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    HUMAN, NATURE

    Susan Lyman Sculpts a Defiant Life Force

    Beauty, sensuality, and destruction converge in works of wood and paint

    By

    In one of Susan Lyman’s sculptures, Washashore (Survivor), a white cedar tree is truncated just above the roots, like a figure cut at the torso. It stands upright, supported by roots that look like dancing legs. Unlike many of her other sculptures, which are marked with lines or dots, this one is stained only in a pale, warm color. The sanded wood is smooth. It looks alive, as if it could jump off its pedestal. But it’s clear this is also something dead: there’s violence lurking in its truncation and excavation from the earth.

    Susan Lyman with her sculpture Washashore (Survivor) at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    Lyman has been working with trees as subject, material, and muse since she came from Michigan to Provincetown in 1981 as a Fine Arts Work Center fellow. Here, she began collecting masses of invasive bittersweet vine and fallen limbs. Lyman’s current exhibition, “The Cadence of Uncertainty,” is her first solo show at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

    The works on display through May 11 are mostly from the last decade and show the breadth of her art practice, which includes painting and sculpture. She makes sculptures primarily in her Provincetown studio and turns to painting when she’s in Arizona or Michigan, where she spends part of each year. Lyman’s work engages with these varied geographies and grapples with the interdependent and often problematic relationship between nature and humanity.

    Some of Lyman’s paintings explore disease as a subject. In Covid at Lago Titicaca, she paints the South American lake and its surrounding landscape in lurid colors: deep blues, autumnal oranges, and fleshy pinks. A green image of the Covid virus is transposed onto the landscape like an alien intrusion. Other viral shapes infect the painting. Pink blobs are obscured under the land and float in the sky.

    Covid at Lago Titicaca by Susan Lyman.

    Lyman visited Lake Titicaca in 1981 with Ken Stebbins, whom she was dating at the time. In the intervening years, they married other people but reunited after both lost their spouses; they married four years ago. In Covid at Lago Titicaca, Lyman evokes the cyclical and interconnected nature of existence through imagery that addresses personal history, time, nature, infection, a global pandemic, and a specific landscape.

    Viruses also show up in Harbinger as red orbs. Lyman’s techniques are as expansive as her subjects — like many of her paintings, this one was derived from a collage. A swirling mass of black lines sits at the center of the composition, which stretches out to incorporate decorative pencil drawings, topographic maps, and deep space articulated through hills folding into each other and rendered with strands of bright color.

    Harbinger by Susan Lyman.

    A collage-like quality links Lyman’s paintings and sculptures. It resounds with the legacy of surrealism and opens avenues of association between subjects, images, and visual languages. In Charrue en Lotus Attaché, Lyman begins with a small log but manipulates its branches. She connects other branches to the originals, attaching them at right angles to create a box-like form that the log hovers within. The form has two ends — branches painted red — that suggest the head and tail of a snake. What began as a tree turns into something geometric and animal-like.

    Charrue en Lotus Attaché by Susan Lyman.

    In other sculptures, Lyman recreates the body in associative gestures that are often humorous. Litany was made from bald cypress knees, part of the root system of the trees that sticks up out of the water in wetlands. Lyman caresses the surface of each form: sanding, staining with wood dyes, accentuating the growth lines with acrylic paint, and dotting with a wood-burning tool. The forms are arranged together, but each has its own personality. Their anthropomorphic quality is further underscored by the way Lyman manipulates the wood to make its wrinkled growth lines look like sagging flesh.

    Although Lyman’s sculptures often suggest bodies, they’re not illustrative. They remain ambiguous and abstract and recall many things at once: appendages, genitals, growths, tumors, and forms from the natural world, like sea sponges and fungi.

    In Lyman’s work, erotic and diseased forms are like two sides of the same coin: one generative, the other destructive, but both part of the cycle of existence. In Botanical Theater #20 (repurposed), Lyman works with the vertical line of a tree trunk, but all the action happens at the ends. At the top, a conglomeration of assembled sticks appears as an amphibious creature balancing on the structure. At the bottom, a bulbous, root-like base sprouts an egg-shaped appendage. In Coy, the forms are emphatically erotic, and somehow at once male and female. Meredith, a gently arching form recalling the work of Romanian artist Constantin Brâncuși, is another one of the exhibition’s sensuous sculptures with its flushed pink and rounded shapes.

    In one of the most recent works in the exhibition, Cone of Uncertainty, Lyman articulates a vision that is both sensual and ecological and shows the inextricable link between the destinies of humans and nature.

    Cone of Uncertainty by Susan Lyman.

    The piece is constructed from branches that Lyman arranged into a downward swirling form. In the exhibition catalog, she states that the sculpture is “a tree not grounded but made uncertain by natural or manmade forces.” It’s informed by climate change, natural disasters, and wildfires. An orange line of branches snakes through the chaotic, destabilized form like a flame. Black birds, calling to mind endangered North American species, nestle in the inverted tree and sit on the wall behind the sculpture.

    Life and Death at the Border Wall by Susan Lyman.

    This work sounds an alarm that echoes through some of Lyman’s other recent work, including a series of paintings about the ecological and moral crisis at the border between Mexico and the U.S. But it’s also a beautiful sculpture, sensitively rendered. Beauty and the sensuality of form seem to freeze this inferno and suspend destruction. In Lyman’s hands, art is like a tree sprouting from the scorched earth. It’s a gesture of defiance and hope: a life force that contends with the antagonistic force of entropy embedded in our bodies, our politics, and nature.

