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Provincetown Art Association and Museum

    ADVENTURES IN PAINTING

    The Magical Travels of Ann Purcell

    Her ‘Caravan’ paintings find the mystical in this sea, sky, and land

    By

    While many artists of earlier generations came to Provincetown to capture its unique light, Ann Purcell arrived 40 years ago with more experiential interests. What she found, it seems, was in some ways as much spiritual as it was physical.

    Gypsy Wind, 1983, acrylic and collage on canvas, 72 by 60 inches. (Photo courtesy Provincetown Art Association and Museum)

    “I see it in the boats in the bay,” Purcell told the Provincetown Advocate in a 1984 interview. “They are suspended in the endless and mystical space.” It was her way of describing one of those hazy, foggy days when the sky and water blend together.

    Among Purcell’s paintings on view now at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the metaphysical charge she encountered in this landscape comes through most explicitly in Balthazar’s Gifts. It is one of her “Caravan” series — 10 large abstract works painted here between 1982 and 1985 that make up the current show. Big fleshy crosshatch marks, tinged in a soft glow, fill the canvas behind a gray quarter-circle void at its center. A stick-like cutout, a paintbrush, stands out against this background as does a box, outlined in blue and alive with gold squiggles.

    Balthazar’s Gifts, 1983, acrylic and collage on canvas, 72 by 66 inches. (Photo by Chet Domitz)

    To any viewer, the box might seem to hold energy or mystery. Those familiar with the Biblical story will recall that Balthazar was one of the three magi who visited Jesus in the manger — the one who presented the gift of myrrh, which some scholars think symbolizes a portent of his death. The artist conflates the act of painting with a narrative about the divine. (Purcell doesn’t look only to Christianity for symbols of the mystical. She tapped Hinduism, for example, in her “Kali Poem” series inspired by May Sarton’s 1971 poem of invocation to the Hindu goddess.)

    Purcell, who lives in New York City, first came to Provincetown in 1982 on the advice of E.A. Carmean Jr., then curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery. Purcell was already an established artist in Washington, D.C., the city where she was born in 1941. In her 30s, she went to Mexico and first exhibited her work there, in San Miguel de Allende. She came fully into view in the U.S. in 1976, when she was part of “Five Washington Artists,” an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery.

    Fast Summer, 1982, acrylic and collage on canvas, 66 by 72 inches. (Photo by Chet Domitz)

    Carmean wanted Purcell to meet Robert Motherwell, who was spending summers in Provincetown. Purcell had admired Motherwell for a decade before that summer of ’82. She was an avid student of his work and had even written him a letter — and, she now recalls with pleasure, had received a reply. The way Purcell remembers it, Motherwell was on his deck sitting in an Adirondack chair when Carmean introduced them. She turned around and Carmean was gone. Surprised to be alone with this artist she so admired, she asked, “Where do you buy these magical paint brushes?”

    Purcell remembers how artist friends would gather at Motherwell’s at the end of each day. “There was a lot of conversation on the porch,” she says, and everyone was welcome. “The camaraderie was incredible — there was no hierarchy.

    “It was a magical summer,” she says, “idyllic.” This was the year she started the Caravan series that led her to explore the landscape of the Outer Cape over four summers and that is currently on view at the museum.

    Moody Blues, 1982, acrylic, silver oil, copper oil, and pieced paper on canvas, 72 by 66 inches. (Photo courtesy PAAM)

    The word caravan connotes travel, and Purcell certainly did approach this landscape as one to discover. But these paintings suggest other kinds of travel, too, through time and art history. She says Henry Matisse was “an idol.” Influenced by his paper cutouts, she began using cutout canvas pieces from her own leftover paintings. She liked how she could move around a cutout to see the effects of its placement before gluing it in place. In the Caravan paintings, cutouts emphasize the interplay between figures and background.

    Purcell also traveled to the more recent past in her examination of others’ paintings. “Motherwell and Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Pollock, and Rothko — they were my heroes and heroines,” she says. In the exuberant scale and freedom of her colorful brushstrokes one sees reverberations of these artists. That’s not to say her works imitate theirs, but these artists seem to have offered a vocabulary that Purcell sampled while developing her own pictorial language.

    One work in the show that recalls both the natural world and the art history of Provincetown most brilliantly is Heron’s Flight. Purcell drew Pollock-like skeins of paint across the painting’s surface by moving around the canvas and flicking her wrist. The back-and-forth repetition can be likened to the movement of a bird flapping its wings. Patches of raw canvas underneath are like a blur of wings against a shimmer of water. The heron is implied in white angular shapes.

    Heron’s Flight, 1985, acrylic and collage on canvas, 72 by 66 inches. (Photo courtesy PAAM)

    It is not unusual to hear someone describe Provincetown as magical. Purcell’s visual vocabulary is simply more precise. The way she, a traveler, came to know Provincetown filters through the Caravan paintings. We see her knowledge of our sunsets and of the boats that seem to float in infinite space, and of the Moon-like landscape of the dunes on a spit of land curving into the sea, and of dense fog and blinding light that dissolve and simplify forms.

    “It’s not conscious, but the deep atmospheric space and profound color of Provincetown is always with me,” says Purcell. “It’s that holy card of the bay at sunrise.”

    A Traveler’s Abstraction

    The event: Ann Purcell in Provincetown: The Caravan Paintings
    The time: Through Dec. 8
    The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
    The cost: $15 museum admission; free for members

    I WITNESS

    The Viewer and the Viewed in the ‘Eye of the Storm’

    Susan Bee’s work encompasses calm and turbulence, poetry and painting

    By

    Stare into Susan Bee’s Eye of the Storm, a painting prominently displayed at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, and you’ll observe bundles of tightly knit red, white, and blue waves ascending into an earth-toned whirlpool; the short end of a yellow triangle points to a watchful eye, staring back. The triangle reveals itself as a large sail. A small orange figure, the painter, sits in the untethered boat. We don’t know if the boat is moving toward the eye, or if the artist in it is a viewer, too, with us, witnessing the scene.

    The artist in her studio. (Photo by Grace Roselli)

    As a teenager summering in Provincetown with her family, Bee took sailing lessons at Flyer’s Boatyard. “I had no aptitude for sailing, really,” she says. “But I always like seeing the sailboats in Provincetown. For me, boats on the harbor symbolize a place to get away,” the artist says, decades after those lessons.

    “Eye of the Storm” is also the title of Susan Bee’s solo show at PAAM now through Nov. 17. In it, single-masted sailboats occupied by a lone figure are one of Bee’s recurrent images. Bee’s PAAM show opened on a sparkling late summer afternoon with white sailboats dotting Provincetown Harbor.

    Eye of the Storm, 2007, oil on linen, 48 x 51 inches.

    Bee painted Eye of the Storm the year her father died, she says, and it is based on a dream. While sea imagery and sailing link Bee and her family to Provincetown, the watchful eye is connected to the kabbalah, a mystical part of Jewish tradition that contemplates the essence of divinity.

    “The eye also symbolizes the relationship between artist and viewer,” Bee says. Scenes of calm and turbulence and of the viewer and the viewed recur in Bee’s work.

    Late Echo shows a woman sitting calmly on a rocky shore viewing sailboats drifting by. The title, Bee says, was suggested by a John Ashbery poem asking whether there is anything left to write about. Bee’s diverse 40-year body of work on view — for this show she and her curator, poet Johanna Drucker, selected paintings made between 1981 and 2023 — offers an affirmative response. At least, there are indeed things left to paint.

    Petunia Pig flaunts a fat paintbrush while giving the side-eye to a seated model in the prominently situated Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pig. In it, Bee is both viewer and viewed. “I am the woman in the nude self-portrait, being scolded by Petunia Pig and urged to paint,” she says. “It is both satirical and personal.”

    Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pig, 1983, oil on linen, 50 x 60 inches. (Photos of paintings courtesy Susan Bee)

    Bee’s parents, Miriam and Sigmund Laufer, were artists. They lived in Manhattan and began spending summers in Provincetown in the mid-1950s, vacationing while creating and exhibiting artwork. These seasonal rituals were shared with artist friends Chaim and Renee Gross (Gross’s six-foot bronze sculpture Tourists stands in front of the Provincetown Public Library) and Ilya and Resia Schor.

    A curious child who started making art at a young age, Bee took drawing classes at PAAM during those visits and painted with printmaker Seong Moy in his studio on Miller Hill Road.

    She also tagged along to Provincetown’s openings and parties where questions like “What is art?” dominated adult conversation. Some of the painters were realists, like her father, who showed etchings and color prints in a Madison Avenue gallery, while others, including Bee’s mother, painted more like an abstract expressionist, from a challenging, feminist point of view.

    “My mother’s artwork could be fierce,” Bee says. “She could be very in-your-face and had a lot to say.”

    Bee remains close to her childhood friends, artists Mimi Gross and Mira Schor. For two decades Bee and Schor collaborated on M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a journal of reviews, opinion pieces, poetry, and artwork. A selection from it was published in 2000 by Duke University Press.

    In the 1970s, while earning a master’s degree in art history and art at Hunter College, Bee was making abstract photograms and writing about European surrealists Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy. But in 1980, when her mother died of a stroke at age 60, she returned to painting.

    “My photographs were already getting painterly,” she says. “But I went back to figuration and oil painting. It was an emotional choice.”

    To the Lighthouse I, which she painted in 1981, is named after the Virginia Woolf novel. Bee notes that the novel is “about the death of the family matriarch and features a woman painter having a vision.” It is also a defense of subjectivity in art. While this particular lighthouse is in Nova Scotia, where Bee spent time after her mother’s death, the loosely scattered houses, puffy clouds, and bluebird sky suggest the Outer Cape’s indelible charms.

    A couple of years later, Bee painted Marsden Hartley Meets Wonder Woman, a sendup of one of her favorite painters. “In my continuing quest for feminist heroines, I featured him,” she says about Hartley, a painter and poet who was in town in 1916. In Bee’s painting, Hartley is “targeted by this bright red superwoman” swooping down over the bewildered painter’s shoulder. “How do you paint what you’re thinking about,” Bee asks, “without being too explicit?”

    Marsden Hartley Meets Wonder Woman, 1983, oil on linen, 30 x 20 inches is in the collection of Jon Friedman and Joanne Barkan.

    Bee’s mother continues to be a presence in her emotional and creative life. In 2006, Manhattan’s A.I.R. Gallery, an artist-run nonprofit exhibition space where Bee had been showing for more than two decades, exhibited Seeing Double: Paintings by Susan Bee and Miriam Laufer. Bee showed paintings from Philosophical Trees, a series she has continued and which includes Treehouse, a 2022 painting that is in the current PAAM show.

    Treehouse, 2022, oil, enamel, sand on linen, 48 x 40 inches. “This painting,” Bee says, “takes me back to my roots in the animated, magical and mystical landscape.”

    In 2016, PAAM exhibited Views and Vignettes, the Works of Miriam Laufer. “Laufer’s engagement with autobiographical subject matter and frank depiction of the female body,” says curator Drucker, “is unusual for a woman painter of her generation.”

