Sunday, March 14, 2010
Subscribe to:
For years, Liza Abelson planned to go to medical school, but one class at Brandeis University changed her career path. "They forced you to take an art class to be well-rounded," she says. "That class (Introduction to Drawing) stopped me in my tracks, and made me reassess everything." The science maj ... Full Story
Cotuit's Anne Boucher has been known to hike through thigh-high snow, hang on to tree branches, and wade into a grey winter sea--all in an effort to create art. "About 70 percent of my work is exploring, and 30 percent is in my studio," explains Boucher, who has a gallery in West Barnstable, adjacen ... Full Story
Whale bones. Clay marbles. Fish boxes. These relics and reflections of Cape Cod's history have been transformed by artist Paul Bowen into a unique language of forms. Bowen, a consummate collector, has amassed a large collection of beach finds and has a studio full of rescued materials: driftwood, ol ... Full Story
Maureen Leavenworth is living a dream that began at age ten when she sat at a kitchen table in tiny Millville, Massachusetts taking private art lessons. An only child from nearby Blackstone, she soaked up this education in drawing and painting, just as she had her mother's sewing and cooking instruc ... Full Story
Sweeping strokes of white and gray, punctuated by stark trees and simple farm structures, capture the vast wintry solitude of the western plains in Jo Ann Ritter's painting, Big Sky. Warm fall tones of golden marsh grass and a red cranberry bog glimmer in Cape Cod Harvest. Whether capturing scenes ... Full Story
It is an artist's dream. For several weeks every other summer, Philip Koch gets to paint in Edward Hopper's Cape Cod home. Surrounded by the stunning simplicity of land, sea, and sky that brought light to Hopper's art from a small studio perched on top of a South Truro sand dune, Koch has found his ... Full Story
At 25, Marstons Mills' Jenny Kelley is a natural at capturing an intimate moment and suspending it in paint. Using her family and friends as models, she has developed a fascination with portraiture. "I look for an emotional connection with the person I am painting," says Kelley. "There is always a s ... Full Story
When Joyce Gardner Zavorskas has a day to herself, she packs her backpack with 25 pounds of paints, brushes, and other provisions. She hikes out onto the dunes, on a mission to capture a sunrise in motion, or the patterns of sweeping eel grass across the sand. Zavorskas, who lives in Orleans, loves ... Full Story
For years, painter Lance Walker made his living in technical andarchitectural drafting, drawing designs for homes and for a tool and die shop's metal products. The work required precision, an analytical eye, and patience. Although his drafting days are behind him, Walker's oil paintings demand much ... Full Story
On an open stretch of Old County Road in rural West Tisbury, there's a big red barn full of art. The Granary Gallery has showcased great works of art on Martha's Vineyard since 1954. A Kenneth Vincent original hangs next to the front door. Inside the gallery, this emerging artist's work takes up an ... Full Story
In August, Elizabeth Lockhart Taft is a green painter. In October, she's a red painter. And in spring, she is a painter of yellows and oranges. Taft is a plein air landscapist, working from remote spots she discovers around Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. She uses pure pigments and does little mixi ... Full Story
"There's a quiet drama on the Cape, which is why I like painting here," says Robert Roark, a life-long painter and co-owner of the Winstanley-Roark Fine Arts Gallery in Dennis. "I love going out after a snowstorm, when there's serenity on the Cape. Or when the sun is low in the sky, when you have th ... Full Story
Robert Frost questions the saying "Good fences make good neighbors" in his poem "Mending Wall," teasing his conjured neighbor that "to each the boulders that have fallen to each" and "My apple trees will never get across/And eat the cones under his pines." Many of the walls that sparked the poet's r ... Full Story
Implements you might not expect in a painter's workspace--toothbrushes, sewing needles, a pizza cutter, and a stack of credit cards--fill tins in Cape Cod artist Carol Odell's orderly Chatham studio. She uses these devices to manipulate paint and create patterns, textures, and layers on her large ca ... Full Story
During World War II, Frank McCoy did not find a lot of time for painting and drawing, though he did manage a few portraits of his buddies on V-mail forms bound for home. "I hadn't been to school yet, but I could draw likenesses of people," recalls McCoy, who, upon graduating from high school in Kans ... Full Story
Ellen Liman is captivated by color, by the constantly changing hues of the sea and sky that surround her island home. "I'm moved by the light and the fantastic colors in the sky and the water," she says. The diversity of her chosen mediums also reflect nature's evolving canvas. She paints still life ... Full Story
Like a lot of mothers, Judy Quinn picked up a camera when her children were young. Unlike most new camera users, though, she became engrossed with photography and has kept this passion throughout her life--she helped form a critique group that's been meeting for three decades; she has taught photogr ... Full Story
Whether it's the meandering Centerville River under a red sky or the early-morning lavender mist rising below Fort Hill, Linda Lee's work evokes a strong sense of place--an artistic accomplishment that can be years--and many miles--in the making.
For Lee, learning to interpret the Cape on canvas ca ... Full Story
For over 35 years, East Falmouth's Jane Lincoln has been capturing the essence of Cape Cod in her pastel and oil landscapes of dunes, marshes, fields, and cranberry bogs. Part of the popularity of her work has revolved around her bold use of color. More recently, however, the color itself has become ... Full Story
It's rare to find artists who look like their paintings, who somehow can transmit their own personalities to the canvas; whose paintings are about the artist's personality as much as they are about the subject. Arron Capron is one such artist.
He is a big strapping man, standing six feet, three in ... Full Story
Many artists will tell you that they were born to paint. Melanie Chartier says the same thing. Upon viewing her paintings, one might even say she was born to bring inanimate subjects to life with her art.
Chartier paints recognizable objects--seashells, corks, flowers--all things one might fi ... Full Story
Among the many things that landscape painter Robert Cardinal collects are inkwells. Scattered around his North Truro studio--among his collections of African pottery, Buddhas, antique art books, and musical instruments--are more than 100 old inkwells. Some are crystal; others are silver or brass fro ... Full Story
Alison Hall Cooley moved to Nantucket with plans to stay for six months, or a year. That was ten years ago.
"It's been a great place to develop my career," says Cooley, 36. "For a small island, it's amazing how many successful artists there are here."
After studying at Vanderbilt University and th ... Full Story
"I never thought I'd paint," says 31-year-old Hans de Castellane. As a teenager in 1995, de Castellane chose an entirely different course of study when he entered New York's Pratt Institute as a commercial design student. He says he expected his degree would end up tied to an office job where he wou ... Full Story
Walter Dorrell, owner of Wellfleet's Kendall Gallery, knows how lucky he is to be a watercolorist living in a place where nature can change in the blink of an eye. Most mornings before dawn, from April through November, Dorrell gets out of bed before the sun rises, straps his art supplies on his bac ... Full Story
Copyright © 2009 Cape Cod Life Arts Edition