    Life Forms

    The event: Susan Lyman’s “The Cadence of Uncertainty”
    The time: Through May 11
    The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
    The cost: General admission $15

    EVERLASTING RIPPLES

    There’s Plenty of Hope in the Sea

    In paintings and mixed media, Nancy Jenner finds beauty, inspiration, and a sense of herself

    By

    In recent years, the world has seemed especially cacophonous to artist Nancy Jenner. In a loud room, says Jenner, “I get quiet.” Her impulse is to travel inward, she says, and focus her gaze on what is small and constant. She walks the Atlantic shoreline often and lingers on the edges of Wellfleet’s ponds and harbor. There she’ll take hundreds of pictures with her iPhone, “trying to get to that moment of intimacy.”

    Jenner wanders the shore in Wellfleet in search of beauty. It isn’t hard to find. (Photo courtesy Nancy Jenner)

    She often returns to a central creative challenge: “I wonder if I could get a painting to feel like those ripples, if I could capture that light the way I experience it?”

    Jenner has been spending more and more time in Wellfleet, where she and her partner have had a house since 2019. The works in her current show, “Look Close/Think Far,” at AMZehnder Gallery were all done in the last six months: oil paintings, most only eight by eight inches, and a series of mixed-media works. Nearly every piece is about the sea.

    Sultry, oil on panel by Nancy Jenner.

    In Sultry, she paints sticky, shiny sand, dotted with pebbles: the water’s underbelly exposed at low tide. The viewer imagines the smell of the silt, the feeling of sinking slowly into the muck. In Sea Light, she captures the gentle rise of a wave poised to crash. Its color is the yellow-green of sea glass, opaque, but so delicate it suggests translucence.

    Sea Light, oil on panel by Nancy Jenner.

    Watching the Waves, a picture of the ocean on a day of gentle weather, is the largest painting in the show at 30 by 24 inches. The whole canvas seems to shift with the water. Near the bottom, white eddies tell the story of a previous wave. In the distance, another wave approaches.

    Watching the Waves, oil on panel by Nancy Jenner.

    “Every time, every day, every season, every light is different,” says Jenner. At the same time, everything about the water is cyclical, she says. “It’s everlasting.”

    Jenner’s mixed-media works are distinct from her paintings in material and subject. She makes the images in an editing app called Procreate by layering hundreds of photographs and then adding filters. The photographs are reproductions of her watercolors and reference images she uses for her paintings. Unlike in her paintings, much of what happens in Procreate is unscripted, she says. Once she’s decided which combinations feel right, she prints them out and uses pastel pencils to draw on top of the images: things like swirling storm clouds and smoke plumes.

    It’s a “disruptive landscape” she’s looking for, she says: alien horizons with multiple moons, haze thick enough to obscure the sun, oversaturated imitations of natural sunsets, and outlines of trees that appear like faint skeletons; ominous weather haunts every image.

    “I think a lot about issues of climate change,” says Jenner. She keeps a “studio prop” with her when she works: a painting she did of the shoreline, with a set of plastic six-pack rings looming, almost spotlit, in the foreground. That painting is “like bopping someone over the head with the idea of plastic in the ocean,” says Jenner. That’s not what she wanted to do with her mixed-media works. The pieces evoke the same ominous feelings “without being quite so blatant.”

    In Untitled 38, Jenner used dark purple pastel for the sky. The bright blue of a photograph shines in the gaps. The whole unsettled dusky firmament meets the ground, which might be water or land. It’s almost impossible to tell.

    Untitled 38, mixed media by Nancy Jenner.

    In Storm Cloud, one large cloud hangs over the landscape. The scene is motionless, and the cloud is beautiful. But it is also, clearly, a full-bellied storm.

    Storm Cloud, mixed media by Nancy Jenner.

    “They’re meant to be mysterious,” says Jenner about the works. She hopes they’re “beautiful enough that it might get people to consider what’s going on in the disruption in our weather systems and landscapes.”

    Jenner grew up in Manchester-by-the-Sea, but she says she never felt fully at home there. “By the time I was in high school, I was ready to get out,” she says. There were two places she did love: the ocean, always nearby, and the pond across the street from her childhood house. Her first drawings were of that pond and of the ocean: “Sea grass and stones and water.” But she took a circuitous path before returning to these subjects as an adult.

    Jenner went far away from the ocean to Penn State, where she studied fine art and graduated in 1980. Then she moved to Boston. “I always thought that I’d live someplace else in my life,” she says, “but I’ve come to realize that I’ve stayed here because this is where I’m from. This is me.”

    For a time, as a graduate student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, Jenner painted “corpses”: nude women posed like Venus, in flesh colors, with bloody stumps for arms and legs. She’d read The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark and decided Clark had gotten it all wrong. Her work, which she says was never for sale, was a visceral, conceptual reaction to the objectifying “male gaze.”

    “I was coming of age,” says Jenner. “I was exploring.” But those works aren’t Jenner anymore. Neither are the works she once thought she should aspire to: the sprawling, stratigraphic paintings of Mark Bradford or the little abstract paintings in thick paint done by a friend. “There was this idea that contemporary art was about depicting some inner truth,” she says.

    In the watery light coming through the windows of the AMZehnder Gallery, Jenner shakes her head. “That’s not who I am,” she says. “These seascapes” — she gestures to the works waiting to be arranged on the walls — “feel most like who I am as an artist.”