    Bee’s Ahava Berlin has a haunting backstory. She painted it in 2012, inspired by a trip she made to Berlin’s Jewish quarter to see the school where her mother lived as a child. Bee’s painting was based on a photo of her outside the war-scarred, graffiti-marred building taken by her husband, the poet Charles Bernstein. Standing close to Ahava Berlin, the viewer sees splashes of red, perhaps suggesting blood — not all the children were rescued. “Ahava” is the Hebrew word for love. Her mother later emigrated to Palestine, where she continued to study art.

    Ahava Berlin by Susan Bee, 2012, oil, enamel, and sand on canvas, 24 x 36 inches.

    Bee and Bernstein met when both were in high school in Manhattan. They continue to support each other’s creative trajectories, which include collaborating with poets. The PAAM exhibit includes two handmade books Bee made with her husband. For Little Orphan Anagram, Bee selected Bernstein’s poems, hand-coloring each page.

    “I love the poets,” she says with a smile. “And they are my best audience. They also buy a lot of my work.”

    Bee’s Windswept is a one-of-a-kind hand-painted accordion-style book, done in Provincetown during the first summer of the pandemic. Bee calls it “a meditation on the bay and water and sun and lost time.” Its pages are dotted with Bee’s signature metaphors: a sailboat with its lone passenger, a lighthouse, the bright sun.

    In this show, the painter takes the viewer without apology from such summer idylls straight into the phantasmagoric and even terrifying. Days of Awe, part of Bee’s “Apocalypse” series, is based on a French apocalypse tapestry from the 1400s. It reveals the concerns about perception and the brevity of life that animate Bee, right alongside the impish humor she continues to invest in her shifting cosmos of characters.

    Days of Awe, 2023, oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches.

    “I like the way it conjures up a whole medieval array of devils, demons, saints, and mythic creatures in a fantastic landscape,” she says.

    Symbols and Metaphors

    The event: Susan Bee discusses her work in the show “Eye of the Storm”
    The time: Thursday, Sept. 12, 6 p.m.
    The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
    The cost: $15 museum admission; free for members; the show is on view through Nov. 17

    ARTISTS

    The Unfurling of a Creative Vision

    Sam Feinstein’s development from a Hofmann student to a painter of sublime abstractions

    By

    The Sam Feinstein exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum charts his lifelong commitment to abstraction and color. The paintings span his early years in Provincetown as a student of Hans Hofmann to his final years, when he continued to work on ambitious large-scale canvases until his death in Dennis in 2003.

    Sam Feinstein’s Untitled (cat. 366), 1953. (Photos courtesy PAAM)

    Feinstein was born in Voronovitza, Russia (now Ukraine) in 1915 and emigrated to the U.S. at five with his family. He was raised in Philadelphia, where he began his artistic career, exhibiting paintings and prints throughout the 1930s and ’40s. He also worked as a commercial artist and teacher. During World War II, Feinstein was an illustrator for the U.S. Army Medical Corps, where he was introduced to filmmaking, a skill he used years later in his 1999 documentary Hans Hofmann.

    In 1949, Feinstein was looking to develop his knowledge of abstraction; he joined the postwar wave of students flocking to Provincetown to study with Hofmann.

    A wall of paintings and works on paper created during Feinstein’s Provincetown years anchors the exhibition at PAAM. They show him moving from representation toward abstraction. He strives to find his own voice while experimenting with the latest developments in painting.

    Feinstein’s Untitled (cat. 499), early 1950s.

    Two of his most representational works in the exhibit, both from the late 1940s, depict Provincetown Harbor in blocky cubist forms. Willem de Kooning — the hotshot of abstract expressionism — seems to be on Feinstein’s mind in a pair of oil-on-paper compositions of nude figures rendered abstractly in brazen painterly gestures. In other pieces from this period, Feinstein favors all-over compositions, freely experimenting with lines and marks. These pieces recall the surrealist roots of abstract expressionism.

    These early pictures capture the excitement and sense of possibility Feinstein encountered as a student in 1950s Provincetown when abstraction captured the imagination of so many painters. The paintings that composed his mature work show their debt to these early experiments. As such, the exhibit charts the development of an artist’s voice, situating it within the geography and community from which it arose.

    Untitled (cat. 18), 1990s-2002.

    Although the show is not organized chronologically, it’s fascinating to observe Feinstein’s work develop over decades. By the late 1950s, he was firmly established as an abstract expressionist, exercising all the physical bravado of that movement. Surfaces are heavily slathered with thick, meaty paint.

    In Pieta 1, he sets up a dramatic play between a primarily dark palette and a yellow slash of color that runs down from the top of the canvas. A reddish-orange shape and a passage of purple at the bottom vibrate in the composition, resounding with Hofmann’s “push and pull” theory.

    In another painting from the 1950s, Untitled (Cat. 607), Feinstein organizes the picture around a similar downward diagonal thrust, conjured through an expansive field of yellow. Between the two paintings, there’s a consistent concern with dramatic tension between light and dark and movement that flows downward — or upward.

    Untitled (cat. 607), late 1950s.

    “These paintings are conceived to project their own expression, to radiate a specific presence,” said Feinstein about his own work. “They are optical structures composed to touch the human spirit, to turn a rectangle into an evocation.”

    In his lifelong pursuit, color and light — as well as vertical compositions that could be alternately described as ascents or descents — became Feinstein’s physical means to evoke presence, spirituality, and radiance.

    In 1960, Feinstein left Provincetown, where he had summered for a decade, and bought a house in Dennis. The rest of his life was spent in New York and Dennis. Feinstein taught private classes and, although he exhibited widely as a young artist, he kept the commercial world of galleries at arm’s length. Consequently, his work is not well known.

    Resurrection (cat. 41), early 1980s.

    The paintings in the PAAM exhibition from the 1970s onward are done in acrylics rather than oil. His colors became brighter. A fascination with hot reds and oranges at one extreme and cool blues and purples at another would remain with him throughout his life. He became a master of color, activating these high-key hues through their relationship to muddy tonal colors. Whereas the dark colors in his early paintings often veered toward black, in his later paintings he found a whole universe of color in areas of darkness.

    Just as his paintings from the 1950s echoed that decade, some of his paintings from the 1980s reverberated with the stylistic trends of their time. Their pastel colors and ample use of aqua green — along with a more stylized texture that emphasized the plastic veneer of acrylic paint — recall that decade’s fixation with all things synthetic and bright.

    Feinstein’s paintings from the 1990s to 2002 show his vision most fully realized. They are sublime paintings that build on Hofmann’s notions of color and the legacy of abstract expressionism, but they are entirely Feinstein’s own.

    Untitled (Cat 72) represents a continuation of his earliest obsessions: large forms fall vertically, dark colors dominate and — in an echo of Pieta from 40 years earlier — there’s a slash of bright paint falling downward and activating the space. In this case, it’s a line of bright orange paint applied straight from the tube.

    Untitled (cat. 72), 1990s.

    Yet, unlike Pieta, the color in this painting is perfected and his mark-making is self-assured and less derivative. Here he evokes a deep space, subtly gesturing toward landscape. His mature paintings are the stars of this show. They represent a triumph and an achievement at the end of a long road. As such, this exhibition celebrates not only Feinstein’s legacy but the journey of any artist who doggedly carves out a space for himself.

    Pieta 1 (cat. 65), 1950s.

    The Radiance of Color

    The event: The paintings of Sam Feinstein
    The time: Through Sept. 2
    The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
    The cost: General admission: $15

    JOY

    An Eagle Scout at Art School

    Students in PAAM’s Art Reach program paint canvases for seniors

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — One floor up from the stately galleries of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum are a series of classrooms with soft natural light. On Saturdays in the off-season they become a hive of creative activity as the museum’s Art Reach program brings students from across Cape Cod to free art classes here.

    “The bus starts at 8:45 a.m. exactly and makes a bunch of stops,” says Avery Garrison, an eighth-grader from Centerville who is in their third 10-week semester with Art Reach. “It doesn’t feel like school, though — it’s a lot more fun.”

    Avery Garrison and painting. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    “Everyone here is looking forward to making art,” says Maia Rollins, also in eighth grade, who lives in Yarmouth and Eastham and is in her sixth semester in the program. “We use all kinds of materials and make full paintings from live models and still lifes. It’s always something different.”

    The program is funded by the Mass. Cultural Council and by grants and private donations, says Grace Emmet, curator of community education at the museum. There are three programs underway this winter: “Art on the Edge” for 4th- through 6th-grade students, Art Reach 101 for students in 7th and 8th grades, and Art Reach Studio for high-schoolers.

    Art Reach students hold their unfinished paintings. Back row from left: Leo Riikonen, Maia Rollins, Elle Andersen Stanley, Cole Escandel, Lulu Edwards, Evan Becotte, Sam Richardson, Chloe Collum, and Avery Garrison. In front are Carter Escandel, Asa Valli, and Felipe Diaz. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    This January and February, the middle-school students have been painting brightly colored still lifes to be displayed at the Liberty Commons rehabilitation clinic in Chatham. Bringing cheerful art to that facility is the Eagle Scout project of Leo Riikonen, an eighth-grader from Eastham who has been an Art Reach student for three years.

    “Eagle projects are about giving back to the community,” says Riikonen, a member of Boy Scout Troop 71 in Chatham and Sea Scout Ship 72 in Orleans.

    Leo Riikonen steps back to look at his painting. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    Instead of installing park benches or trail signs, Riikonen wanted to make a change at the rehabilitation facility where his grandparents had stayed recently.

    “There’s a bunch of empty wall space there, and most people are immobile and can’t really leave,” Riikonen says. “I wanted to bring some happiness to the people staying there with these joyful still lifes.”

    Carter Escandel working on his still life. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    Riikonen sought funding for canvases and frames from the Adams Masonic Lodge in Wellfleet, where he had previously volunteered, and got permission from Liberty Commons to install the paintings. Some of his fellow Boy Scouts will paint canvases, too, he says, as leading other Scouts is a requirement for Eagle projects.

    Riikonen’s grandparents were in the rehabilitation center for a couple of months, he says. His visits there, and his years in art class, convinced him that bright colors could help cheer the patients.

    Lulu Edwards shows her work. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    Agata Storer of Wellfleet teaches the middle-school Art Reach classes and says the program includes a wide range of media. “We do printmaking and painting,” she says. “We sculpted with clay, with cardboard, and with natural materials we found in the Beech Forest.”

    Chloe Collum, left, with her painting, and Agata Storer, who teaches the “101” class in the Art Reach Program. (Photo by Paul Benson)

    The students also used drawings to make short handmade animations, Storer says. Local artist Mischa Richter spoke to the group about how his movie I Am a Town grew out of his career in photography.

    “We can order anything we need, good-quality materials, and the kids can really learn so much,” says Storer.

