In the cold, short days of winter and early spring, when painting outdoors is practically impossible here, Mary Giammarino, a plein air painter, takes a counterintuitive route as she awaits the return of the light that first drew her to Outer Cape Cod.
During the warm months, Giammarino maintains a small studio in Truro, but her true summer studio is the trunk of her car, filled with canvas, paints, and an easel. She shows her work at Four Eleven Gallery in Provincetown.
Her winter address is in Andover, Vt. There, working outdoors as well as from a light-filled studio facing into the woods, what she lays down with her palette knife is a different kind of light than what she finds here. It appears in impressionistic blue-white landscapes of snow glowing through pines and red barns unknown in these parts.
Giammarino first came to Provincetown in 1989. She was studying art at Greenfield Community College in Western Massachusetts when she picked up the copy of Hawthorne on Painting that lured her here. The book is an unusual record of the Provincetown painter’s teaching, captured in students’ quandaries and notes on his comments, collected by his wife and published in 1960.
“You cannot bring reason to bear on painting — the eye looks up and gets an impression and that is what you want to register. Painters don’t reason, they do,” is one of the haiku-like precepts found there. And “Be alive, stop when your interest is lost. Put off finish . . . make a lot of starts.”
The well-worn volume remains Giammarino’s touchstone — she returns to it for inspiration both as a painter and as a teacher. “It felt like a language I learned at an early age,” she says of Hawthorne’s words.
What Giammarino hoped for that first summer here was the chance to study with Henry Hensche. She had heard about him: the Hawthorne student who opened his own Cape School of Art. But when she got to Provincetown, Hensche was no longer teaching; he had stopped in 1984 and sold the school in 1987.
Her husband, the sculptor John Cassin, knew Provincetown painter Hilda Neily, though. She had studied with Hensche and with others would help bring his Cape School back to life. In Neily, Giammarino found a friend — the two often painted together — and a way into Hawthorne’s principles of working en plein air.
“I started as a studio painter in college and loved the abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline,” Giammarino says about the motivation for her early career. “But I also loved the light and nature, which meant I was destined to be a plein air painter.”
In this way, Giammarino became a student of the Impressionist style as taught in Provincetown, squinting into the atmosphere, and using a palette knife that insists on color and volume rather than detail. Of course, she learned to paint “mudheads” — the kind of plein air portraits Hawthorne and then Hensche taught artists to make swiftly and improvisationally, without slowing down for details, as if dancing with the wind.
Now these are part of what Giammarino teaches. That’s become a year-round pursuit with a core group of painters who meet online on Fridays. But come summer, she’ll be back with workshops at the Cape School and at Castle Hill.
“Of all the Cape School teachers, I may be the least Cape Schoolian,” Giammarino says. Her paintings often veer toward abstraction. Still, Hawthorne would recognize her teaching objectives. In one of her classes, students fold a single sheet of paper in three and work with a single color, often red.
“Look, look, paint,” she says. The goal is to capture the varied effects of light on sky, water, and land. As much as she is drawn to sunlight, Giammarino is also pulled by the effects of the night sky. Squinting into the darkness, she captures the moon’s reflected glow as it casts orangey notes puddling the blackening bay.
For most of her paintings, Giammarino relies on a palette knife, a six-inch squeegee, and large brushes. After all, she says, “It’s painting, not drawing.”
