The Silas-Kenyon Gallery
At
THE SCHOOLHOUSE CENTER
Presents

MARK ADAMS
RAMON ALCOLEA
TIM ARNOLD
SUSAN LYMAN
RAPHAEL NOZ
JASON SEDER

New Work in the Galleries

October 4 - 16, 2002
RECEPTION: Friday, October 4 6-9 PM

MARK ADAMS current interests are mapping landscape and the body through watercolor, drawing, printmaking and photography. The traditions of Japanese and Chinese landscape painting inspire Adams with their direct and spontaneous response to nature. Adams enjoys the simplicity of brush and ink, the spareness of drawing that gives him the space to move freely - splashing ink onto blank paper, leaving indelible marks. The thrill is physical: movement, gesture, follow-through. The shapes left by a loaded brush speak back from the page with a life of their own. As a scientist Adams has a great respect for hard facts, but as an artist he lets the brush lead the way.

For this exhibition Mark Adams will present images that consider “the two kinds of blue found in nature: the pigment in the petals of an iris and the structural blue in the feathers of a jay.” He starts by painting what he sees: the clarity of a blue eye. When asked why he is interested enough in the color blue to paint a show of it, Adams says, “Blue is the color of memory - like a Cyanotype: seductive, comforting and poisonous. In the 18th century the invention of synthetic indigo made the trip to the "Indies" unnecessary and spawned an insatiable demand for blue silk ball gowns, the color of wealth. There is also the deep blue water world off the continental shelf. Once I swam out from an island and suddenly, dizzyingly, I was engulfed in dark silent blue as the bottom dropped away to negative infinity.”

Simple marks signify the monumental. Splashing color onto paper is the equivalent of thrusting your hands into the dirt, spilling handfulls. Peter Hutchison asks, who really could claim to be an action painter after all? There's a zen story I'm trying to remember about a master brush painter summoned to create a temple screen. He ground ink for weeks while the monks watched expectantly, growing impatient as the season passed to autumn. Then suddenly, as they had all turned to the sky at the passing of a flock of geese, the master laid down five strokes and was finished.

 

RAMON ALCOLEA presents new work called " Hearts of Provincetown". For this show he is using Provincetown not only for inspiration - but also actually using the physical parts of Provincetown to create the work. Driftwood from the beach, Linoleum from old houses, Hardware from the dump, old wood from building sites have been found and gathered. They become the materials used to create pieces that are more than the putting together of objects. In his skilled hands inside the artist’s studio Alcolea’s new work is a blending of different worlds.

 

TIM ARNOLD presents new work including drawings and paintings on paper and masonite, each 4”x 4”. The pieces embody without illustrating, the natural processes at work around us. They concern light, form, and pattern without depicting an actual thing or place or time and seek to explore the essential vitality of life and non-life. Arnold lives in Truro and finds the Cape’s tidal zones and estuaries deliciously rich for scrutiny.

He lists influences as Kandinsky, Dove, Pousette-Dart, Morandi, and Winters (among others). He is also influenced by the scientists Capra, Dawkins, Lovelock, Margulis, and Wilson, and the philosophers Bronowski, Searle, and Singer.

 

SUSAN LYMAN makes sculpture where inspiration and subject are inseparable from the source materials themselves. She finds the materials (a twisted root, vine, or sapling) on the beach, or deliberately gathers them from the woods or at the tree dump at Ducky Noon’s “pit” in North Truro. Friends also have given her materials. Without a sketch or preconceived idea, Lyman carves and assembles the pieces until she identifies some sense of body, gesture, emotion. She then compresses or stacks the fragments into small solid forms that reveal only a memory of their shape in nature, or a simple gestural detail of their former identity as a sculpture.

Susan Lyman, sculptor and painter, has been a resident of the Outer Cape since receiving a Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 1981. She is represented in Provincetown by the Silas-Kenyon Gallery, and in San Francisco, by Gregory Lind Gallery. Ms. Lyman is the recipient of fellowships from the Artists’ Foundation of Massachusetts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She has exhibited her work for over 25 years in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, and abroad in Japan and New Zealand.

 

RAPHAEL NOZ returns to Provincetown with new paintings on metal. The recent work continues an interest in Colonial Mexico, and Wedgwood china.

Cut metal shapes of tureens, ladles, tea cups and pitchers float and dance
on the wall with images from Colonial paintings appearing on them. The
effect is a combination of quaint domestic stillness fused with rich autumnal somber and sadness. A bit absurd, somewhat musical, these pieces drip with sadness and nostalgia. Using shapes evoking found-object scraps or high classical dinner serving sets, the work marries refinement and crudeness, like an elegent grand dame with a grotesque nose.

Also on view is a collection of small metal "pages": reproductions of Wedgwood design shapes from catalogues dating to 1774. The designs are scratched onto dark blue backgrounds to create a reverse-etching effect.

 

JASON SEDER is a painter of emptiness and yearning, but of desire happy with itself, the transport of art and the transport of the highway, full of possibilities and at the same time, with no possibilities left. Someone once said that to desire something is to have as much of it as you will ever have. It looks like it’s always winter in Western Pennsylvania, or the anywhere and everywhere America which these paintings also look like. This is why people leave these places and become artists isn’t it. So, these pictures are eventually about the big city. About the safety of a lot of people around all the time. It’s about the lack of the terrifying horizon. The side of the road mirrors our way out too uncomfortably. We came here to... [New York, Chicago, San Francisco] to get away from this and we paint it and write about it. Still fascinated by it, the fragmented landscapes of an uncaring nature, of Pennsylvania, Indiana or Oregon. The quality of these paintings center in this emotional mood that is not specifically named, but that is too specifically felt by exiles and deserters, by artists and other searchers.

—Rodney Phillips

 

 

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