    Sam Richardson paints. Lulu Edwards is in the background. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    There are 16 students in the middle-school class this semester, and on the Saturday when the still lifes for Riikonen’s project are being completed everyone is focused on the work.

    “We’re making paintings with lots of color so that the people in the nursing home, when they walk by, can say, ‘Oh, look at this beautiful painting!’ and not be sad,” Garrison says. “It’s really cool.”

    AN ART LEGACY

    Sal Del Deo Carries On

    A solo exhibition at PAAM charts the development of an adventurous career

    By

    In one of Salvatore Del Deo’s paintings now at his solo exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the town is framed through a pair of binoculars — a view one might see from the Pilgrim Monument. The circular shapes converge on a strip of land sandwiched between a purple sky and deep-blue water.

    Salvatore Del Deo in his Provincetown studio. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    The circularity alludes to Del Deo’s eyes, which, for 75 years, have observed and painted Provincetown’s landscape and community. The show is about Del Deo’s love for this town where, at 95, he continues to build a life as an artist.

    Del Deo first heard about Provincetown from his brother Silvestro when he was growing up in an Italian-immigrant family in Providence, R.I. Silvestro, older and already an artist, would tell his brother stories about painters, composers, and poets as they were drifting off to sleep. At 14 or 15, Silvestro visited Provincetown — which he had heard was full of painters, fishermen, and colors. When he returned, he was “beaming with excitement and happiness,” says Del Deo. “ ‘It’s like being in Europe,’ my brother said. ‘You’ve got to go there someday.’ ”

    Del Deo made it to Provincetown as an art student when he came to study with Henry Hensche. Silvestro had died of a blood disease at 19. Years later, Del Deo acquired Silvestro’s papers from an older brother. Searching through those documents recently, he discovered a letter in which Silvestro wrote about Provincetown as the place where his brother should be.

    The Shepherd of the Clam Flats by Salvatore Del Deo. (Photo by Tatiana Del Deo)

    Silvestro was right. From the beginning, Provincetown captured Del Deo’s imagination. “After I got out of the Army,” he says, “I met my wife ,and we decided to stay and make a life here.”

    Del Deo is part of a dwindling cohort of artists who studied in Provincetown in the 1940s and ’50s, when the town was still an influential place of learning for young artists, dominated by teachers such as Hensche and Hans Hofmann.

    Self-Portrait With Sunflowers by Salvatore Del Deo. (Photo by Tatiana Del Deo)

    One of the pleasures of the current exhibition, on view through Nov. 26, is that it charts the developments in Del Deo’s adventurous painting career. In a self-portrait with sunflowers from this year, his color is his own: vibrant and chromatic. The dance between the complementary blues and oranges also shows up in a large-scale narrative painting in his studio. Based on Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony, the painting was started in 1972 and finished just last year after sitting in Del Deo’s studio for decades. “My color is richer,” he says of the painting. “I take a lot more liberties now than I used to.”

    In his Provincetown studio, Del Deo says he approaches landscape painting like Cezanne, who was concerned with finding geometric structure in the landscape through an emphasis on horizontal and vertical gestures. In Breakwater, Del Deo establishes horizontal movement through the umber slice of land on the horizon and quick, unfussy brush strokes defining the blue expanses of sky and water. The vertical element is achieved through a triangle of rocks leading into the water. A few light shapes of color among the dark rocks economically convey the specific quality of magic-hour light on the Outer Cape.

    Breakwater by Salvatore Del Deo. (Photo by Tatiana Del Deo)

    The simplicity of this painting echoes through the exhibition, particularly in Pilgrim Lake #2, a serene, horizontal composition of a dune and its reflection, and Shoreline Community, a composition dominated in the center by an empty expanse of illuminated sand and punctuated in the distance by seagulls, rendered in flicks of paint, pecking at urchins and clams. His portraits, a territory where Del Deo seems most at ease, convey a similar warm austerity in their lack of finish and emphasis on the geometric structure of the faces.

    Del Deo draws parallels between his distilled approach to painting and that of Corot, another Old Master, whom Del Deo quotes: “When you paint, leave as much as you can of the reality in front of you out of the picture. Include just enough to cling to an idea but not a reproduction of what’s in front of you.” It’s advice he continues to live by. “I think I’m just beginning to be a painter,” he says.

    Arthur Cohen in Al Di Lauro’s Studio by Salvatore Del Deo. (Photo by Tatiana Del Deo)

    In his studio, Del Deo appears like an Old Master himself, with his tousled white hair, sitting in a paint-covered smock among easels with works in process, stacks of paintings, still-life set-ups, and antique mannequins. The studio, in a hollow at the end of a woodsy dirt road, recalls an older Provincetown, something less manicured and more rural.

    On his desk, he has a pastel drawing of his late wife, Josephine, at Frenchie’s dune shack. Josephine, who was a poet, writer, and devotee of Provincetown’s art community, is often on Sal’s mind.

    “My wife was so supportive,” he says. “I suffered from self-doubt, and she was there all the time encouraging me to keep painting. I did the same with her and her poetry.”

    East End Cold Storage Wharf by Salvatore Del Deo. (Photo by Tatiana Del Deo)

    In a recent lecture at PAAM, Del Deo told stories about the artists he painted and characters associated with his other paintings. A picture of the dune shack introduced a story about its former owner, Jeanne “Frenchie” Chanel, a dancer and singer who lived in Paris before visiting Provincetown with her friend Bette Davis. Davis left, but Frenchie remained, where she developed a passion for nursing wounded birds back to health.

    When he introduced one of his most recent paintings, Ghost Wharf, his tone became more elegiac. “I did this a few months ago from memory,” he said. “It epitomizes what was out there once. This was a real working town. Now, unfortunately, it’s not.”

    Ghost Wharf by Salvatore Del Deo. (Photo by Tatiana Del Deo)

    The town’s fishing industry initially attracted Del Deo to Provincetown. In Ghost Wharf, the sunset colors speak of its waning presence. The wharfs sit surrounded by water, vulnerable and untethered to land, but Del Deo captures a fleeting moment of yellow light before the sun goes down — an ephemeral but very real, very beautiful presence.

    Del Deo, in the sunset of his own life, remains vital, full of curiosity, and continually engaged with the world around him. In his studio, he tells another story about an artist who gave him a book before he died at 46.

    “He wrote an inscription in the cover: ‘Dear Sal, Carry on,’ and then signed his name,” says Del Deo. “I said, ‘Jesus, I have to carry on for all my dear friends who were painters and never lived as long as I have. I have to continue until I can’t paint anymore.’ ”

    Taking Liberties

    The event: Sal Del Deo, 75 years of painting in Provincetown
    The time: Through Nov. 26
    The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
    The cost: General admission: $15

    MUSEUMS

    Jane Kogan’s Wide-Ranging Retrospective

    In her current show at PAAM, the artist shows us how to change, in style

    By

    When viewers enter the two rooms at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum that comprise Jane Kogan’s retrospective show, they step into a staring match. At one end of the gallery, the late Roger Skillings stares out from his 1969 portrait, almost life-size, with his hand on his hip and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Across the room is a self-portrait of Kogan. She, too, is life-size, wearing a bowler hat, the first painting in Kogan’s “Amazon” series.

    The pairing is appropriate, as the show is dedicated to the memory of Skillings, who championed Kogan’s work. The two met during Kogan’s first summer in Provincetown in 1966. “I first came up here with a lover of mine,” she says. “We ended up renting a big house out on Shore Road. And we filled it up with people.”

    One of those people introduced her to Skillings. Kogan, 84, has lived in Provincetown for 54 years; she was among the Fine Arts Work Center’s first cohort of visual arts fellows in 1968, and the next year, when the writing program began, Skillings, too, became a fellow. He remained involved with FAWC until his death in 2020.

    Yogi, 1982, oil on canvas, by Jane Kogan. (Photos courtesy PAAM)

    The work in the retrospective is notably diverse. There are the large-scale “Amazon” paintings — imposing female figures surrounded by geometric patterns and iconography reminiscent of paintings by Hilma af Klint. There are Kogan’s early small-scale etchings, works in colored pencil, photo collages, mixed media work with buttons, and small-scale landscapes on wood panels.

    “A lot of people at the opening thought that four different people were the artist,” Kogan says. “I say that I’m like Picasso: many different styles, but not quite as good.”

    Kogan’s stylistic periods begin and end definitely, each era working through a concept.

    “What happens is I do a whole series, and then there’s a break, and I have a new idea,” she says.

    Her earliest works are etchings, made when she was living in New York City with access to a printing press. Some of these, like Marie Standing, Rear View, from 1967, are small domestic scenes with textural variety produced by the etching of lines onto a metal plate in an intaglio process. Others, like 1966’s Satisfaction of Desire, are collages of disparate scenes and include text.

    Marie Standing, Rear View, 20/20, 1967, etching.

    “I was doing Cezanne,” says Kogan of this period. “He was my favorite artist. Then I began to get a little bit more abstract.”

    Kogan points out two works representative of this development: a large, semi-abstract still life and a painting of a quartet of musicians (her father was a cellist) with clear Cubist influence.

    Next came Kogan’s “Amazon” series, started in 1969 during the period of second-wave feminism.

    Portrait of Roger Skillings, 1969, oil on canvas.

    “I wanted to do life-size women,” Kogan says. “In a way, it was unconscious, most of it. That’s what’s interesting.” In one painting, titled Self Portrait, Kogan wears one tall black boot; her other foot is bare. “People would say to me, ‘Why does she have one shoe on and one shoe off?’ I had never realized that I did.”

    The paintings in the series have other dualities: usually a combination of symbols of good and bad. One woman holds flowers in one hand and a coiled snake in the other. In one self-portrait, she carries a flower and a speculum.

    “Everything’s not so beautiful all the time,” says Kogan. “On the other hand, nothing’s horrible all the time.”

    After she completed the series, Kogan moved on to something new.

    294A Commercial: No Trespassing, 1983, oil on wood panel.

    “I think my father said something like, ‘Must you work so big?’ ” Kogan says. “Well, of course, the next ones turned out to be these teeny ones, of town.”

    The small-scale paintings (Duarte Motors, from 1982, is the littlest, at 5 by 8 1/8 inches) capture in great detail the buildings and scenes of Provincetown in the 1980s.

    “I guess I had been in P’town long enough by then, about 15 years, to have absorbed it,” Kogan says. “I had never done landscape. And I never have done landscape except for those little houses. I had to learn to do bushes and real trees and fences and all that stuff.”

    Kogan made 32 of the pieces before she stopped painting and moved into collage and colored pencil drawings, around 1990.

    Kogan’s “Embedded” series is among her more recent work. Using photo collage, she would place a nude self-portrait into a street scene. In one, she sits with tourists on the benches in front of town hall. In another, she’s superimposed into a Paris café.

    Embedded 20: Fat Lady Torso on Town Hall Benches With Tourists, 2010, mixed media.

    Across her far-ranging body of work, there are some constants: an interest in the female figure, collage, geometric forms, texture.

