Provincetown, MA, Berta Walker Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of three major exhibitions, Friday, July 9 - Sunday, July 25, with a reception Friday, July 9, 7 - 9 PM.
Hans Hofmann (1880-1996) Sketching Along the Way
ink & color drawings
Peter Watts Spirit in Light
recent paintings
Dusk to Dawn
Group exhibition of paintings, sculpture, African & folk art
HANS HOFMANN (1880-1966)
Sketching Along the Road to Provincetown
Its beautiful here and my car runs magnificently and is in very good shape. I have the greatest kick flying over the hills and dunes. My old horse that goes over the Cape oh, its a wonderful old horse, better I think than a new and young one. Its a little symbol of myself. I feel pretty young in it. Lillian Keisler,
letters from Hans Hofmann, on the occasion of Hans Hofmann: Retrospective Exhibition, Whitney Museum, June 1990.
Back in 1930, when Hans Hofmann arrived in America, he discovered a newfound freedom in the American experience of the automobile. Almost immediately, his pen became rambunctious and liberated in his newfound joy of experiencing travel to the Cape. For more than a decade, on highways and back roads, the car served as Hofmanns studio on wheels. These drawings, made en route to -- and in -- Provincetown between 1930 and 1943, are markedly different from his drawings done just a few years earlier in Europe. Viewers are invited to participate in the views experienced by Hofmann as we look through the car window, over the drivers wheel, through to the land and sea. Whether painting still lifes from behind the wheel of his car, in his converted barn studio or painting en plein air in the surrounding dunes, Hofmanns ecstatic gaze spontaneously encompassed everything around him. These small works reveal the magnitude of his vision, his ability, as Frank Stella has written, to fuse the action of painting and drawing into a single, immediate gesture....
Hans Hofmann is one of the most important figures in the history of postwar American art. He changed the face of American art right here in Provincetown, where he spent his summers as teacher and painter from 1935 until his death in 1966, helping create the largest and longest running art colony in America, starting over 100 years ago with Charles W. Hawthorne. Provincetown still shelters hundreds of artists from across the Country
In 2008, Provincetown Art Association and Museum presented Hofmann and His Students, curated by artist Donald Beal, focusing primarily on drawings from the Metropolitan Museums permanent collection. A few of those students -- Paul Resika, Selina Trieff, Robert Henry, Brenda Horowitz -- are still active in Provincetown today and are sought after in the galleries by major collectors, and in the many art schools in Provincetown and Truro by emerging artists seeking to study with them.
Berta Walker Gallery is pleased to have connected to the Hofmann Foundation several years ago, reintroducing Hofmanns then unknown Provincetown drawings and paintings to Provincetown audiences. The Foundation has since been incredibly generous in helping to fund the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and Fine Arts Work Center. Since that initial introduction of Hofmanns Provincetown paintings and works on paper, this particular body of work has become highly sought after all over the world, and are now increasingly difficult to obtain
PETER WATTS
Spirit of Light
PETER WATTS has lived a life experienced deeply in nature, ensconced in the vine-covered woods of summer and the snowy, star-lit skies of winter. He lives deep in the woods of the Cape Cod National Seashore. I am surrounded by trees. He bikes daily and observes Natures forms and patterns: the filigree of tree branches against the sky, the play of light on the ground in the midst of a pine forest, the curl of a wave as it lands on the beach.
Watts has spent most of his adult artistic life developing a deep understanding of the landscape he has lived in and painted for decades creating his own personal iconography in his painting. At one time, notes Watts, I was more interested in the landscape itself. Now, I look at how an abstract element of a landscape feels. Watts does not painstakingly reproduce an image, but develops a personal vision of it drawn from his impressions of the environment around him.
For Watts, these images are part of the larger fabric of Nature. I am interested in Natures changing patterns and the patterns that repeat themselves. Ripples in the sand at low tide are like the ripples of a clam shell. Interlocking branches in a grove of locust trees are like a forest of deer antlers. These patterns also relate to Watts view of the world through the lens of botanical archaeology. A riot of lilacs deep in the woods is the marker of where a home once stood. A pine needle and moss lined pit is the old cellar. A stand of pines on top of a knoll is a former pasture returned to seed, surrounded by the oak forests that will one day conquer it. History gives me ideas.
Watts does not just search for lost history in nature, he also envisions its future. He represents Wellfleet on the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Council and has worked for years with the Seashore and the town on the Herring River Restoration Project. He imagines the serpentine streams of the tidal flats returning, weaving through the marsh grass in infinitely various repeating patterns. These patterns recur in his studies of the deep forest at different times of day and night. They recur in the undulations of the ocean and the plant life in the forested dunes.Watts will often do a series of paintings, one small and one large, and leapfrog between them, exploring technique to develop effects and colors in larger and smaller ways. It is a very satisfying system of working. Sometimes it ruins a painting and sometimes the elaboration of patterns becomes quite abstract.
Peter Watts first came to Cape Cod as a student of Laforce Bailey in 1954. Living at first in Provincetown and working at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Watts moved to Wellfleet in 1970, bringing his young bride, painter Gloria Nardin. In 1978, he joined the Board of the Fine Arts Work Center, and in 1980 he became a Trustee of PAAM on which he still serves. The public will be treated to a major career survey of Peter Watts art opening September 24 November 14, 2010 at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.
Next Exhibitions, JULY 30 - AUGUST 15: EDWARD HOPPER (1882-1967), Early Impressions, pencil & ink drawings; VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN, Humor Seriously, new constructions and collage; PAUL RESIKA, three mini shows: Recent paintings; The Monument Series completed in Provincetown in 1989-92, and receiving its Provincetown Premiere in honor of the 100th Anniversary of the completion of the Pilgrim Memorial Monument honoring the Mayflower Pilgrims who arrived in Provincetown in 1620 prior to moving on to Plymouth; and a selection of ink and pencil drawings focused on a variety Provincetown subjects.
FURTHER INFORMATION & photos, please contact Sky Power, Director, Berta Walker Gallery, 508-487-6411
PHOTOS OF THE GALLERY EXHIBITION
DUSK TO DAWN
PETER WATTS
HANS HOFMANN