    Jenner’s paintings are beautiful, but for her, beauty isn’t necessarily the end goal. “Beauty is a funny word,” says Jenner, “but I don’t want to be afraid to use it.” The concept of beauty “gives us a renewed sense of belief in ourselves as humans,” she says. “The fact that we even perceive beauty is a very human thing — whether it’s the face of your child or a sunset.”

    Beauty is also a way into other ideas, she says, like renewal and hope. “If capturing a perfect moment in nature creates an uplifting experience for the viewer,” says Jenner, “I have perhaps perpetuated hope. It’s an audacious goal, but that’s the idea.”

     

    In the Eye of the Beholder

    The event: Nancy Jenner’s “Look Close/Think Far”
    The time: Through April 23; opening reception Saturday, April 5, 4 to 6 p.m.; artist talk Saturday, April 12, 3 p.m.
    The place: AMZehnder Gallery, 25 Bank St. #3, Wellfleet
    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

    FRAMING THE NEWS

    Mira Schor and the Art of Misrepresentation

    In a FAWC talk, she explores the role of politics in artists’ work

    By

    “This is not political,” the painting proclaims. Its flowing script, on an orangey background, is surrounded by a rectangular black frame, anchored by a vertical post. At first glance, the piece, by artist Mira Schor, could be a protest rally sign. But think again: the “not” can be read ironically, echoing surrealist René Magritte’s famous line of text, under the image of a pipe: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

    Mira Schor returns home from the Provincetown farmers market in 2016. (Photo Susan Rand Brown)

    To Schor, everything is political. And it’s fitting that the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown is using the painting to promote her upcoming virtual conversation, “Art and Activism,” with painter Anoka Faruqee, next Thursday, April 29. For both Schor and Faruqee, the role of artists in the political arena is an essential subject for discussion.

    Schor is a scholar, painter, and essayist whose books — such as Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life — and artwork have been honored with numerous awards. In 2017, she was elected to the National Academy of Design. Beginning in the ’70s, when she was a graduate student at Cal Arts, the history of art and politics, especially feminist art, has been an essential part of her artistic practice. Her work has become more public and politicized since Trump’s inauguration in 2017.

    Schor and Faruqee met at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine two decades ago. Schor was the “teacher” and Faruqee, a recent M.F.A. graduate, was the “student” — Schor, interviewed virtually by the Independent, makes air quotes with her fingers around those words. “I followed her work as soon as she began to exhibit,” the older artist says.

    The two reconnected when Schor, an associate professor at Parsons School of Design, saw Faruqee’s “Walk the Walk” fundraising project (@walktwalk2020) on social media. Faruqee, now director of graduate studies in painting and printmaking at Yale, targeted maneuvers aimed at voter suppression.

    This painting by Mira Schor was part of the exhibit “Tipping Point” at Lyles & King in New York City. (Photo courtesy Lyles & King)

    “Our conversation will be about how politics enters her more abstract artwork, and I will present my own artwork over the last four years — and work that I don’t actually consider art, such as New York Times ‘interventions,’ ” Schor says. “I am interested in exploring what it means to be a political artist. Anoka and I have different paths, but I think there are similarities.”

    Schor’s “interventions” grew out of her frustration with the way the Times reported momentous events. A lifelong New Yorker and daily reader of the paper, she started annotating its front page. “I corrected and altered their coverage,” she says. “Sometimes, it was as simple as taking a marker and circling the words they were using. Other times, it got pretty elaborate.”

    During the 2020 Republican convention, a page she posted online on Trump’s violation of the Hatch Act went viral. “Probably 12,000 people saw it — people who did not know who I was,” Schor says.

    A gallery in Berlin, gathering work for a show titled “This Is America,” is exhibiting some of these interventions. Schor’s Manhattan gallery, Lyles & King, will show them alongside recent figurative paintings. Under consideration is a soft-cover book the size of the Times with several dozen of her best word-rants.

    “I don’t want to sell them,” Schor says. “They are part of a historical record I want to keep intact.” She hopes, at some point, to have them become part of the archives of the New York Public Library or New-York Historical Society.

    Archiving her work, as well as the artwork of her parents, has been much on her mind lately. That’s because a student researcher associated with the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland contacted her about a podcast on women who went there, including Schor’s mother, Reisa. Schor shared biographical material on Reisa, and on her father, Ilya — her parents, both artists, met as students at the academy in the 1930s.

    This “intervention” by Mira Schor, a marked up front page of the New York Times, went viral on social media. (Photo courtesy Mira Schor)

    Fleeing war-torn, Nazi-dominated Europe in 1940, the couple moved to New York, where Ilya, a painter and engraver, created artwork in the spirit of Eastern European Jewish culture. When he died, at age 57, Reisa, with two young girls to care for, “picked up his tools,” Schor says. “She had been an abstract painter, and quickly learned to make objects in her own style — not as refined as his, but more muscular, more sculptural, and, at the time, very contemporary.

    “Her artwork, her jewelry, and the satisfaction she got from it was a major element in our lives,” Schor continues. “It gave her the confidence to buy a house in Provincetown. She would bring her tools from New York and spend long seasons in town.” The compact East End home that Reisa bought in the early ’70s has been in the family ever since.

    Provincetown has been a source of inspiration for Schor. As a young child, she says, “I loved the beach, I played with the sand. You know how the sand in Provincetown goes from tan, to rust, to black? These are the colors I use in my work. The landscape, those skate egg cases, gave me forms that entered into my work.”

