BERTA WALKER GALLERY

208 Bradford Street Provincetown MA 02657
p 508-487-6411 c 941-350-7135 f 508-487-8794 bertawalker@bertawalkergallery.com

Opening Friday, July 11 July 27
NANCY ELLEN CRAIG paintings and large drawings
ERNA PARTOLL paintings
DONALD BEAL paintings
DOUGLAS CULHANE mixed media sculpture
FOR PHOTOS PLEASE GO TO OUR MEDIA WEBSITE bertawalkergallery.com/media

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or,please contact Sky Power, Managing Director of the Gallery 508 487-6411

NANCY ELLEN CRAIG
Renaissance Dream series
paintings and drawings

For more than forty years, Nancy Craig has been a celebrated portraitist, commissioned by some of the most illustrious families of America and Europe. But her portrait work, while important, allows her to pursue other passions. On view in the latest show are some of those passions, Craigs oils and drawings. Like Degas, she says with a smile, je suis n饠ࠤessiner. She was born to draw. Ive kept sketchbooks all my life. I started in a group New York and kept doing them when I was in Paris and Madrid. She continues to sketch from life and keeps her notebooks as a source of idea and inspiration. Figures long lost in the pages will suddenly leap out to her and appear in her new drawings, returned from oblivion.

Craig calls her works Renaissance Dream Drawings. They contain elements of structured architecture and Mannerist figures within a dreamlike space. Patterned floorspace and architectural follies recede into an infinite distance. A modern eye sees something of the computer age in the irresistible geometry, while a Classicist may think of Brunelleschis discovery of linear perspective in the Italian Renaissance. I love math and geometry. And in these drawings I am able to combine that design with naturalistic figures. People and animals appear, sometimes active, sometimes in stasis: horses, cheetahs, acrobats contorting themselves into tortured shapes. The viewer is pulled into the vastness and locked inside. There is a haunting calm over the scenes reminiscent of the pre-Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. It is the art of experience translated onto paper and canvas with rigid lines and swirling arabesques and Craig is the master conjurer.
Craig has won a number of awards, including the Benjamin Altman Figure Prize of the National Academy of Design at the age of 26, the Allied Artists Gold Medal, the Audubon Artists Patrons Prize, the National Association of Women Artists Mary E. Karasick Portrait Prize, and the Julien F. Detmer Award for Best Oil, among others. She has had solo shows at the Grand Central Galleries, the Graham Gallery, and the Forbes Magazine Galleries in New York; the Merradin Gallery, London; the Lyford Cay Gallery, Nassau, Bahamas; the Wellfleet Gallery; the Galeria B鴩ca, Madrid; and Galeria Los Canos, Sotogrande, Spain. Craigs portraits of note include: Frank Lloyd Wright, Tyrone Power, Angelica Huston, Cliff Robertson, the Duke of Argyll, Norman Mailer, Princess Marie Luise of Prussia, Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Forbes, George Abbot, Hans Hofmann, Irwin Shaw, John Ringling North, Princess Piminella Hohenlohe, Paul Cadmus, Prince Alexander Romanoff, Edwin Dickinson, Guinness Plunket, Marqu鳠and Marquesa de Portago, among others.

DONALD BEAL
paintings

Donald Beal digs deep into the canvas in his search for form and color. I am non-object oriented. In the early phases of a painting, its about building space, building relations. I am not going for a particular subject, but let the brushwork suggest a space and then the space becomes the subject. Beal layers color and often turns the canvas sideways or upside down. The forms shift. The perspective is altered. The shape bubbles up from the subconscious and becomes the strident green of summer leaves or the burnt red bark of a fallen tree trunk. The form reveals itself as the planes of color shift and deepen.
Beals inspiration has tended toward images of his family home in DownEast Maine, which he has painted from memory. A cove is bordered by forest with a small red boat in the foreground that anchors the canvas. The strokes of paint are lush and heavy. The colors are laid in thick bands that break the painting into abstracted elements of water, forest and sky. A tree trunk juts violently through a canvas blurring the foliage behind it while a bird, a grebe or a loon, sits quietly holding a fish in its mouth. The forest is impenetrable. The tree trunk dominates the canvas and brings the eye down toward the bird, a surprise that draws the viewer in. A waterlily is near its feet. The revelations appear as if in a flash amid Beals layered and textured canvases. And they comprise the wonder of Beals work.
Beal studied at the Swain School of Design, the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Brooklyn College and at Parsons School of Design where he worked with Paul Resika and Leland Bell. He has had solo exhibitions at the Prince Street Gallery, New York (2003), Rising Tide Gallery, Provincetown (1996), Gallery Matrix, Provincetown (1993-1995), Hopkins Gallery, Wellfleet (1989-1992), and the Julie Heller Gallery, Provincetown (1991). He has participated in group shows at the Cherrystone Gallery, Wellfleet (1999, 2002), Maurice Arlos Fine Arts, New York (2001), Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown (2000, 2001), The Painting Center, New York (1999), the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (1999, 1997, 1987), the Winifsky Gallery, Salem, MA (1995), the Hillyer Gallery, Northampton, MA (1994), Gallery X, New Bedford, MA (1992), and the Packard Gallery, Provincetown (1988). He has been on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts, North Dartmouth since 1999.

DOUGLAS CULHANE
mixed media sculpture

In a virtual world, Douglas Culhane is concerned with the sphere of touch. His sculptures of steel, wood and stone invite the viewer to contemplate their physicality. His work features orbs of rusticated wood or cages on wheels filled with mysterious objects including steel hooks, disks and wooden balls. It is a vocabulary of inert force that is separate from the viewer yet invites engagement. The work does not require the viewer, but makes demands of him or her that are irresistible. It is this response fraught with perplexity and anxiety that Culhane strives for, what he refers to as the blur of experience that elicits ambiguities. I want my work, he continues, to engage the space of the viewer. The object must create the space around it.
Culhane did not arrive at sculpture late in his education. I always had a lifelong intent to be a sculptor. Culhane experimented in everything from bronze casting to stone and wood carving to welding. His intellectual interests are equally diverse. His work brings together a synthesis of his education in nature and the sciences: paleontology, archaeology, anthropology. These are disciplines, Culhane explains, where objects speak. As a paleontologist, you find a fossil and you ask it questions. I work from the opposite direction. The viewer is presented with an object that asks questions of them.
Culhanes work is also sourced from the environment around him. He has worked as a welder in New York City. The nature and structure of steel construction in that environment drew him to use steel in his work. Equally, he explains, the forests that he seeks out provide inspiration. Wood is both a material for sculpture and its subject, and provides a way into the natural world from which most people have distanced themselves. Since I live in the woods, there is a natural interest in wood and its properties and opportunities. The combinations are intriguing and visceral. One cannot contemplate Culhanes work without experiencing the temptation of touchto touch the object or to be touched by it. That is the contradiction of my work. The work is very interior, but since they are objects, they are in the exterior world as well.
Culhane divides his time between Cape Cod and upstate New York. He has been featured in a solo show at Amherst College (2005) and in group shows at the Berta Walker Gallery (2007, 2006, 2005, 2003), Muscarelle Museum of Art (2005), DNA Gallery (2003), The Educational Alliance (2002), Claire Beaumont, New York, NY (2000), Between the Bridges, Fulton Landing, New York, NY (1998), SoHo Arts Festival (1996) and Dowling College (1994). He has received awards from the Outer Cape Artists in Residence Coalition, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Lake George Arts Project, Yaddo, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and The MacDowell Colony for the Arts.
ERNA PARTOLL
paintings