The Silas-Kenyon Gallery
At
THE SCHOOLHOUSE CENTER
Presents

POLLY BURNELL
ROB DUTOIT
KATHI SMITH
PAUL STOPFORTH
PIA SCHACHTER
TOM BOLAND

New Work in the Galleries

AUGUST 9-21, 2002
RECEPTION: Friday, August 9 7-10 PM
ARTIST TALKS/ GALLERY WALK: Saturday, August 10 Noon

POLLY BURNELL "Little places to escape to" is how Burnell has described her work, their scale and vivid imagery causing reviewers to continually comment on their mapping of the erratic and saturated landscape of the subconscious mind.

Influenced by early expressionist landscape painters Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Charles Burchfield, it's only the sharp eye that can take in all of her exquisite detail at a first glance. Often, the images that one may have overlooked later surface like apparitions. Without any close inspection however, viewers and reviewers alike can carry away the sense of intimacy and personal meaning that surely accompanied the work's creation, evoking "sentiment without sentimentality". Most of the themes are recognizable, yet brought together in a way that has led Burnell to describe the work as 'irreal' (rather than surreal): "Reality once removed." These are "paintings within paintings"; the canvases worked and reworked until their story is told. Bringing still glistening paintings into the gallery, Burnell will often comment: "This one needs a little more work, I think." Showing in galleries since the 1980s, her process-oriented approach to painting continues to evolve, and her latest works reflect this development.

By Denise Bilbao



ROB DUTOIT exhibits work exploring two main themes. In terms of "landscape", his subject for almost 25 years, Dutoit has been interested lately more in intimacy and less in the grand view. We see him drawn to shrubs, grasses, and the spaces within the trees where he finds a freedom not bound by traditional concerns with the earth-sky relationship. In some ways these new images are similar to the popular "wave" paintings which allow for a less grounded execution. They also tie in with Dutoit’s interest in Chinese painting and calligraphy.

The other theme is more about internal images than those made from direct observation. These are either abstract flowing lines or symbolic images from dreams, thought emotions. There is nothing conceptual here - the work is very physical and intuitive - mostly done with sumi ink on paper, cardboard, or over printed text.

KATHI SMITH ~ Provincetown Printmaker Kathi Smith was born in Washington, D.C. and schooled in Maryland and Colorado. Her childhood was spent in Provincetown with her grandmother Ferol Sibley Warten, who taught her White Line Printing. The “American”, or White Line Print was developed in Provincetown in 1915 by a small group of women (and one man) who had returned from Europe as WW1 was starting. War also removed them from previous Japanese and European influences and demanded a reduction in materials, resulting in the single block method. Smith is esteemed in this tradition for her technical accomplishment, color sense, and ability to handle beauty as an artistic tool.

"Concerned with a sense of time and place, my work is representational, based on forms in nature and the feelings engendered by the place and the context in which it was seen. Color and spatial relationships intertwine to develop the feeling of the moment. Almost, but not quite, realistic rendering relies on the use of flattened planes of color juxtaposed with the skeletal structure of the white lines defining the space. The floral images and the landscapes of the earlier works reflect the natural, organic movement of the living object in a particular place, at a particular moment in time. Flattened planes are expanded and realism becomes more abstracted in the later works which rely more on the emotional overtones of surrounding circumstances and interpretation of time and place. The moment continues to excite me. To capture it is the biggest and most rewarding challenge presented to me. To push the work beyond the traditional boundaries of the genre has become my life’s work."

 

PAUL STOPFORTH: The slow and subtle accumulations of visual and visceral information from a rich and diverse range of sources continue to shadow and inform the work of Paul Stopforth. The graphic intelligence of Leger; the linear playfulness of Debuffet; the interlocking rythmns of Hindu temple sculpture; the dynamic compositions and color of African textiles; the radical distortions of the human body in the work of Francis Bacon and the sheer beauty of Ndebele wall paintings are all embedded in the vitality and scale of Paul Stopforth's new
body of work.

These large-scale drawn paintings and smaller mixed media sculptures contain a powerful visual sensibility in which spatial ambiguity, surface, texture, rhythm, color and fragments of the human figure interweave and interact. These images and objects hover in the space between abstraction and figuration, their meaning lies in the immediacy of our perception of them and the energies they generate in the spaces they occupy.

A large drawing titled " End of Empire" will be executed directly onto one of the walls in the gallery.

 

PIA SCHACHTER: Artist Pia Schachter’s new work includes memorable
mixed-media pieces exploring hope, sadness and faith with her characteristic wit and sympathy.