    When she comes to Provincetown, “spending two months, on average, it’s like I push a reset button,” Schor says. “Over 50-plus years, painting in Provincetown probably accounts for more than 50 percent of my artwork.”

    While she’s here, she also goes for daily swims in the bay, gathers vegetables and flowers at the Ryder Street farmers market, and sees old friends. But perhaps most of all, she lives surrounded by objects from her family’s history, and embodies her parents’ legacy of art and activism.

    In These Times

    The event: “Art and Activism,” a conversation between Mira Schor and Anoka Faruqee

    The time: Thursday, April 29, 6 to 7:30 p.m.

    The place: Virtual presentation of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; register at fawc.org

    The cost: $25 minimum donation

    CABIN FEVER CURE #1

    A Watercolored Return to Beginner’s Mind

    By

    I took a luxurious vacation last week into a world filled with lapis lazuli, burnt sienna, and yellow ochre paints; hake, dagger striper, and mop brushes; flat, graded, and variegated washes. The vacation was a virtual workshop titled “Watercolor: Absolutely Positive Beginners!” taught by artist Tim Saternow through the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill.

    Through a class, a writer returns to her love of making art. (Photo Tessera Knowles-Thompson)

    Since I began working at the Independent, I’ve spent days glued to my writing desk while my dear drawing table has stood pushed against the window, neglected, waiting for me to once again acknowledge its existence. I did not have to travel far for this vacation — only to the opposite side of my office/studio/storage room. But for two hours a day, five days in a row, I felt worlds away from the drab monotony that is life in the time of Covid.

    I am not really a beginner, but signing up for this class, I wanted to return to how it feels to be a beginner. I’ve been stubborn in my learning as an artist, and, in some ways, I’ve been stuck. Maybe spending a little time at my drawing table, revisiting the basics with the help of a teacher, other students, and technology, would help.

    Before the class began, we received a materials list and class schedule. Luckily, hake, dagger striper, and mop brushes were not required for this class. But a word of caution for anyone taking a painting workshop: sign up well in advance, so you have plenty of time to prepare and gather materials — unless you have lots of disposable income.

    It is easy to unintentionally spend $100 on painting supplies at the local hardware store. If, like mine, your budget is closer to $10, ask around — there is bound to be someone living on this artist colony peninsula who has high-quality watercolor paints gathering dust.

    I can picture the classified ad: “Wanted: professional watercolor paints (preferably cobalt blue, cadmium-free yellow, French ultramarine, burnt umber, titanium white, etc). Can barter baked goods, art, and gratitude.”

    The first day of our workshop, Tim said that learning something new every day keeps you young. And so, he said, by taking this painting workshop, we are all getting younger. This was a relief to hear, because a week into the first lockdown, I found my first gray hair. It was approximately two inches long, and said, “Hello. You are getting older.” About a month later, I turned 30.

    I took a deep breath and began learning (and relearning) the properties of watercolor (translucent, staining, sedimentary), color notes (value, tone, chroma), and composition techniques (background, middle-ground, foreground).

    On a vacation to your drawing table, the landscape includes watercolors, brushes, and color experiments. (Photo Tessera Knowles-Thompson)

    On day two, we painted negative space and I was reminded of my art teacher at Brattleboro Union High School, Gary Blomgren. “Think about the space in between,” Mr. Blomgren would say. “That’s where you want to look.” Mr. Blomgren died several years ago, and I will never forget his lessons.

    When you paint in the negative space, you see the world in a different way. You learn to observe the spaces in between leaves on a beech tree, or the subtle shadows and gradient colors of lichen growing along a branch. You learn to delight in the details.

    Returning to the basics of painting was a return to my love of art. There were some things I had simply forgotten, others I’m certain I never learned. I signed up with the intention of tricking myself into having an open, beginner’s mindset. I didn’t need to do that. I absorbed every moment of the class.

    The experience was also a reminder of the importance of teachers. A virtual platform allows us to learn from and support the work of teachers and teaching artists around the country. Time is strange now, in this world of Covid, and the days blend together. But I will remember the week when I got to play with color, texture, and light.

    SEASCAPES

    With an Eye on the Surf, Colin McGuire Paints Provincetown

    A local artist contemplates the Outer Cape’s past and present

    By

    “The ocean is both beautiful and terrifying to me,” says Colin McGuire. An emerging local artist, he finds “limitless inspiration” in the seascapes of the Outer Cape and their “variety of moods and effects of surface and light.”

    McGuire’s Reflecting Light, a 9-by-12-inch oil on cradled wood panel, is one of his recent small-scale works, done in a single session. (Photo courtesy Colin McGuire)

    McGuire has recently been focusing on small works on cradled wood panels (panels backed and raised by a frame). Using bold colors and broad, expressive palette-knife strokes, he seeks to capture the energy of the waters surrounding Provincetown.

    “I’m trying to say more with less, allowing texture to speak,” McGuire says. “There are so many facets to explore: the waves, currents, winds, clouds, atmosphere — all of which are fleeting. There is something about the pure vastness and depth of the ocean in relation to our human existence that presents an existential crisis, which I welcome and seek in my work. I find that in their small scale, my paintings are best capable of capturing a glimpse of this.”

    He’s the son of painter Michael McGuire, who owns an eponymous gallery in Provincetown, where Colin shows his work. Though he was born in Boston, his family relocated to the highlands of North Truro when he was in elementary school, to be closer to Provincetown’s art scene. “I feel lucky that I saw the beach and the ocean with fresh eyes when I moved out here as a young kid,” McGuire says. “I was enchanted — I fell in love.”

