part of the fabric of the town. Elspeth was always up for a gathering of friends over dinner at their home, and was delighted when guests would break into song. She also loved to dance; learning to do the twist at the A-House was a fond memory.

    Sympathetic to young artists making their way, Mark Rothko helped them purchase his house and studio on Bradford Street in 1963. The same year, Tony started teaching painting and art history at Purdue University. Settling into winters in Indiana, Elspeth completed a bachelor’s degree with distinction in fine arts in 1969, marking a turn toward black and white photography and ceramic sculpture that would ultimately figure in her assemblage work.

    Tony and Elspeth Vevers photo
    Tony and Elspeth Vevers. (Photo Renate Ponsold Motherwell)

    During the summers, as an active member of the artist-run Group Gallery from 1979 to 1988 and co-founder and president of Rising Tide Gallery from 1988 to 1998, she remained focused on being a serious artist. She has been represented by Berta Walker Gallery since 2003. The gallery celebrated her work with a major exhibition in 2018. In a Boston Globe review, Cate McQuaid wrote, “Halvorsen’s surreal box constructions read like poetry: concise, lyrical, and sown with symbols and metaphors that … create odd and tender openings in the viewer’s imagination.”

    Elspeth also shared her love of art with generations of children, teaching classes in clay sculpture, freeform assemblage construction, and an introduction to the use of tools. In later years she took great pleasure in encounters with former students or parents who told her how formative those classes were. In her eighties she picked up a video camera to record town events and produced a short documentary about the dramatic launch of the schooner Istar.

    Elspeth was a loving mother and wife, fiercely loyal to friends and family. She was predeceased by her husband, Tony Vevers, her sister, Hildur Kehoe, and her brothers, Björn and Robin Halvorsen. She leaves her daughters, Stephanie Vevers of Brooklyn and Provincetown and Tabitha Vevers and husband Daniel Ranalli of Wellfleet and Cambridge, and many nieces and nephews, including Anthony and Jonathan Sherin.

    A memorial celebration of Elspeth’s life is being planned. Donations in her memory may be made to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum or to Helping Our Women in Provincetown.

    provincelands

    Boris’s Dune Shack: Journal Notes

    Where peace is broken by the urge to capture the limitless

    By

    I’ve bought time, the most beautiful thing for which we pay. Time to act out an old monkish dream of a spare cell facing out over water.

    Time apart, a moratorium on my own life into another, pretending to simplify, to distill.

    View from a dune shack, evening colors
    A view from the dune shack, with sunset’s endless colors. (Photo Teresa Parker)

    Being on an artist’s residency makes me feel attached to the many artists, writers, thinkers, drinkers (many long dead) before me who paced this wooden shack. But it’s a light attachment. This place is wholly the present. The frenzied dance of the gleaming grasses, the shifting waters shoved forward by the constant wind seems to be all that is.

    I see a book on a shelf, “The Salt House” by Jan Gelb, who lived in this room long ago. I open a page to a list of those who originally pieced together this string of shacks riding the crests and valleys of the Provincelands dunes.

    “There are Frenchie Chanel, Sunny Tasha, Peg Watson, Boris Margo, Dune Charlie, Phil Malicoat, Ray Hunzinger, and of course, Hazel.”

    I turn another page to a quote by the artist Hans Hoffman, a portentous observation that I know will come to haunt my desire to draw what I see for the next few weeks:

    “Nature is always the artist’s source of inspiration, but in its spiritual, not physical sense. In nature every object exists in relationship to other things. This is what we must seek.”

    Within one day the peace other visitors write about in the shack journals is broken by an internal pressure to release onto paper the collection of shapes in the simple room. Clear-cut and lifted way from clutter, things are achingly defined.

    The artist’s stupefying drive to capture our perception of a place, an object — to what do we owe this unholy urge?

    Artists try to seize and keep things until they can be fully, slowly digested. These things are like fleeing antelope, us the old lions.

    The problem is observation does not rest and has no end.

    When I set out to pin down the shape of the glass oil lamp, it is not just its breathtaking shape against the windowpane. It is all the colors of the grasses, sky, ocean trapped in its glass. It’s the brass mound where the short tongue of mesh is lit, the spiking prongs that grip the glass chimney. It’s the downward thrust of the glass pedestal on which the squat glass bowl, full of clear kerosene, swells upward in a swirl of Victorian patterns cascading up its sides in white and ruby red. It’s the tiny chip of a frantic kite distant in the sky beyond the window, its fabric glinting with the same red as the lamp, the same gold of the grass, the same blue as the sea.

    I could, should go on and on until nothing is left out, until the whole world is not left out. It is a nightmare of beauty.

    I know escape is useless. If I go outside to get away from the limitlessness, the wild roses’ perfume will jezebel me.

    I’m aware, as always, that the attempt to capture will capture me without me able to capture it. The antelope wins.

    Ellen Lebow spent part of May at the Margo-Gelb dune shack making white line prints six years ago, she thinks.

     

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