    “I feel like the artwork should speak for itself, basically — as Picasso said,” Kogan says with a laugh.

    These days, she’s not doing a thing, she says. “I’m retired, you know. I just haven’t had any new ideas. I have all my art materials, so if I thought of something, I would do it. But I haven’t, and I’m okay.”

    Staring Match

    The event: A retrospective of works by Jane Kogan, curated by Vicki Tomayko
    The time: Through Aug. 20
    The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
    The cost: $15 general admission

    GROUP SHOW

    The New FAWC Fellows Make Their Mark

    A quiet, nuanced show offers a first chance to see work by the current visual arts fellows

    By

    In her film Untitled (burned rubber on asphalt), 2018, Tinja Ruusuvuori turned her attention to a small community in Norway where she probed one town’s minidrama about a mysterious person who marks up the roads with skidding tires. The action, or lack thereof, takes place over 20 minutes amid soaring mountains and pristine, misty landscapes captured in slow, panoramic shots. The stillness and purity of the environment, along with the sleepy town — where it’s apparent that not much happens otherwise — place the skid marks in stark relief, like charcoal sketches on a blank page.

    A still from Tinja Ruusuvuori’s documentary film Untitled (burned rubber on asphalt), 2018. (Photo courtesy the artist)

    The mood of Ruusuvuori’s piece carries throughout the current exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, which features work by eight of the 10 current visual arts fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center. The work is sparsely hung and often small. There’s a sense of calm and quietude throughout the exhibition, in contrast to last year’s busier, more colorful show. The subdued energy allows for a heightened viewing experience and a clear space to highlight the individual marks of each artist. Some of these marks are as brash as those of the speeding driver in Ruusuvuori’s documentary. Others are more controlled and restrained.

    The exhibition is anchored at both ends of the gallery by large multi-panel paintings. At one end, Siennie Lee explores tension between organic and geometric forms in her triptych, Foliage of the Seas. In this delicate painting on silk, Lee creates an all-over composition with lush organic forms, rendered in subtle variations of blues and greens and overlaid with rigid, geometric shapes that appear like an electrical diagram. The combination creates a soft, pulsating energy that’s equal parts synthetic and natural.

    Siennie Lee, Foliage of the Seas (detail). (Photo by Agata Storer)

    At the other end of the exhibition space, Elizabeth Flood takes an entirely different approach to materials in her commanding five-panel painting of Race Point. She mixes sand into her paint and applies it thickly in energetic gestures. But despite the material heft, a sense of quiet permeates the work: not just in the imagery of calm seas and clear skies, but also in a limited palette and an emphasis on horizontal lines, which ground the viewer. The only image without a horizon line in the five-panel composite is a gray seascape where sea and sky merge, and its amorphous quality creates an ethereal, mysterious void at the center of the work.

    Elizabeth Flood, Atlantic Ocean, Race Point. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    Sichong Xie also incorporates water imagery to create a poetic meditation on mortality. In her video piece, filmed at a lake in Skowhegan, Maine, a woman swims and sits on a chair on a dock while reading a text. Her words — both philosophical and personal — narrate the video, which progresses into wide-angle views of a couple rowing a boat on a placid lake. “How can you create an experience of being alone?” the narrator asks. The characters, small and rowing toward some intermediate place, conjure existential anxieties, which are eased by the beauty of the environment.

    Nearby, Blake Daniels and Mark Joshua Epstein pack intense visual experiences into their small paintings. Daniels’s Morning Wader in Vaal River depicts a figure silhouetted and standing in a river as lushly painted mountains rise in the distance. The yellow-green palette and hazy edges create a hallucinogenic atmosphere from which the figure emerges like a ghost materialized in globs of blue paint.

    Blake Daniels, Morning Wader in Vaal River. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    Epstein’s similar-size painting on paper is equally dense with color. In this fastidious abstraction, he works with flat shapes of color and curves that wrap around the composition and bubble outward from one edge. The painting shows an interest in pattern and decoration, but the controlled tenor of the work finds release in a large central area, where green streaks, loose and liberated, run across a purple ground.

    Also working with shape-based abstraction, Kristy Hughes’s body-sized works, which merge painting and sculpture, are the loudest pieces in the show. Before coming to FAWC, Hughes was the coordinator of the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency on the former grounds of Murray’s farmhouse in upstate New York, which celebrates the late artist’s commitment to creative risk-taking. Like Murray, Hughes is interested in expanding painting beyond two dimensions. One of her pieces hangs on a wall, its shapes layered in relief. It seems to grow a leg that connects it to the floor. Another, Shape of a Rock (Heart), plays with the presentation of a sculpture on a pedestal — but here, the pedestal is part of the sculpture. Hughes seems to enjoy the process of contesting how art objects are approached by the viewer.

    Fancy Lady by Kristy Hughes. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    Georgia Dickie’s installation Promiscuous Availability appears from a distance like a pile of junk that someone left on the floor, perhaps anticipating a viewer’s reaction. (After all, what contemporary art show doesn’t have at least one installation that looks like a pile of junk on the floor?) But a closer look reveals that the piece is actually a carefully constructed arrangement of quotidian objects like cardboard boxes and empty food containers. In her statement accompanying this piece, Dickie discusses her interest in reassembling found objects “into new arrangements based on a logic of eschewing and rebalancing their assigned functions.”

    Georgia Dickie, Promiscuous Availability. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    The fellows, who are about halfway into their seven-month residency, will begin their individual exhibitions at FAWC’s Hudson D. Walker Gallery in February. Like the Norwegian community in Ruusuvuori’s film, the Outer Cape this time of year is a place where stillness and natural beauty provide space to create, ruminate, and cultivate minor dramas. It will be fascinating to see how this experience informs the mark this group makes.

    Meet the Fellows

    The event: A group show by the 2022-2023 Fine Arts Work Center visual arts fellows
    The time: Through March 5
    The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
    The cost: $15 general admission

    AT THE MUSEUM

    By Artists, for Artists (and Everyone Else)

    The Members’ Juried Exhibition at PAAM highlights the continued excellence of working artists on the Outer Cape

    By

    I recently came across a digital copy of a bulletin for an exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in 1935: a no-frills black-and-white publication filled with ads and a list of exhibiting artists. Despite the intervening years, the Provincetown of today is still reflected in its pages. There are ads for antique shops, art stores, and a contractor, as well as a one-page announcement for the annual costume ball held at town hall at the end of August — a precursor to today’s Carnival.

    The list of exhibiting artists includes names long associated with Provincetown whose works still hang in our banks, public offices, and schools and on the walls of PAAM: Philip Malicoat, Blanche Lazzell, Charles Kaeselau, Ross Moffett, and Henry Hensche, among others.

    The pair of members’ exhibitions currently on view at PAAM reflect the history of the museum as an artist-supported institution. Like the 1935 show, in which 120 works were listed, the Members’ Open: Small Works Exhibition represents an inclusive swath of artists working locally. Any member can contribute an artwork no larger than 20 inches in any dimension. The resulting show is understandably chaotic and mixed in quality. But there are visual gems throughout. What’s most laudable about the show and its democratic tradition is the message that PAAM makes space for artists at different stages of accomplishment without constraint from cultural gatekeepers. It continues to be a museum by artists and for artists.

    The concurrent Members’ Juried Exhibition is a more tailored show. It highlights some of the most interesting artists working locally and positions Provincetown and the Outer Cape as a place where ambitious art is still made. Curated by James Stanley, a painter and professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Kirsten Andersen, a writer and arts administrator, the show features 29 local artists, chosen from a pool of around 250 submissions.

    Diane Messinger, Where Did We Come From — We Are Here Now — Where Are We Going? (Photo courtesy the artist)

    Stanley and Andersen have placed a large narrative painting of women in different stages of life by Diane Messinger at the center of the exhibition, where it becomes a starting point for a conversation. Its elements — landscape, figuration, abstract flourishes, and a visual sensibility that veers toward bright colors — echo throughout the exhibition. The front room of the museum reverberates with the hot colors of Messinger’s figures, rendered in brushy strokes of feverish reds and pinks. Her painting recalls the work of Edvard Munch and the German Expressionists, as does a nearby work by Robert Henry: a street scene in which muddy colors mingle with touches of synthetic green.

    Many of the other brightly colored works in the room have roots in Pop Art. Like other artists from that genre, Chris Kelly uses tools from advertising — bold typography, fluorescent color, stylized images, and patterns — to build his painting. But the resulting abstract image obfuscates any commercial intention. A gouache on paper by Barbara Cohen, in which a brightly colored cube floats in a green field, hangs next to Kelly’s painting and echoes some of its fluorescence. In Cohen’s work, the artificial colors associated with consumerism take on a nimbler quality. It’s a charming composition that feels both offhand and spatially sophisticated.

    Jessica Teffer, Food as Famous Folks Like It. (Photo courtesy the artist)

    Across the room, Jessica Teffer’s fiber sculpture of a box of bran cereal echoes the spirit of Claes Oldenburg, who washed dishes as a young artist in Provincetown before creating his installation, The Store, a watershed moment for Pop Art. Teffer’s Food as Famous Folks Like It was inspired by a pamphlet featuring recipes by artists including Peter Hunt, Mary Hackett, and Ross Moffett published by the Church of St. Mary of the Harbor in the 1940s. Teffer found the pamphlet at a book sale and created a sculpture inspired by a recipe for bran muffins by Dorothy Gregory Moffett, which is hand-stitched on the back of the box. It’s an imaginative recreation of local historical ephemera with a playful attention to detail, including a vintage A&P logo.

    Taylor Fox, Congressman Massie’s Funny Xmas Card. (Photo courtesy the artist)

    Celeste Hanlon also works with vintage materials and embroidery, but to darker effect. In her ironic Pharma Series: Oxycontin, five bottles of OxyContin are stitched on a vintage linen napkin. Each bottle is labeled with a different color and increases in strength from left to right. The domestic craft and the neatly ordered bottles belie the reality of opioid addiction. Taylor Fox similarly tackles a serious social issue with a light hand in his painting Congressman Massie’s Funny Xmas Card. Here, Fox recreates the Kentucky politician’s real-life Christmas card (which went viral on the internet in 2021) in which his family, all armed with guns, poses in front of a Christmas tree. Painted quickly in a realistic style, it’s a deadpan commentary on the cheery veneer that glazes over issues like gun violence. Like Pop artists of earlier generations, both Fox and Hanlon mine products and images from popular culture to make critiques particular to American society.

    Provincetown is not historically known for Pop-inflected artwork, so its presence in this show is refreshing, even if the exhibition places more emphasis on genres more typically associated with the Outer Cape, like landscape painting, portraiture, and abstraction. But the work doesn’t feel tired. Rather, it reflects the ability of local artists to inject fresh inspiration into these time-honored traditions.