    Although he liked to draw, McGuire spent his youth surfing and didn’t begin painting until his late teens, when he picked up a brush during a trip to Mexico with his father.

    “My first paintings were of waves, because I had drawn them obsessively my whole life,” he says. “Painting nonstop for a month, I felt the same kind of joy I did surfing.”

    Many of McGuire’s paintings examine the ever-changing moods of the ocean, such as Entering the Sea, a 16-by-20-inch oil on panel. (Photo courtesy Colin McGuire)

    Surfing still informs his work as a painter. “I consider my experiences as a surfer similar to the studies of J.M.W. Turner, who, I believe, tied himself to a ship’s mast in a storm to better understand the force of the sea,” McGuire says. “I remember one day surfing in the winter in Truro, looking back to shore once I had made it through the massive breakers. I realized how far I had drifted, and it was clear to me that I was not in control of the situation — the ocean was.”

    After taking his first degree at Montserrat College of Art, where he now teaches, McGuire went for an M.F.A. at Lesley University’s College of Art and Design. During his studies there from 2016 to 2018, he further explored the Provincetown environment.

    “I always felt a particular connection to the town as an old colony fishing village,” he says. “Much of the history of our country began there.”

    McGuire’s series of “Settlers” paintings, done while in graduate school, contemplates the experience of the Pilgrims upon their arrival here. “I imagined what it must have been like to sail into the wild unknown: the fear, the doubt, the danger, the excitement,” he says. “Many of the scenes I painted show groups gathered in a circle around a central glow — a place to shelter in camaraderie, to come together to share ideas.”

    Migration, a 24-by-24-inch oil on panel, is part of McGuire’s “Settlers” series, re-imagining Provincetown 400 years ago. (Photo courtesy Colin McGuire)

    The lives that were uprooted and destroyed by the settlers’ arrival are equally important to McGuire. “I tried to imagine this happening today — an alien civilization appearing on the horizon with plans to destroy our way of life,” he says. “These paintings show groups gathered together, migrating to safety, or distantly observing another group.”

    The “Settlers” paintings are a marked shift from his usual vibrant palette. “I was questioning making a living from painting a place that was once natural and untouched, wondering what my role was and whether I could feel good about it,” McGuire says. “I would start by painting a bright scene, which I then covered over entirely in black. Then I would use a reductive process to find the painting within.”

    McGuire’s recent work, an ongoing “Serenity” series, reflects the deeper connection he now feels to the Outer Cape he has loved since his childhood. It embraces the tranquility of the ocean, and, with it, a lightness he needs at this time and hopes to pass on to his viewer.

    Truro artist Colin McGuire is inspired by the beaches of his Outer Cape home. (Photo Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher)

    Many of his new works are painted in a single session, hoping to capture the energy of the moment. “I am bold in my application,” he says. “I take risks in the studio that present challenges I try to resolve that day. My paintings have become much more minimalist, just this transition of color across the canvas. What I am trying to convey is a state of being.”

    McGuire enjoys teaching and is offering two-hour online evening classes this winter on his website. He also hosts single-session virtual workshops via Wellfleet Preservation Hall, including one on Tuesday, Dec. 8.

    “I speak to approaching a painting that is not coming out as you intended and reacting to that,” McGuire says. “You have to learn not to worry, but instead trust that that will be a good thing.”

    Different Strokes

    The event: “Paint Night: A Virtual Workshop With Colin McGuire,” presented by Wellfleet Preservation Hall

    The time: Tuesday, Dec. 8, 6 to 8 p.m. (single session)

    The place: wellfleetpreservationhall.org

    The cost: $25 per person, not including materials

    PAINTING

    A Master Class With Paul Resika

    He has a show in Provincetown, a new book, and 80 years of experience

    By

    Paul Resika’s studio in Truro is strewn with clam shells that he uses to mix his paints — orange ones, turquoise ones, mustard yellow ones. They are like little distillations of the vibrant colors that make Resika paintings unmistakably his. When asked about them, he says, “Take some!” On an easel is a newly painted double portrait of him and his wife, Blair, who is holding one of their cats.

    Clam shells in Paul Resika’s studio are evidence of the artist at work, mixing paints. (Photo Saskia Maxwell Keller)

    “There are not so many artists who live as long as me and who keep painting,” Resika says. “Some artists follow a sort of line, but I was much more chaotic. I’ve been painting so long, since I was 10 years old, but it all looks as if it’s coherent in the book.”

    He’s referring to Paul Resika: Eight Decades of Painting, a large new monograph edited by Blair Resika and published by Rizzoli Electa. It contains essays by Karen Wilkin, Avis Berman, John Yau, and Jennifer Samet that trace the artist’s career. In celebration of the book, Resika’s work will be part of an exhibit at the Berta Walker Gallery from Saturday, Aug. 15 — his 92nd birthday — through Sept. 5, alongside paintings by Mike Carroll and Sky Power.

    Resika’s first teacher was Sol Wilson, a Provincetown painter of romantic seascapes. While in high school, Resika attended Hans Hofmann’s night classes in New York City. Upon graduation, he became Hofmann’s monitor, a job that required him to arrive early and unlock the door, set up the easels, pose the model, and sweep up afterwards. He also followed Hofmann, a revered and influential teacher, down to Cape Cod one summer.

    Fish, Moon, Dragonfly, by Paul Resika. (Photo Berta Walker Gallery)

    “Hofmann sometimes had [still life] setups,” Resika says, “but unlike most schools, where there were apples and pots, he made fantastic setups with balloons and cellophane, fantastic stuff. People don’t know about that. It has all been forgotten.”

