BERT YARBOROUGH
Ecologies: Paintings and works on paper created over the past ten years.
GILBERT FRANKLIN (1919-2004)
The Bridge Series: Paintings created from 1982-2000
BERTA WALKER GALLERY
Reception Friday, July 29, 6 - 8 PM
Berta Walker Gallery is proud to introduce Bert Yarborough’s “Ecologies” - paintings and works on paper created over the past ten years - opening July 29 and continuing through August 20, 2022. While this is Yarborough’s first one-person exhibition with the Berta Walker Gallery, he has participated in many group exhibitions with the well-known artists’ cooperative, artSTRAND Gallery. We are excited to show his new work, having known and admired his varied art career since his arrival in Provincetown on a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship in 1976.
Yarborough refers to his current work as “Ecologies” because the work “creates that type of physical environment.” In a recent article in ArtScope Magazine, Yarborough’s work was described as “Dramatic and haunting…a set of bold manifestations of the internal landscape of the mind and soul.“ What emerges from Yarborough’s paintings is an amalgam of influences he refers to as “ritual layering.” ArtScope notes his “artistic transitions, each an epiphany, are themselves a kind of ritual layering of nature and culture."
The current work evolved during a long and exploratory creative career which started with studying and teaching in architecture and photography and led to his fellowship with FAWC. During his fellowship Yarborough experimented with conceptual art and installation art on the Provincetown dunes, as well as studio painting. Art historian Ann Wilson Lloyd observes that “the raw primacy of nature, its irrepressible, tangled essence, comes through in a way that proves Yarborough’s meditative time spent on the dunes [is] still very connected to his work.” When Yarborough opened his studio to the Berta Walker Gallery this spring, we were amazed and excited to discover what he has been working on. We saw that through his earlier focus on creating more figurative paintings, many en plein air, he discovered a new fluidity and applied it to new colorful abstract patterning, reflected in these rambunctious yet meditative paintings. As Katherine Hart of the Hood Museum wrote for Yarborough’s Provincetown Art Association and Museum exhibition in 2009, “Yarborough’s work contains an honesty and immediacy, and a courage, rarely seen in paintings by his contemporaries. There is no cynical overlay of appropriation or sly allusions to art that came before. These paintings represent a truly original expression -- a raw energy and authenticity that is truly unique to this creator/artist.”
"For many years I had researched and viewed African and Oceanic objects in numerous exhibitions and collections,” says Yarborough. “I looked for a way to create a transition from working with the material I used outdoors, to bringing them into interior spaces… I felt I needed to go to the source of the richest carving tradition, exemplified by the Yoruba people of Nigeria. I applied for and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship Grant in sculpture to live and work in Nigeria and study traditional Yoruba carving with the prominent fourth-generation carver Lamidi Fakeye. While there I experienced delays waiting to buy wood for carving, finding transportation, or making appointments. During these times I painted on paper and drew, completing hundreds of works which I brought back home. These works encompassed everything I saw and absorbed: color, iconic form and image, pattern, and ritual layering. The irony of this incredible year of experience is that I went to Nigeria to study carving but returned a painter.”
In 2018, after Yarborough’s retirement from academia, he was awarded a Visual Arts Residency Fellowship to Civitella Ranieri in Umbria which expanded on three earlier visits to Italy. "I was exposed to work only previously admired in texts and I discovered new avenues of exploration, absorbing color, form, and surface, deeply inspired by Italian frescoes, paintings, architecture, and textures.” Ann Wilson Lloyd describes Yarborough’s continuing experiential syntheses: “The effect is one of eternal subjugation to the natural rhythms of the universe.”
Bert Yarborough, Sarsen with Clouds, 2022, Mixed media, 60 x 48”
Gilbert Franklin (1919-2004)The Bridge Series Paintings created from 1982-2000 Gilbert Franklin is widely known for his sensitive and powerful sculptures in bronze, marble, and wood. Following a busy career that included many sold-out shows at Kanegis Gallery in Boston, numerous large-scale public works commissioned - including Sea Forms installed in front of the Wellfleet Public Library - and teaching and administrative positions at the Rhode Island School of Design, in 1983 Franklin retired to live full time in Wellfleet.
At that time he began a series of studies in oil on canvas of his natural surroundings: sky, land, water, and light. The focus of his exuberant investigations was the Lieutenant Island Bridge. He walked there daily from his house to watch the sun fall behind the island. While the sun moves through its seasonal positions, the waters of Loagy Bay also change as they rise and fall around the pilings of the bridge. At the highest tide, the bridge is nearly submerged and yields a mirror image in sunset-hued water.
To capture this reliable and yet infinitely variable vastness, Franklin employed a wide range of styles including naturalism, expressionism, and abstraction. He overpainted and gouged and pasted the paint in layers of heavy impasto and marked the structure with charcoal line drawing. It was a fierce and liberated approach. Now, forty years since Franklin began creating these images, the Lieutenant Island Bridge has become a well-loved and much frequented iconic symbol of the tranquility and isolation of the Outer Cape.
GILBERT FRANKLIN (1919-2004) was born in England and grew up in Attleboro, Massachusetts. He came to Provincetown in 1938 to study with John Frazier at the old Hawthorne School. He always thought of Provincetown as a fascinating place, saying "I think it's a place of freedom: People can do what they like, mostly, and other people let them do it." Franklin's father was a jeweler and so Franklin was exposed to metalworking tools at a very young age. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design and continued his studies at the Museo Nacional in Mexico City and the American Academy in Rome.
Art writer Lynn Stanley wrote, "Touring Gilbert Franklin's studio of finished pieces and wax forms in progress a restrained elegance and simplicity of line were evident everywhere. The features of each face were nondescript, the forms stylized; one had the sense of the archetypal body moving in time, not confined to the specifics of identity."
Gilbert Franklin, Bridge, 1994, Oil on canvas, 20 x 24”