    Joerg Dressler, 998.06 km. (Photo courtesy the artist)

    Joerg Dressler breaks open the landscape painting genre in two works that combine abstraction and hyperrealism: a close-up of a plant with red berries and a portrait of a tree. The images sit like collage elements on a surface smeared with paint and color samples, underscoring the landscape as a constructed image. Donald Beal’s painting of flowers in a wooded landscape shows a similar attention to surface. His forms are seductively painted: bulging buds, bruised and stained with warm color; flower petals rendered with quick motions of a palette knife. Russ Miller’s Road to the Land of Nod (After Hassam) stands out for its subtle color modulations and meaty passages of paint that weave together an image pulsating with movement.

    Donald Beal, Forest Floral. (Photo courtesy the artist)

    Among the many figurative paintings in the show, Karen Ojala’s portrait of a man with a yellow shirt feels particularly alive. The vertical format and quivering, gestural brushwork give the piece a feeling of urgency and spirit reminiscent of El Greco. Jo Hay is represented by a large, sumptuous painting of Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, distinguished by deft wet-on-wet brushstrokes, and Paul Schulenberg shines in a handsome gray painting of a fisherman that feels neither romanticized nor generic.

    Karen Ojala, What’ll It Be? (Photo courtesy the artist)

    An adjacent exhibition of recent donations to PAAM includes a series of Helen Frankenthaler watercolors created in Provincetown in the 1960s, a testament to the town’s deep ties to abstract expressionism. Like Frankenthaler, Bert Yarborough creates loose, gestural abstractions informed by the natural world. His piece in the juried show, Estuary, creates tension between defined and amorphous shapes and passages of paint that are alternately opaque and transparent. The result is a painting that feels like a record of both painterly moves and time. Its cropping creates the sense of a fragment of something moving beyond the confines of the canvas. Similarly, the whole exhibition feels like a different kind of fragment: a colorful snapshot of a moment in time, linked to the past and pointing a way towards the future life of this creative community.

    Paul Schulenberg, The Return. (Photo courtesy the artist)

    Members Only

    The event: Members’ Juried Exhibition
    The time: Thursdays-Sundays, noon-5 p.m. through Jan. 22
    The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
    The cost: $15 general admission

    RESOLVED

    Where to Volunteer and Connect in the New Year

    From petting cats to planning events, opportunities to help abound on the Outer Cape

    By

    Walter Buckingham and Sheryl Jaffe at the Wellfleet Historical Society’s Banana Bash. (Photo by Lauren Hill)

    If volunteering is on your list of New Year’s resolutions, you’ll be glad to know that many local organizations are seeking people to help. The connection to others and the sense of purpose that comes with volunteering has been shown to be healthy, too. You can do something for others and for yourself by offering your skills to one of the organizations listed here. —Abraham Storer, K.C. Myers, and Edouard Fontenot

    Outer Cape

    Meals on Wheels, run by Elder Services of Cape Cod and the Islands, is in need of volunteer drivers to deliver meals to seniors in Wellfleet, Truro, Eastham, and Orleans. Training and mileage reimbursement is provided. Contact Dawn Ericson-Taylor, volunteer resource manager, at 508-394-4630 or [email protected].

    Helping Our Women, a resource center for Outer Cape women living with chronic or life-threatening conditions, is looking for volunteers to take on tasks ranging from driving clients to medical appointments to making home visits, doing data entry, and helping clients with basic technology. Find out more by clicking on “Get Involved” at helpingourwomen.org or by calling 508-487-4357.

    Mimi Friedman volunteers at the Methodist Church’s swap shop in Provincetown. (Photo by Nancy Bloom)

    Homeless Prevention Council is based in Orleans and helps people from Harwich to Provincetown take steps to keep their housing and attain financial independence. The volunteer positions listed on its website include general office support, marketing and development, events, and even landscaping at the office. To learn more and apply, go to “Get Involved” at hpccapecod.org or call  508-255-9667.

    Provincetown

    AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod has community members helping with administrative duties, food delivery, and events. There is a strong group of volunteers now, but new people are always welcome. Volunteers are free to commit as little or as much time as they want. To learn more, contact the office at 508-487-9445.

    Dixie Carter is one of the cats at CASAS who needs a home. (Photo by Nancy Bloom)

    CASAS, the Carrie A. Seaman Animal Shelter, is a no-kill shelter currently housing nine cats. The shelter has an all-volunteer staff. “We have some lovely cats that need some attention,” says Anita Butler, a full-time volunteer. The shelter is cage-free and volunteers are needed to sit with cats, brush them, and scoop boxes. Prospective volunteers should stop by during visiting hours (daily from 2 to 3:30 p.m.) to fill out an application. Information can be found at casasanimalshelter.org or by calling 508-487-4243.

    The Council on Aging in Provincetown is always looking for volunteers, according to Chris Hottle, the director. “I like to match volunteers with what they want to do,” she says. “Some volunteers are here every day and some are on call as needed.” Some 40 volunteers work in the meals program, teach classes, and help with over 175 other programs and services over the course of the year. Hottle meets in person with potential volunteers. She can be reached at 508-487-7080 or at [email protected].

    Provincetown Art Association and Museum likes to match volunteers with projects that use their skills. Currently opportunities are available for people to distribute flyers for the museum school, reorganize archives, install member exhibitions, and help with drop-off and pick-up days. Interested candidates should contact Lesley Marchessault, PAAM’s development officer, at 508-487-1750, ext. 112 or follow the “Support” link at paam.org.

    Truro

    Truro Historical Museum and the Cobb Archive have many year-round opportunities for volunteers interested in the history of the town and region. Although the museum is closed in the off season, archival work continues and volunteers catalog wills, deeds, newspaper articles, and photographs that document the history of the town. The archive welcomes and trains volunteers to help organize holdings. Some winter volunteers become greeters or docents come summer.  Currently the archive has a need for photographers to help with visual cataloging of museum collections and a technical person who can set up a new Wi-Fi network. To volunteer, contact museum staff at [email protected].

    The Cobb Library in Truro is open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30 a.m. to noon and by appointment at 508-349-0200. Volunteers catalog historical documents there all year round. (Photo by Nancy Bloom)

    Truro Community Kitchen fights food insecurity in Truro by delivering free, nourishing home-cooked meals to those who need them. Winter volunteers are urgently needed to help with the preparation and packaging of food in the community kitchen at the Christian Union Church from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. each Tuesday. Food delivery drivers are also needed on Tuesday afternoons. To volunteer, write to Wendy Lurie, [email protected], or call 973-868-7526.

    Sustainable CAPE supports local agriculture and farmers and combats hunger and food insecurity by donating fresh-picked fruits and vegetables on the Outer Cape. Volunteer possibilities include gardening with the team and making deliveries for the CSA program. To become a volunteer, go to “Get Involved” at sustainablecape.org.

    Carolina Marseglia volunteers at the Truro Swap Shop. (Photo by Nancy Bloom)

    Truro Swap Shop, located at the transfer station, is the town’s best place for repurposing unwanted items and keeping them out of the waste stream. It is in dire need of volunteers. Application materials are online at the Truro town website, truro-ma.gov, where you can click on the button for “Transfer Station” then choose “Swap Shop Volunteer.” Nancy Fenichel can help interested volunteers apply. Call her at 508-349-2591.

    Friends of the Truro Library are always looking for volunteers to assist library staff in keeping the library running smoothly. Volunteers’ skills go to event planning, staffing book sales, library work, publicity, presentations, and lectures. For the library’s current needs, contact Director Tricia Ford at 508-487-1125 or [email protected].

    The Food Pantry is looking for new volunteers to join its community of pantry helpers. For information or to volunteer, contact Barbara Bond at [email protected] or 617-515-4342.

    Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on Dec. 29, 2022, incorrectly reported that the Cobb Library in Truro was closed for the winter. It is open Tuesdays and Thursdays.

    Wellfleet

    AIM Thrift Shop is volunteer-run and open year-round, six days a week, except for the month of February. Proceeds benefit local nonprofits that provide health, food, and other social services. The thrift store lost a lot of volunteers during Covid, and they’re hoping to rebuild their ranks, says Jim McAuliffe, a board member. Volunteers are asked to work at least one three-hour shift a week. Interested candidates can get an application at the shop at 305 Main St.

    Mass Appeal has a mission of providing free clothing to residents of the Outer Cape. Its Share Shop is staffed by volunteers who unpack donations, sort clothing, and assist customers. To become a volunteer, call 508-349-1173 or go to ccmassappeal.org and click on “Support Us” to send a message.

    246 Community Kitchen’s volunteer teams prepare meals all winter on Mondays and Tuesdays. The meals are currently packaged for pickup, but they plan to return to community meals later in the winter. This winter’s teams are pretty well staffed, but those interested in helping should call Amy Carow at 908-377-0677; she says 246 always has room for enthusiastic volunteers.

    The Wellfleet Food Pantry at Grace Chapel provides food to more than 150 families. Volunteers are needed to staff the pantry and serve shoppers. The time commitment can be as little as two hours per month. If interested, contact 508-349-3036 or send a message via the website, wellfleetfoodpantry.org.

    The Audubon sanctuary in Wellfleet is open year-round. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary offers a wide variety of volunteer opportunities depending on the season. At this time of year they are seeking front desk volunteers. “It’s one of the most interesting and challenging positions,” says Director Melissa Lowe Cestaro. You’ll field questions about everything from trail conditions, wildlife, and where to go to eat, she says. Ideally a volunteer would take a three-hour shift once a week.

    Volunteers for the sea turtle rescue program underway now are recruited and trained in the fall. In the spring, there will be training for volunteer naturalists to lead guided walks, protect diamondback terrapins, or help with a horseshoe crab census. See massaudubon.org and click on “Get Involved” or call the sanctuary at 508-349-2615.

    Wellfleet Historical Society is looking for history buffs to join in a wide range of opportunities in grant research and writing, photography, gardening and landscaping, education, conducting oral histories, and fundraising. Schedules are flexible and “there’s something for everyone,” according to the website. Choose “Get Involved” at wellfleethistoricalsociety.org or email coordinator Sheryl Jaffe, [email protected].

    Eastham

    The Eastham Council on Aging seeks volunteers to be greeters at the senior center as well as activities organizers for the meals, events, and other programs offered there. Phone 774-801-3151 for information. People who have a mind for retail may also help at the thrift shop. For information on that, call 508-255-6164.

    Amy Sanders is the volunteer coordinator at Wild Care in Eastham. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    Wild Care attends to sick and wounded small wild animals. The staff is always looking for help cleaning the clinic, which includes disinfecting animal cages, washing dishes, doing laundry, and washing floors. A three-hour shift one day per week for a minimum of six months and attendance at a monthly meeting in Brewster is required. Volunteers are also needed to help with fundraising and events. For more information, email [email protected].

    Nauset Warriors Booster Club at Nauset Regional High School depends on volunteers to raise funds for sports equipment, transportation, and other expenses that allow students to participate in sports without paying any fees. Volunteers work at the concession stand at games and tournaments. The minimum time commitment is two to three hours a season. Community members and students are invited to sign up. Contact volunteer coordinator K.C. Myers at [email protected] or learn more at nausetboosters.com.