TEARS II
Twenty-four glass bottles with tear-dropper tops stand in a Plexiglas case. Within each bottle lurks a ghostly cut-out photo of a crying person. The weeping characters are photographed television images.

“Tears II is part of a series focusing on crying and the storage of tears”, says Schachter.

The Tears series originated from a story, or half-remembered dream, from Pia’s childhood. A crotchety old wizard spent years collecting the tears of fair maidens. Falling in love with one of the lasses, (played in young Pia’s mind by Britt Eckland). So heart- broken was the old man that drank the entire bottle of his beloved’s salty sadness. The curmudgeonly sorcerer died from absorbing all of her sorrow.

“Sadness will prevail in moments of sentiment,” says Schachter.

THE PROMISE BEAUTY BOOTH
Playing off the fraudulent guarantees foisted by cosmetic companies on their needy customers - and her own experience as a beauty writer - Pia displays an authentic cosmetic counter touting her signature line, The Promise.

In this piece bottles filled with photographs of movie stars line the shelves. Each makes a product claim. Elizabeth Taylor's picture adorns “Prettier Than Her”. “White’s” copy is particularly provocative: “Get a raise. Get a cab. Get served first. Get ahead...with White” – as Whitney Houston's face smiles through the plastic.

“I spent ten years writing a magazine column called ‘Beauty and Truth’, which tried to expose the scams of cosmetic companies selling hope in a jar. I learned that people want the promise. Knowing that it was false and they were getting ripped off didn’t matter. It was all about that momentary high where the lie helped Band-Aid life’s blows. ‘The Promise’ cosmetic counter illustrates how much we need to believe in something,” says Schachter.

Before one can focus on the details of the beauty booth, the eye is seized by the bright red words that hang above it. “Santa is Real”, they proclaim.

‘SANTA IS REAL’ is a childhood prayer that Schachter has said over and over, right into adult life. She uses her adolescent mantra to illustrate further our need to believe in something, be it Jesus, America, rock and roll or the power that can come from self-care.

Twenty-four picture tags hang from key rings on a white pegboard. Each tag shows a small color photograph of a young man. Each person is identified by a metal label tacked to the board, and stamped with an imagined first name. The picture tags bear a small, personal promise penciled on their reverse. Two examples: "I would trust you with the car", or "I would listen to your music and try to hear what you hear."

Schachter explains: "I gave an infant son up for adoption when I was fourteen. For years afterward, I would wander through crowds, like at the rock concert where I took these photos, wondering whether each young lad I saw could be him. I would ask myself whether I would trust him enough to let him into my heart, or to give him the keys to my house. Later, when I finally met my son, I learned I had been right: he had been at many of the concerts where I had looked for his familiar face; our age so close it was like seeking a younger brother. The tags remind me of the I.D. labels that mothers put on their sons’ belongings before sending them off to camp. The same kind of thing happens to all of us in crowds. Some call it the hunt, where you scan the crowd, one after the other, looking for whatever it is you seek, your dream lover, a long-lost pal or your next best friend."

 

TOM BOLAND: When Tom Boland looks at a piece of furniture he doesn’t just see a dresser, a cabinet or a desk, often he sees an opportunity for expression. A background in historic preservation might do that for you, that and a deep appreciation for the authority of nature on Cape Cod. These are the primary ingredients in Boland’s decorative painted furniture, and out of the cramped chaos of his garage studio on a tiny dirt lane in Provincetown, emerges sundry furniture that is as unique as your own fingerprint.

“What really inspired me initially into all this was when I moved here and we bought our house, we had a table from the ‘40s that was done by Peter Hunt,” Boland says from his home. “I would sit there and look at it and thought that I’d like to give that a try. My style is very different from his but I think that was a major inspiration for all this. Then I started out with furniture as a refinisher and restorer and that segued into trying some painted techniques. Now I pretty much do the painting exclusively as opposed to the refinishing. A lot of the pieces I get are vintage or antique pieces that are in rough shape and it’s not uncommon for me to change some elements of them - add moldings or feet - that kind of thing."

A simple secretary desk becomes a work of art after Tom Boland paints it with flowers, vines, and other gifts from Mother Nature. Boland’s process for furniture selection is varied, but he likes to find pieces that have good structure to begin with, such as a recent desk he finished where he painted older scenes of Cape Cod in the panels.

Originally form Connecticut, Boland received a master’s degree in historic preservation and objects conservation, a field he has been working in professionally for over a dozen years.

 

 

 

The Schoolhouse Center is located at 494 Commercial Street in Provincetown’s East End Gallery District. For information or to interview the artists please contact Michael Carroll at 508.487.4800 X 105 or check our web site at www.schoolhousecenter.com