NEWS
November, 2011: Recently completed portraits of Budd Hopkins, Tabitha Vevers, Cherie Mittenthal, Dan Richter, Jim Stone, Chris McCarthy,Kim Kettler & family. Working on portraits of Paul Resika, Blair Resika,Jane Leavy, Barbara Cohen,Tom Watson, Francie Randolph, Morton Dean, and Ruth Reichl.
ABOUT
I arrived in Provincetown in 1970, when I was twenty-five, welcomed by older artists and writers, many of whom became my friends. Over the years, in addition to making art and exhibiting on the Outer Cape and elsewhere, I have served as a Trustee and Officer of the Provincetown Art Association & Museum, as President of the Provincetown Group Gallery, as board member of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, and as Co-founder/ Publisher / Editor of Provincetown Arts magazine.
Robert Motherwell often said that he chose to live and work in Provincetown because of the “Mediterranean light,” and because of the easy camaraderie amongst the art community. B.H. Friedman wrote, “In Provincetown everything happens in the streets and on sidewalks. In the Hamptons there are no sidewalks. Everything happens behind tall hedges.”
In 1989, after a half-lifetime of making only abstract art, I started making paintings portraying the art colony at leisure – what people do when they are not working – documenting the fabric of life in the art colony that draws people back every year.
The first painting in this series portrayed E.J. Kahn, Jr. (veteran New Yorker writer) and Palmer Williams (Executive Producer of Sixty Minutes) playing backgammon outdoors on the edge of the National Seashore – in positions reminiscent of Cezanne’s “The Card Players.” The painting is 6 x 5 feet.
Since then I have made over 160 paintings in this series of notable talents such as Norman Mailer, Robert Motherwell, Stanley Kunitz, Alan Dugan, Douglas Heubler, Justin Kaplan, Joel Meyerowitz, Annie Dillard, Mark Strand, Sebastian Junger, Alec Wilkinson, Varujan Boghosian, Michael Mazur, Mischa Richter, Al Jaffee, Lee Falk, Elise Asher, Anne Bernays, Alice Brock. The dimensions of most pieces are either 60 x 43 inches or 40 x 30 inches.
I envision continuing this series for the rest of my days, thereby creating a unique documentation of life in one of the world’s most interesting art colonies