    The Windmill Weekend Committee’s president, Joanna Stevens, said her group has already started planning for Windmill Weekend in September 2023. The committee needs a chairperson to organize the road race, co-chairs for the raffle and car show, and a volunteer merchandising coordinator. These positions require attendance at monthly planning meetings throughout the year. Alternatively, you can volunteer just for the weekend itself. There’s a Windmill Weekend volunteer recruitment event at the Eastham Public Library on Feb. 2, 2023, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. or email [email protected].

    IN THE LOBBY

    Outer Cape Banks Circulate Cultural Currency

    The tradition of displaying local art continues at one bank — and is being reconsidered at another

    By

    If you don’t do much banking in person, the art on display in banks on the Outer Cape might be a good reason to venture beyond the app on your phone or the ATM.

    The paintings at the various offices of Seamen’s Bank include pieces from its own collection and some that are on loan from private collections as well as a sizable number from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Most of the work depicts the local landscape.

    A painting by Ciro Cozzi at Seamen’s Bank in Provincetown. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    “I’ve been fortunate to have some nice paintings around my desk,” says Amanda Norris, who sits under works by John Clayton and Dorothy Loeb at the Provincetown branch. As a child, Norris took art classes with Salvatore Del Deo, whose painting of a fishing boat hangs in the main lobby. (“I hated the class,” says Norris, citing the long, hot sessions at the Art Association without conditioning. “Plus, Sal wasn’t the most patient back then,” she says, laughing.)

    Upstairs at the bank is a pair of brightly colored nautical paintings with overlapping sails by Ciro Cozzi, who opened Ciro and Sal’s with Del Deo. Norris’s parents often spent time at the restaurant with artists like Nancy Whorf, who is represented at Seamen’s by an eight-foot stormy winter landscape in the bank’s board room. Downstairs, behind the tellers, there are two equally dramatic paintings by Charles Kaeselau of rowboats in tumultuous seas.

    Two large paintings by Charles Heinz bring the earthy, unmanicured beauty of the local landscape into the polished interior of the Wellfleet branch of Seamen’s. Heinz, who died in 1953, was a farm boy from Illinois who came to study and live in Provincetown. Wellfleet Vista, which appears to have been painted on a hill, depicts a body of water with the town rising on another hill in the background.

    Two Charles Kaeselau paintings hang on the wall behind the tellers at Seamen’s Provincetown office. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    Across the lobby, hanging above a table with banking slips and brochures, is another painting by Heinz of three oyster shacks on pilings teetering above the water. As in his other paintings, their freewheeling energy and unadorned marks are held together by Heinz’s evident mastery of drawing, composition, and color. In the painting of the oyster shacks, the solid form of a blue sky and railroad tracks in the foreground frame the scene.

    Most of the artwork at the Wellfleet branch of Seamen’s is also from PAAM’s collection, except for a piece loaned by the Left Bank Gallery and a few from the collection of Steven Roderick. “We like to share our collection with the public,” says Madeline Larson, the registrar and collections manager at PAAM. Given that much of its large collection is in storage — and that space in the museum is limited — PAAM collaborates with local institutions to get art into public view. (Works from PAAM’s collection are also displayed at Seashore Point Wellness Center and in the law offices of La Tanzi, Spaulding & Landreth and David Marshall Datz.)

    “In general, it’s places where we have either a donor relationship or it’s a place we feel will be a good public repository,” says Larson. PAAM Executive Director Christine McCarthy is responsible for deciding which artworks are displayed in outside locations.

    Welcome to Provincetown by Nancy Whorf. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    There are other historical gems in the Wellfleet bank, including another moody painting by Kaeselau of a man rowing a boat through icy waters. The carcass of a ship haunts the foreground, and the landscape is reduced to large blocks of cool colors while the sky is bruised in shades of yellow and purple. On the wall behind the teller hangs a Ross Moffett painting and a pale watercolor by Marston Hodgin: another view of the same oyster shacks that Heinz painted.

    In addition to the historical paintings, the bank features work by contemporary artists including Bob Henry, Joyce Zavorskas, and Helen Miranda Wilson. Wilson’s unsettling painting of a pair of shoes is one of the few nonlandscape works on display. Wilson draws our attention to peculiar details in the composition — a square heel and disembodied socks — through her insistent, careful observation.

    There’s another image of Wellfleet’s bygone oyster shacks along with a painting of cranberry farmers — both evoking a social realist vision of local workers — on the other side of town at Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank on Main Street. The two pieces are owned by the bank, which has acquired artwork since its founding through capital improvement budgets.

    “We try to be in keeping with artists from the community or artwork featuring the community,” says Kim Howes, vice president of retail services for Cape Cod Five. The bank’s Orleans branch features a broad array of paintings by local artists, including a standout work by the late Arthur Cohen: a dreamy image of Provincetown as a sliver of land between purple expanses of water and sky.

    Wellfleet Oyster Shacks by Charles Heinz, displayed at Seamen’s Bank in Wellfleet, are on loan from PAAM. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    But aside from the two social realist pieces, the Wellfleet branch is currently empty of artwork. One wall that used to host exhibitions of community artists displays nothing except the clear strips that were used for hanging pictures.

    “In the past, we allowed outside organizations to display artwork in our banks,” says Howes. “We are suspending that as of January 2023.” The new policy, established by an executive management committee, affects all Cape Cod Five banking centers.

    “A lot of people would come in and take a look at the artwork,” says Wil Rhymer, a previous manager at the Wellfleet branch and current assistant vice president and manager at the Provincetown branch of Cape Cod Five. “It was good for the community.”

    Rhymer says that the space was used for exhibitions since 1989, when artist Blossom Newman started organizing shows. The responsibility then passed to Maura Ghedini.

    It was good for both viewers and artists, says Lew Schwartz, a photographer from Wellfleet who has shown twice at the bank and was planning an exhibition of his work last June that never happened. “Unless you have gallery representation, you don’t have a lot of opportunities to show. It was a great place for an unaligned artist.”

    Ghedini and Schwartz had a disagreement about scheduling over the summer, though, Schwartz said, and the exhibition policy changed soon after. Rhymer says he was not involved in the decision to suspend the program, which happened after he left the Wellfleet branch.

    “There was a lot of due consideration of the decision,” says Howes. She said the bank worried about the safety of the artwork and customers who had to navigate through installations with “hammers, nails, and ladders,” though neither she nor Rhymer could recall any safety issues in the past.

    George Edward’s Shoes (Polish) by Helen Miranda Wilson, on loan from PAAM, is at Seamen’s Bank in Wellfleet. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    “In some instances, exhibitions were changing out every other month,” says Howes. “That’s a lot of logistics to deal with.”

    Then there is the changing role that banks play in the community.

    “As banking continues to evolve, it’s less transactional and more advice-related,” says Howes. Bank interiors are beginning to reflect this change: Howes cites two major renovations, one in Yarmouth and another in East Harwich, where new layouts feature “less of a traditional teller line.” Instead of creating places for customers to engage with artwork, the decor is focused on branding.

    “Our logo is more prominent,” says Howes, and staff portraits hang on the walls in the bank’s Hyannis headquarters.

    But that doesn’t mean the bank won’t also display art. Rhymer says that, although there’s no art yet on the walls of the newest Cape Cod Five branch in Provincetown, “We’re working on that. The branch will work with the marketing team to make sure the artwork reflects the community.” Work from a recently closed operations center in Orleans may be reallocated to other locations, including Provincetown.

    And what about that empty wall in the Wellfleet branch, which served as an informal community gallery for over 30 years? Its fate is still undetermined, but Howes says that’s being worked on, too.

    “It will likely be a combination of branded marketing and local imagery,” she says.

    Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on Dec. 15, 2022, suggested that the Charles Heinz painting Wellfleet Vista was painted on Cannon Hill. That seems to be inaccurate, as art collector Michael Parlante has informed us that it was more likely painted near Mill Hill.

    A GIFT OF ART

    Helen Frankenthaler’s Provincetown

    Five works by the abstract master — the first in PAAM’s collection — are featured in an exhibition of recent acquisitions

    By

    Helen Frankenthaler’s Provincetown years were peppered with painting and parenting, swimming and socializing. “My sister Jeannie and I lived with Helen and our father, Robert Motherwell, for a decade of Provincetown summers during the 1960s,” wrote Lise Motherwell in a catalog essay for an exhibition of her stepmother’s work at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum four years ago. “She was a parent, friend, confidant, fellow passionate traveler, [and] a fierce competitor in the art world.”

    Helen Frankenthaler, Provincetown Series. (Photos courtesy PAAM)

    Co-curated by Lise Motherwell (who is chair of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and president of PAAM’s board), that 2018 exhibition showcased Frankenthaler’s monumental oils and acrylics as well as a series of five watercolors that the artist made in Provincetown in 1960. Some of the watercolors had not been shown publicly in nearly 40 years. The series was recently donated to PAAM’s permanent collection by the Frankenthaler Foundation and will be included in PAAM’s “Recent Gifts to the Collection” exhibit, which opens Nov. 18 and will be on view until Jan. 29, 2023.

    The show will also include works from other major collections recently given to PAAM, including jewelry by Provincetown metalsmiths donated by Stephen Borkowski and selections from the collections of Robert Duffy and David Murphy.

    The Frankenthaler works are the first by the artist to be acquired for PAAM’s permanent collection. “The watercolors — a major series — are our first gift from the Frankenthaler Foundation, one that really filled a big gap for us,” says CEO Christine McCarthy.

    While they echo Frankenthaler’s larger works in which free-flowing paint was directly applied onto unprimed canvas, the watercolors are a more intimate reflection of the landscapes the artist experienced during her summers in town.

    Frankenthaler’s stepdaughter Jeannie Motherwell exhibits her own abstract work at Provincetown’s Schoolhouse Gallery and sees Frankenthaler’s watercolors through her own lens as a painter.

    “What interests me is their square format,” says Jeannie. “I’ve been working on a lot of square small paintings, so it was exciting for me to see Helen’s. Squares are extremely difficult to work with if you want to create visual tension.”

    Frankenthaler was 32 when she joined the coterie of abstract painters clustered in Provincetown’s East End. She was already showing in galleries in New York City and had recently married first-generation abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell. Jeannie notes how Frankenthaler responded to the environment of the Outer Cape in her work. Looking at the first painting in the series, she says, “You see that red shape, directing your eye to the right, while the green shapes pull to the left. Your eye moves around the page.”

    Helen Frankenthaler, Provincetown Series #2.

    She finds much to appreciate in Frankenthaler’s Provincetown Series #2 as well. “The blue works really beautifully on the cream paper she’s chosen,” she says. “Blue is the color people are automatically drawn to. And in this particular case, I like the painting because it is so abstract. I feel the blue of the sea. The composition works beautifully within the square. It has weight to it. There’s enough tension in there to make it feel really — definitive! You don’t doubt the decisions she made. That was part of her boldness and strength as an artist.