    But not by Resika. “People say they studied with Hofmann, but it doesn’t mean anything,” he says. Hofmann had numerous pupils and taught throughout his life at several different locales. The brightest students rarely got the most attention: “If you really understood, he did almost nothing to you, and I was one of the best in the class,” Resika says.

    Following his studies with Hofmann, and wary of a full descent into abstraction, Resika traveled to Europe to study the old masters. He eventually found his way to Venice. “At first, I only loved Giorgione and Bellini, who I could understand,” he says. “Then, I began to see the great Venetian painters who I have loved ever since — Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese.

    “When I came back from Italy, I had to make a living,” Resika continues. “Since I had trained myself to paint in the old manner, I figured I could paint portraits. I found people to sit for me, but only people in the theater would accept the portraits.”

    Pilgrims, by Paul Resika. (Photo Berta Walker Gallery)

    Resika painted the actress Tammy Grimes: “I painted a full-length portrait of her, a really classic-looking one, I thought. Later on, she married a famous actor,” he says, referring to Christopher Plummer.

    “He didn’t like the portrait, but he liked the head, so he cut it down and made a small picture,” Resika says. “It had a marvelous frame — that’s why he cut it down. He had enough culture to know the frame was better than the picture itself. So he put a mirror in the frame.”

    Resika recalls a touching story about seeing Hofmann many years later in Greenwich Village. “I was in a little restaurant where I used to eat. Hofmann was in his late 80s at the time, and his wife had died, and he lived downtown, too,” Resika says. “I remember, vividly, that there was a glass window in the front of this restaurant, and I saw Hofmann look through the window. It was a very cold night, and he was clearly alone, so I ran out to get him, and I brought him in. We sat together — I had never sat alone with Hofmann before. I could ask him all these questions, all the things I’d wondered about, because, you see, I had left his school — I had gone a different way entirely. I had gone to Italy to study the classic painters. I was terribly happy to talk to him, and I think he was happy to be in a warm place.”

    Paul Resika in 2019. (Photo Blair Resika)

    Eight Decades of Painting analyzes Resika’s work from a scholarly standpoint. It looks at the events in his life and proposes how they might have influenced his artistic trajectory. Though this is interesting and important, the artist himself has other priorities. “It is better to look at art than to talk about it,” he says, gesturing to the paintings in his studio.

    “Do you have any other questions for me?” he asks. His words echo the story he tells about Hofmann at the restaurant in Greenwich Village. It would be possible to go on and on, asking Resika about his travels, the people he knew, his thoughts about art. But he’s right: the work speaks for itself.

    Paul Resika: Eight Decades of Painting, with essays by Karen Wilkin, Avis Berman, John Yau, and Jennifer Samet, was published by Rizzoli Electa in May.

    True Colors

    The event: Paintings by Paul Resika, an exhibit with Sky Power and Mike Carroll

    The time: Saturday, Aug. 15, through Sept. 5; noon to 4 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday, appointments at calendly.com/bertawalker

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

    The cost: Free; Paul Resika: Eight Decades of Painting, $75

    PAINTING

    In Provincetown, Lorraine DeProspo Is ‘Enveloped by Blue’

    Her luminous canvases capture the emotion of the sea

    By

    Since Lorraine DeProspo moved to Provincetown year-round almost two years ago — for nearly two decades, she split her time between here and Montclair, N.J. — she has noticed a transformation in her art. “I now understand the rhythms of the sea and sky, how the temperament of the water changes so quickly,” DeProspo says. “I don’t think I had a choice about coming here. I had to be here.”

    Just as the sea beckoned DeProspo to Provincetown, her work draws the viewer in, almost hypnotically, to a place of tempestuousness or, alternatively, tranquility. She is represented by Outermost Home gallery, at 427 Commercial St. in Provincetown, where her work can be seen in the flesh.

    Drawn In, by Lorraine DeProspo. (Photo Outermost Home)

    DeProspo observes that just as the Provincetown community changes from summer to winter, so does the sea. “There are different colors, there is a different feel, there is a whole different vibe during the wintertime,” she says. Not to mention the day-to-day variability of Outer Cape weather, she adds, which can have an enormous effect on mood.

    DeProspo began as a ceramic artist. As an undergraduate, she had very little interest in painting. “I thought three-dimensionally,” she says. “I still can’t draw very well.” But when she was done with school and struck out on her own, without easy access to tools or a studio, she realized that her medium needed to change. Her partner at the time encouraged her to paint: “One day I came home, and there was an easel in our spare room,” she says.

    That got her started. “I bought the biggest canvas I could find — a four-foot canvas,” she says. “I made a lot of mud. I didn’t know how to mix colors, but I knew the colors I wanted to work in, and they were all earth tones. They were all grays, every combination of gray: brown-gray, green-gray, gray-gray, 50 shades of gray.”

    Before long, DeProspo found that when she visited museums or galleries, she would walk past the Giacometti sculptures and gravitate to such artists as Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter, and Helen Frankenthaler. “I was amazed by how she could pour paint on canvas and have it become such a beautiful thing,” DeProspo says of Frankenthaler. “Which I actually tried to do in my tiny little studio and ruined my hardwood floor.”