    “Helen captured the inference of Provincetown, the view that I remember and love: the lights, the colors, the shapes, the ripples of water,” Jeannie continues. “I paint differently, but it comes from the same source.”

    Measured by the calendar, Helen Frankenthaler’s tenure in Provincetown was relatively brief. But the legacy of this boldly adventurous artist continues to resonate. “There are no rules,” said Frankenthaler. “That is what invention is about.”

    Recent Gifts to the Collection

    The event: Works by Helen Frankenthaler and others.
    The time: Show opens Nov. 18; on view until Jan. 29, 2023.
    The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
    The cost: $15 general admission.

    KIND OF BLUE

    Drawing With Light and Making Magic

    Three Provincetown artists take one of the oldest photographic techniques in new directions

    By

    When a new medium was unveiled in 1839 that miraculously seemed to fix images from an ever-changing reality onto a permanent surface, the British scientist and polymath Sir John Herschel gave it the name it has been called ever since: photography, literally “drawing with light.”

    Amy Heller’s collection of cyanotype-wrapped egg sculptures in “Out of the Blue” at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. (Photo by John D’Addario)

    Herschel would discover a new photographic technique himself a few years later by experimenting with the photosensitivity of different iron compounds. Cyanotypes use the effect of sunlight on these compounds to capture the outlines and shadows of objects on a piece of paper or fabric. They were named for their brilliant blue tones, which range from a silvery periwinkle to a rich Prussian blue as deep as the ocean, and soon became widely used for recording things as different as delicate botanical specimens and complex architectural plans (which we still call “blueprints”).

    This month, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum showcases three artists who explore this antique photographic technique in new and creative ways.

    “Out of the Blue,” on view through Nov. 13, features work by Provincetown artists Midge Battelle, Rebecca Bruyn, and Amy Heller. Each combines cyanographs with other media and techniques — including digital photography, fabric, sculpture, and LED light — to create formally related but distinct bodies of work.

    “Each artist’s style has elements that we’re familiar with, but those elements are recombined in different and surprising ways,” says exhibition curator Michelle Law. “The work seems magical yet accessible.”

    Installation view of “Out of the Blue” at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Photo courtesy PAAM)

    A strong, shared sense of place also unites the show. Provincetown — its people, plants, wildlife, and natural and built environments — is a presence in many works. Even the blues of the town are everywhere, from the pale hydrangeas in East End gardens to the deep navy blue of the plaques marking the houses in the West End that were floated over from Long Point in the 19th century — and, of course, the endless variations of tones in the seas and skies that surround it all.

    Few types of photography illustrate the concept of “drawing with light” as directly as cyanotypes do: in its simplest form, the process involves little more than placing an object on a treated piece of paper and leaving it in the sun for a while.

    This was the basic technique used by the 19th-century botanist who all three artists cite as an inspiration for their own work. Anna Atkins (1799-1871) was a family friend of Herschel, who taught her how to make cyanotypes for her studies of marine flora. Collected in three volumes titled Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions over a 10-year period, Atkins’s hybrid of scientific observation and artistic expression is considered the first publication illustrated by photography.

    Of the three artists in the show, Midge Battelle appears to hew the closest to Atkins’s precedent — at least initially. But where Atkins focused on single specimens in her compositions, Battelle’s cyanotypes often combine multiple objects, underlining their poetic connections and visual resonances in contrast to Atkins’s more documentary approach.

    Curator Michelle Law installing Amy Heller’s mixed media cyanotype work in “Out of the Blue.” (Photo by Ruby T)

    Battelle incorporates drawings into some of her pieces, creating complex collage effects. In others, prints are torn into strips or cut up into blocks and rearranged into random patterns, lending equal measures of control and chaos to the finished work. And Battelle says using a “wet” variation of the cyanographic technique, which creates layered and dappled visual effects in the final print, enables her to further incorporate chance elements into her process.

    “It creates a sense of letting go of a controlled outcome,” says Battelle. “I’m never certain of what will transpire. It’s always a kind of thoughtful play.”

    Rebecca Bruyn also incorporates random elements into her work, along with two centuries of photographic tools and methods. She photographs her favorite Provincetown buildings with an iPhone and uses different apps (more than 40 at last count, she says) to add various effects to them before they are converted into negatives and printed on watercolor paper. Random strokes of a brush allow Bruyn to cover some areas of the paper with emulsion and leave gaps in others, so she doesn’t know which parts of the paper will pick up the image until it’s complete. Each print then becomes a one-of-a-kind object.

    Installation view of Midge Battelle’s Flora II and Flora III in “Out of the Blue.” (Photo by John D’Addario)

    In combining analog and digital techniques, Bruyn creates a body of work that feels both contemporary and timeless. If it weren’t for details like phone wires and signage in some of the images, it would be difficult for a casual viewer to determine exactly when in the past 180 years they were made. She says that sense of history is central to how she hopes her work is perceived.

    “As someone who likes history, I am transported by cyanotype printing to another era,” says Bruyn. “I want to give the viewer a sense that they’re glimpsing the past.”

    Amy Heller pushes cyanography towards the future in her transformation of its usual two dimensions into three-dimensional objects. In one series, Heller prints lengths of silk with images of marine life (including horseshoe crabs, skate egg cases, and jellyfish) and mounts them with LED lighting, resulting in works that are infused with a sense of movement and watery depth.

    Rebecca Bruyn’s cyanotype of 112 Commercial St. began as an iPhone photograph that was post-processed and made into a negative before being printed on watercolor paper. (Photo courtesy the artist)

    A display case at the entrance to the show containing Heller’s cyanotype-printed fabrics wrapped around sculpted supports becomes a treasure chest filled with Provincetown-inflected versions of Fabergé eggs. On a wall behind it, a work called Skates Swimming, with its grid of egg cases arranged like blocks in a quilt, recalls both the particular Cape ecosystem in which Heller creates her art and the Atkins work that inspired it.

    As with her fellow artists, it’s the combination of old and new that especially draws Heller to working with cyanotypes.

    “I love combining this simple and elegant 19th-century process with 21st-century technology to create new things,” she says, echoing curator Michelle Law’s take on the show. “It’s pure magic.”

    Rebecca Bruyn, 160 Commercial Street, c. 1820. (Photo courtesy PAAM)

    Out of the Blue

    The event: Cyanotypes by Midge Battelle, Rebecca Bruyn, and Amy Heller
    The time: Through Nov. 13, with an opening panel on Thursday, Sept. 1 at 6 p.m. and reception on Sept. 2 from 6 to 8 p.m.
    The place: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St.
    The cost: $15 general admission; free for PAAM members and children 16 and under

    RETROSPECTIVE

    A Maverick Artist’s Many Faces

    Provincetown celebrates Philip C. Malicoat with paired exhibitions

    By

    Moisture, fog, the piney essence of forest and dunes — to commune with these in a Philip Malicoat landscape or seascape is to experience that certain slant of light when the grays and greens vibrate with inner life.

    A selection of two dozen modest-sized Malicoat paintings are on view at the Schoolhouse Gallery. A few blocks west, at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, we are treated to 14 of Malicoat’s formal, seldom-exhibited studio paintings, spanning four decades.

    Philip Malicoat in his studio in the early 1970s. (Photo courtesy Breon Dunigan)

    Rarely presented as a group, the studio paintings — those done in the artist’s personal workspace — are windows into Malicoat’s inner life, exploring his dreams and fantasies. They provide another dimension to the artist’s better-known scenic views and reveal his range. Among them are classically inspired paintings of his artist wife and a self-portrait that could hold its own alongside a Rembrandt.

    Taken together, the paired exhibits offer a rare view of Philip Malicoat’s place in Outer Cape art history and in the scope of early 20th-century American painting.

    The large-scale paintings reflect Malicoat’s studies with Charles Webster Hawthorne, founder of the Cape Cod School of Art, as well as his bond with friend and teacher Edwin Dickinson, who, almost a generation older than Malicoat, also studied with Hawthorne.

    Malicoat was born in Indianapolis in 1908 and, after arriving in Provincetown in 1929, never left except for European travels. He was a member of the Beachcombers, a social club whose original roster is a who’s who of early Provincetown painters — Dickinson, Karl Knaths, Ross Moffett, Coulton and Frederick Waugh (no women were allowed — nor are they today). He often painted en plein air on the back shore, placing his easel not far from the family’s two-room dune shack.

    In Interior, on view at PAAM, a pitcher on its side is reflected in a mirrored surface, referencing perspective and classical geometry. (Photo courtesy PAAM)

    Painter Robena Malicoat is one of Philip’s six granddaughters, the daughter of sculptor Conrad Malicoat and ceramicist and printmaker Anne Lord Malicoat. She speaks of her visceral reaction to her “Grandpa Phil’s” smaller oils, alive with spontaneity and movement.

    Of a painting of pines in a snowy dunescape, Robena says, “It’s a really damp drizzly day, just kind of wet,” with a “silver-gray palette.” The paintings are beautiful without being beautiful, she says. “I wonder about them, not necessarily needing an answer.”

    On a walk through the Schoolhouse Gallery to view the many paintings from the family collections, Robena describes Head of Sheila (1966) as “introspective.” Long fingers rest on her cheek as the auburn-haired beauty peers into a distant void in tones of gray. “Your attention is drawn to the hand,” Robena says. “You also imagine what she’s looking at, what she is thinking.”

    At Schoolhouse, the subject in Head of Sheila gazes into the distance. (Photo courtesy Schoolhouse Gallery)

    Robena and her cousin, Breon Dunigan, also an artist, whose “trophy head” sculptures are shown at the Schoolhouse, are family historians and co-curators of the Malicoat exhibit at PAAM. Cataloging their grandfather’s work continues to be a long, exhilarating, and occasionally frustrating journey. From idea to fruition, the exhibit took them five years. Robena says the paintings are “contemplative, contained, and yet spacious.”

    A large painting of Barbara Malicoat (1932), on view at PAAM (and the cover of the exhibition catalog), shows her pensively gazing into a mirror, a Renaissance-red cape draped over her shoulders. Malicoat often spoke of his preference for a limited palette, from which he would create a range of closely-related hues.

    Breon, who has curated numerous exhibitions at PAAM and serves on the museum’s exhibition committee and board of trustees, appreciates Malicoat’s paintings of Ireland, Greece, and France.

    She points out paintings of Athens in which grays mingle with violets, blues, and splashes of rosy peach. There are four from La Cadière, France. La Cadiere, Christmas Day (1960) is the most abstract — a gestural splash of blue-grays, its impasto surface pulsing with life.

    La Cadiere, Christmas Day is the most abstract of Malicoat’s travel-inspired paintings on view at the Schoolhouse Gallery. (Photo courtesy Schoolhouse Gallery)

    These postcards from Phil’s travels also reflect the teachings of Charles Hawthorne, who followed the Impressionists in valuing the premier coup, the first strike, which translates as “don’t overpaint.” Breon remembers showing her grandfather drawings she made in art school. “Never spend more than a couple of hours on a drawing,” he advised. Phil’s paintings, she says, are intentionally done to capture that sort of energy, to capture the moment.

    Malicoat also spoke of painting as an exercise in problem-solving. His Self-Portrait (1969) at PAAM offers insights: possibly he’s looking into a mirror. Geometric forms — a triangle, a vertical shaft — connect to a diagonal beam bisecting his shoulder; the edge of the artist’s nose parallels floating cubes.

    A colorful blue jug extends into the foreground. Surrealism? Perhaps. “I recognize that vase,” Robena says. It’s one of many objects remaining in Malicoat’s studio, the rustic, inviting space where he painted most of his large-scale works, and where she now paints.

    Malicoat’s loves of chess and music also appear in his studio paintings. In Reflection (1969), the model, seated at a chess table, stares into what Robena calls “indeterminate space.” Sheet music appears in the foreground. A swipe of rust-colored paint anchors a corner. A red cube rests on the model’s shoulder. “He is taking us on a journey into the process of painting,” Breon says.

    Looking at Reflection, co-curator Breon Dunigan says Malicoat takes the viewer on “a journey into the process of painting.” (Photo courtesy PAAM)

    Three Seasons (1965) spans 15 feet. The sensual triptych includes fragments of classical ruins. For the center section, Dunigan’s red-headed father, Phil, was a model. “He only posed for the head, and was lying down,” Breon says. His involvement took a couple of sittings — modest compared to what was usually expected of Malicoat’s studio models.

    Mastering the act of painting itself, unlocking the mysteries of creating a dimensional entry point within the borders of a flat, two-dimensional surface, was Malicoat’s holy grail. In an interview in the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, he speaks of the pleasures of the studio, his retreat and fortress. But the ocean gusts and solitude of the back shore were perhaps more primal sources of energy.

    “He liked to paint waves,” Robena says. “And he loved to sail. A boy from Indiana, he came to Provincetown and discovered his calling.” Malicoat made four studio versions of Storm Over Sea (1967). White pulse marks punch their way across a furious gray sea: Malicoat has taken on the mantle of Ahab, the painter’s fierce brushwork chasing the white whale.

    Co-curator of the PAAM exhibit Robena Malicoat says of her grandfather, “He liked to paint waves.” (Photo courtesy PAAM)

    In an age of inflated artist reputations and greed-fueled prices, Malicoat remained the real thing — unpretentious, sociable, industrious, more interested in painting than in selling.

    He was also open-minded about new styles. During the 1920s and 1930s, when PAAM had separate shows for “traditionalists” and “modernists,” Malicoat served on the exhibitions committee alongside Hans Hofmann, a modernist who had known Picasso and Matisse in Paris. Malicoat’s approach would have been considered more in line with the traditionists, but they became allies, agreeing to end meaningless distinctions.

    For contemporary viewers, this slice of Provincetown history opens a door to revisiting Malicoat’s oeuvre through the lens of abstraction. Trained as a realist at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Malicoat, who died in 1981, remained intent on capturing, in his own atmospheric style, recognizable figures and objects.

    At the same time, his work is gestural — toothy and abstract. The much younger Helen Frankenthaler, who, during the 1950s, had one Provincetown studio in a private, wooded area and another facing the Bay, would have applauded Malicoat’s embrace of abstracted indeterminate space.

     

    CANVASES

    Behind the Scenes With Malicoat’s Larger Works

    A conservator copes with Cape Cod’s environment and with the paint itself

    By

    Few viewers are conscious of what goes on behind the scenes to keep a museum’s collection not just intact but resistant to the unrelenting effects of time. But conservator and restorer Debra Dickinson knows. And when she took on her most recent assignment — to prepare a collection of Provincetown painter Philip Malicoat’s larger paintings for the current exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum — she assumed she was in familiar territory.

    Various kinds of mold grow on paintings, taking hold easily here because of the humidity of our seaside environment. (Credit TK)

    Generations of Cape Cod’s most definitive artworks have passed under her scalpel and magnifying glass, bringing with them the specific challenges — mold, humidity, salt, wood smoke — that the Cape imposes on local artifacts. And because Dickinson, who lives in Wellfleet, has worked on Philip Malicoat’s paintings for nearly three decades for family, private collectors, galleries, and museums, she says, “I now feel I know him personally.”

    But while she is intimately familiar with Malicoat’s smaller paintings, Dickinson discovered that the condition of these larger works presented challenges she hadn’t encountered before in his work.

    Malicoat was a seminal player among a wave of young art students who, in the late 1920s, inspired by painter Charles Webster Hawthorne’s expertise, attitude on life, and exotic choice of residence, followed him to Provincetown.

    Although caught in the throes of the Great Depression, Provincetown held a rich confluence of advantages for artists like Malicoat. This village of Portuguese fishing families, not yet too alarmed by a growing influx of strangers, offered an intimate, self-made community, a dramatic natural beauty ready to inform one’s imagery, and, being at the edge of the continent, a remoteness that invited freedom from cultural conventions.

    Malicoat, along with other artists, stayed on, developing their artwork, raising families, and becoming enmeshed in the fabric of the town.

    Decades later, the studio where Dickinson is restoring his paintings has become a labyrinth of pathways narrowed by stacks of canvases as big as small sails.

    In the 1960s and ’70s, when most of Malicoat’s bigger pictures were painted, artists regularly used commercially manufactured materials of varying quality and chemical components, which accelerated their deterioration.

    “I’ve worked on paintings from the 1500s that were sturdier than the early paintings from the Provincetown school,” Dickinson says. In earlier times, paints were hand-crafted with pure minerals and fewer mysterious ingredients.

    She discovered pigments in the larger paintings — not commonly used in Malicoat’s smaller pieces — that were causing a whitish haze to bloom on parts of a painting’s surfaces. She knew this was created by “fatty acid exudates,” which over time get chemically drawn up from within the paint to the surface, creating a fogging effect on darker colors.

    Dickinson tracked down a colleague in Europe who had been involved in a successful rescue of a large body of badly deteriorated paintings by Edvard Munch. Because his works had been stored and neglected for years at Munch’s old studio in a small coastal town south of Oslo, the paintings had been subjected to physical, chemical, and environmental exposures nearly identical to those found in Provincetown — and had suffered similar effects.

    A conservative approach, and the right solvents — “some common ones used to correct a problem can actually make it worse,” she says, would need to be deployed.

    With 13 canvases in her care, Dickinson retouched over 1,000 tiny holes burned into the paint by spider and fly excretions and tackled plenty of embedded Cape Cod mold. This was exacting work, as various molds respond differently to different cleaning agents, with multiple species sometimes growing on the same painting.

    In the end, Dickinson’s treatment plan focused at least as much on protecting the pieces from future decay as it did on bringing back as much of the paintings’ vibrancy and depth as possible.

    The solution suits Dickinson just fine. Her goal, she says, has always been to both conserve and restore the works she is entrusted with, honoring natural changes time has added while slowing down its more destructive effects — to strike a balance between the two.

    ARTISTS

    For Christine Niles, Bigger Isn’t Better

    Capturing Provincetown’s light in small paintings

    By

    Christine Niles’s narrative challenges the myth, mostly believed by nonartists, that artists are born and not made. “I always enjoyed the arts, but I didn’t feel myself drawn to them at a young age,” says the Provincetown painter. She credits her life as an artist to a combination of nature and nurture.

    Niles grew up in Lexington, a leafy bedroom community west of Boston. A broad introduction to both fine arts and crafts along with a progressive education served young Niles well. “In the ’70s, we had kits: paint by numbers, build this, create this,” she recalls. “I had art in school; it was part of our education. It was just part of life to make things.”

    Christine Niles in her Provincetown studio. (Photos by John Greiner-Ferris)

    Instead of attending the town’s highly regarded public schools, Niles studied at private schools — Belmont Day School, Buckingham Browne & Nichols, and the High Mowing School, a Waldorf school in New Hampshire. “I felt very disconnected from Lexington,” she says. “Lexington was where our house was, but I didn’t spend a lot of time there.”

    After a year at a liberal arts college feeling no sense of direction, she transferred to the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, now part of UMass Dartmouth. “My boyfriend at the time went there and said, ‘This is a really cool place. Why don’t you come here?’ ” Niles says. “I know a lot of people spent their high school years building portfolios geared to art school and I just happened into it, but I think it worked to my advantage. I was totally open-minded, admitting I didn’t know what I was doing. There were definitely people who entered art school with an idea of being an artist and this is how to do it, and they were less open to learning something new.”

    Her first experience with oil painting was “messy and difficult,” she says, “but thinking back on it, my paintings were OK. I persevered.” At Swain, Niles became fascinated by color theory, which also excited her when she first visited Provincetown 15 years ago. She witnessed firsthand the celebrated “Cape light” and its effect on landscape painting. She was especially moved by the sight of the “warm sun on the cool water.”

    Lights Like Fireflies is an 18-by-24-inch oil on canvas by Niles.

    Niles had never been to Provincetown before she and her husband, Charles Nichols, started dating. “I was blown away,” she says. “It was seeing all the galleries and painting that made me go home and take out my paints again.” They began planning Cape vacations around workshops Niles wanted to take.

    Niles and Nichols, who serves as deacon at St. Mary of the Harbor Episcopal Church, moved to Provincetown three years ago. Niles had been working in a hospital, and even before the Covid pandemic saw, through her patients, how quickly a person’s life can change. Upon moving to Provincetown, she immersed herself in her painting.

    The walls of the couple’s East End house are covered, salon-style, with paintings by Cape artists — Charles Hawthorne, Hilda Neily, Chet Jones. As a visitor climbs the stairs up to Niles’s third-floor studio, Nichols pokes his head out from his study to say hello and joke that one requirement for their house was plenty of wall space to accommodate their art collection.

    The studio is orderly. Two easels and a work table hog the light overflowing from the north-facing window. Finished work covers the walls and works in progress sit in neat piles. Charles Hawthorne and Impressionist Light, a two-day workshop Niles will be teaching at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum in June, is on her mind.

    The Land at Rest is a 16-by-20-inch oil on board by Christine Niles.

    Niles’s works are small — no larger than 18 by 24 inches. There are a couple of reasons for this: for many years, she didn’t have a studio, and she also works in plein air as much as she can. “I have a real appreciation for small compositions, and I don’t necessarily think bigger is better,” she says. “There’s something about the preciousness of a small painting, and if you made it larger it just wouldn’t work.”

    Niles is represented by kmoe gallery in Provincetown. She tries to price her work so that the average person coming over on the ferry can afford it. “I remember when I first started collecting art, and not just posters,” she says. “It’s really expensive, but it’s really special.

    “I don’t feel in competition with the other artists; it’s more of a conversation,” Niles continues. “The opportunities that have happened for me here, I didn’t seek them out — they just have fallen in my lap. Someone will say, ‘My friend’s a gallerist, why don’t you show your work?’ or ‘They need teachers at PAAM, why don’t you apply?’ I don’t think that would have happened anywhere else but here.”

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