    Lorraine DeProspo, in her Provincetown studio, holds a palette knife and looks over her painting Breakwater Flats. (Photo Karen Madura)

    An artist that DeProspo was compared to early on was J.M.W. Turner. Not having much of an art-historical background, DeProspo had to look up who he was. “To say that my work is ‘Turner-esque’ — I should have known that was a really big compliment and bought that person a drink.” Yet the comparison is apt, especially considering Turner’s proto-abstract style.

    DeProspo’s method is largely intuitive and self-taught. She paints on canvases of varying shapes and sizes, ranging from a square foot to larger than four square feet. “I predominantly use palette knives,” she says. “Sometimes, I’ll use a nail or something else that I dig up on the beach. Sometimes a squeegee. And I use my hands a lot, almost like a finger painter.”

    Another aspect of DeProspo’s work is the cold wax she adds to her paint. “It gives a very buttery experience to the paint,” she says. “It is not at all like encaustic.” It dries completely matte and is soft to the touch. By layering and blending thin layers of this paint, she’s able to emulate fog and sea spray. “Fog is my favorite thing, because it is so elusive,” she says. “One minute it’s there, one minute it’s not. What color is it?”

    DeProspo has noticed that living in Provincetown changed her color palette. “All of a sudden, I’ve shifted to blue tones that don’t necessarily have a lot of gray in them, which I never painted with before I moved here,” she says. “It’s because, when I look out my window, I have the harbor right in front of me. Every day, that’s what I see. I see the water; I see the sky. I have been enveloped by blue.”

    Summer Fling, by Lorraine DeProspo. (Photo Outermost Home)

    She does not paint from life. Though she takes photographs, they are mostly used as a reference for mixing colors. “It’s a remembrance — it’s not something I am looking at right now,” she says of her art. “It is something I looked at two days ago, three weeks ago, maybe five months ago, and it is just sort of floating in my head and bubbles its way to the surface.”

    As DeProspo paints her imaginary skyscapes and seascapes, she’s focused on color, texture, and strong horizontals. She categorizes her work as somewhere in the middle of the abstract-realistic continuum. “I’m certainly not abstract, per se, but I like to think that I am leaning towards the abstract,” she says.

    She’s seeking something beyond an objective view. “I don’t want to look out the window and paint what I see,” DeProspo says. “I want to paint what I feel.”

    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

    Sky Power’s Abstract Dreamscapes: Emotions in Oil

    A Provincetown artist retires and recharges

    By

    When we enter this world as newborns, we experience our surroundings visually as forms, shadows, and, gradually, shades of color. We recognize our mother’s face before all else, then become accustomed to the lines, contours, and hues around us. Without much thought, we seek patterns in what we see and assign them to familiar objects — a house, a birch tree, someone we know picking up a shell on the beach.

    Sky Power
    Sky Power sits on her Provincetown porch next to an African sculpture that was a gift from Berta Walker, whose gallery shows her work. (Photo Howard Karren)

    What would happen, however, if we, as adults, tried to see the same shapes, lines, and colors purely in terms of their composition and relation to one another? What if we looked over the sea, for example, and instead of identifying sand, waves, and a lone sailboat, we just experienced planes of different colors meeting, and shapes appearing at that point of convergence? This is the realm of vision, Provincetown painter Sky Power says, from which abstract art is born.

    “People ask me of my paintings: ‘What is this?’ or ‘What is this supposed to be?’ And I tell them, ‘It is what you are experiencing now,’ ” Power says. “Abstract art is emotional. You connect to it from an emotional place.”

    Over a lifetime of creating art and studying with local masters, Power’s paintings have become increasingly abstract. “I do like to do very concise, representational work as well,” she says. “But that is not my focus.” She considers abstract art to be a bridge between the material and spiritual worlds. “When I make art, I open up to something much larger than myself,” she says. “I call it ‘source’: my oneness with humanity, all species, nature, and the universe.”

    A Texas native, Power found her way to Provincetown in her early 20s. “I arrived here in 1976 to launch a horse-and-carriage business, and discovered a vibrant art colony,” she says. “I was drawn to this beautiful landscape by the sea, and the safe haven of a gay community that was part of a culture of artists and fishermen.”

    Power has been represented by the Berta Walker Gallery since 2004, and she is scheduled to have an exhibit of her work there, along with that of Paul Resika and Michael Carroll, from Aug. 7 to 20. She’s also scheduled to teach a class in “Abstraction as Form” at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum from Aug. 17 to 19. But the fate of all planned events is unknown during the coronavirus crisis, and for now, Power is holed up in her Provincetown home.

    She describes doing abstract work as expansive and freeing. She’ll sometimes combine abstract forms with representational elements to show the connection between them. Having worked over the years as a piano tuner, a carpenter, and, most recently, a phlebotomist at Quest Diagnostics in Provincetown, she values concise, analytical focus in art as much as the loose expressiveness of abstraction. Both, she says, are necessary to her process.

    “First, I mix a large batch of the color that I feel most connected with that day,” Power says. “On a blank canvas, I start off painting with what I call ‘free abandon.’ Once I achieve a form that I want to keep, I set the painting aside to dry — I work in oils. I generally work on several paintings during the same time period, for weeks or months. At a certain point, the process becomes very deliberate and analytical.”

    Power retired shortly before the Covid-19 epidemic shut everything down. “I am going to be 69 soon, and I realized that I needed to focus solely on my art. This is really what we are all doing now, thinking about time: How am I spending my time? How much time do I have left? For me, this happened pre-virus.”

    Dreaming of a New World is a new 24-by-30-inch oil painting by Sky Power. In it, a Native American woman sleeps amid abstract forms. (Photo: courtesy of Sky Power/Berta Walker Gallery)

    For the past months, Power has been working on paintings that are “important and specific to what is going on right now,” she says. “In my piece Dreaming of a New World, our new future is abstract. That’s what we’re doing when we are painting abstractly — we are dreaming of something new. That is hopefully what is happening right now. We are creating a new world.”

    In the painting, Power added a human figure “in the middle of a diffused landscape to convey the idea of a dream,” she says. “Because she is painted in similar color tones, your eyes do not immediately go to the figure. I wanted the viewer to experience the dream first, then come upon her and realize that she is the dreamer. And I wanted her to be indigenous, because these are the roots that we, as a species, need to get back in touch with.” She adds: “I am part Cherokee.”

    Shifting Sands, a new 24-by-30-inch oil painting by Sky Power, reflects her thinking about renewal on the planet during Covid-19. (Photo: courtesy of Sky Power/Berta Walker Gallery)

    Another recent painting, titled Shifting Sands, “conveys the beauty I am surrounded by here, connecting with the mystical qualities in the Cape light,” Power says. “But more importantly, it is a metaphor for humanity’s need to save our planet and our species. The Covid-19 virus has temporarily, globally stopped humans from continuing with the life structures that we have created. This is an opportunity for us to reflect on who we are and who we could be. This is our time for reflection, our time for change.”

    PAINTING

    Hannah Morris Discovers Herself in Her Art

    What the FAWC fellow finds, she hopes will touch others

    By

    Large, brightly colored canvases, some spanning an entire wall, layered with images of figures, birds in flight, a fox, or flowers, greet the viewer entering Hannah E. Morris’s studio at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Countless tubes of oil paint cover almost every surface, and brushes stand like bouquets in jars. Morris, the instigator of this creative storm, seems almost invisible in it, her unassuming demeanor a curious contrast to the striking nature of her work.

    The visual arts fellow at the work center approaches each new painting as a bold, intuitive step into the unknown. Her art will be on view for a one-week exhibit with an opening this Friday at FAWC’s Hudson D. Walker Gallery.

    Hannah E. Morris
    Hannah E. Morris reveals herself in her paintings. Her work will be on exhibit at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, with an opening on Friday. (Photo Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher)

    “I usually begin by getting rid of the white and either spilling paint or drawing without intention,” she says. “I try to move with the work. These are big pieces. I don’t make them specifically because I want to create large paintings, but rather because I want to use my body and feel my weight when I’m making a move. I like to feel where my flesh is hanging on my body and try to create a touch to the canvas that resonates with how I’m feeling emotionally at the moment. I move the painting off the wall and onto the floor, negotiating the space as if arguing with someone or making love.”

    Being emotionally awake and open to the unexpected is central to Morris’s creative process. Since arriving in Provincetown, she has been working on what she describes as “adventurous experiments.” She speaks in a soft, youthful voice.

    “I think of the narratives in my work, like when you meet a stranger and they divulge something insignificantly personal about themselves, unnoticeable to them,” she says. “But you think, that’s so strange! They’ve just shown themselves to me without even knowing that they did.”

    Likewise, the images that appear in her work often surprise and sometimes unsettle her. “I try to keep my expectations open,” Morris says, “but, of course, I still get caught up with fear and disappointment when things are not feeling right in the studio. When fear of where to make a move creeps into my mind, I have to reorganize and try to get back to a point of fearlessness.”

    Morris’s paintings harbor personal narratives that draw the viewer in, especially when experienced in person. It is as if Morris, by baring her inner self, invites the viewer to discover his or her own.

    “What is most important for me is for the viewer to feel an emotional response to my paintings,” she says. “They are never going to see exactly the same story that I see or know about the layers of hidden imagery in my painting. I would never want to prescribe a story to the viewer. For me that would leave no room for them to come in and project their own narrative. What matters to me is that they feel something, that they interact with their own stories.”

    oil on canvas
    An as-yet-untitled oil on canvas by Hannah E. Morris. (Photo Susannah Elisabeth Fulcher)

    Before coming to Provincetown, Morris was living in England and completing a master’s degree in contemporary art theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. She’ll be returning to London this summer to begin work on a Ph.D.

    “I really do like theory,” she says. “It has opened me up to how I tell a story, and how I can understand myself and humanity on a wider plane.”

    Having grown up in Chatham, N.Y., and the Berkshires, Morris describes the landscapes of her childhood as being central to her work. “We had no neighbors, just lots of mice running through our cupboards,” she says. “We would play elaborate games outside for hours on end, in the mud and running through the trees. I don’t remember ever watching TV or even playing with toys — the land was always the material.”

    She says that being a fellow at the work center in Provincetown has been a privilege. “Just to have no worries but to make work in a beautiful studio is a true dream, not to mention the nature that surrounds these studios,” Morris says. “It’s been great for me to be by the ocean. If I’m having a bad day, I walk down to the breakwater and cross the rocks to the other side of the beach, and I can breathe again.”

    Morris feels lucky to share her time here with a partner, Rob Rodak, a writer from London. Together they walk for miles and miles, exploring new terrain throughout the Outer Cape. Those walks, she says, “full of deep discussions about philosophy, theory, and the work we are making, while looking around at the sea, trees, or dunes, have wonderfully crawled into my work.”

    Inner Landscapes

    The event: Opening of exhibit of work by visual arts fellow Hannah E. Morris

    The time: Friday, Feb. 28, 6-8 p.m.

    The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown

    The cost: Free

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