LAURA SHABOTT: “Artist and Model” paintings, collage, drawings
BERT YARBOROUGH: ”Signals” large-scale paintings, constructions, acrylics
NANCY WHORF 1930-2009: “Love Affair with Provincetown” paintings
Reception Sunday, May 12, 2023 5-7pm
Bert Yarborough, Load Loaded, 2023 mixed media 72 x 60 in
LAURA SHABOTT
“Artist and Model”, paintings and collage
Laura Shabott has indeed broken through from small drawings and paintings to an “installation” painting 142” H x 72” W. Viewing this painting, we’ll start at the ceiling and work down to the floor. Entitled After Rousseau’s The Jungle, this exquisite installation piece employs three predominant elements – color, scale, and space – all approached with wildly varying materials.
After Rousseau’s The Jungle was made at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, in intermittent Returning Residencies over two years. It is made with one floor size piece of canvas sewn with painted canvas pieces, painted, and drawn using pigments sticks. She says “I had bought a blanket of canvas and used the entire piece. It was exhilarating to work on a piece so big that the figure is larger than life. Inspired by Rousseau’s relationship to nature, a man wades through a field of giant flowers,massive legs immersed in tulips, with a crown made of sunflowers.
"I am exceptionally grateful to Kevin McLaughlin of McLaughlin1889, who generously collaborated with me to help finish the piece in his fourth-generation custom upholstery studio in Everett, Massachusetts."
Additional art in this exhibition includes a selection of vibrant gouache paintings inspired by the relationship between the artist and the model that explores color and mood. In counterpoint, there are monochromatic mixed media collage works on linen using repurposed original drawings, thread, staples and paint and select charcoal figure drawings. “Laura Shabott makes paintings, drawings, and collages responding to the natural world – humans, flora, and fauna – with boldness, strength, and originality," notes Berta Walker. "And I’m continually impressed with her courage and originality in constantly stretching through new materials and sizes, subjects.”
A graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at TUFTS, Shabott knew she was an artist when she went into the Yale Art Gallery for the first time at eight years old, spending her school years studying art through observation. Emily Mergel wrote in Artscope Magazine “Shabott continually draws inspiration from abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann and breaks forms into their most evocative essentials…She seizes the opportunity to burst the gallery walls, speaking with intentional gesture in visual vocabulary all her own.”
Her paintings, collage and drawings have been exhibited regionally with solo, juried and invitational shows at Berta Walker Gallery, Provincetown; Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, MA; Ely Center for Contemporary Arts, New Haven, CT; Four Eleven Gallery, Provincetown; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, (PAAM); Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Truro, and her work is in the permanent collection at PAAM.
BERT YARBOROUGH
“SIGNALS”recent paintings, constructions, and gouaches
Bert Yarborough joined the Berta Walker Gallery last season with a spectacular exhibition of paintings completed over the past ten years. “My paintings are an amalgam of influences which could be referred to as "ritual layering.” Many paintings speak to primal shapes such as cave structures, mountains and large ancient stones known as Sarsen, (eg. the stones used to create Stonehenge).” The new paintings in this exhibition continue his explorative reach, revealing continuing clarity through his expressive brush and rich color. "They exude celebration with a spiritual underlying from ancient voices," notes Berta Walker.
This exhibition includes five new paintings, and selections from two earlier series: one, collaged constructions, completed in 2011-12, and the other, a group of gouaches created in the Provincelands more recently.
"The artist’s journey through artistic transitions, each an epiphany, are themselves a kind of ritual layering of nature and culture” observed Lee Roscoe in “Artscope Magazine”. “Dramatic and haunting…(Yarborough’s paintings) are a set of bold manifestations of the internal landscape of the mind and soul, created through abstract and figurative renditions of the ritualized external natural world.“
Yarborough starts painting loosely with an initial coat of reactive dyes and continues to build, often with the incorporation of collage, gouache, Flashe, inks, and/or watercolor. “My good fortune to be able to work, and for three summers in the 80’s LIVE in a dune shack in the Provincelands, served as the foundation for my work, providing me with the visual language extracted from the natural world that I continue to explore and expand upon. Art historian Ann Wilson Lloyd notes that “the raw primacy of nature, it’s irrepressible, tangled essence, come through in a way that proves Yarborough’s meditative time spent on the dunes (is) still very connected to his work — but now transcended as a source, rather than as an arbitrary setting.”
Bert Yarborough’s new paintings constitute a synthesis of over 40 years of drawing, painting and constructing sculpture in the dunes, forests and beaches initially in the Provincelands National Seashore, as a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship recipient for two years,1976-1978, expanded later through a Fulbright year in Nigeria and extended visits and Fellowships in Italy from 2014-20. They represents a process of experimentation, growth and visual maturation expressed through symbolic, narrative and abstract qualities. "The accumulation of these experiences was critical to my understanding of the ritualization of objects and the visual power this process creates”, said Yarborough. The paintings in this exhibition — Conductor, Vault and SIGNS, gods… speak to this realization.
NANCY WHORF
"Love Affair with Provincetown” paintings
NANCY WHORF was one of the first artists to join Berta Walker Gallery when we opened in 1990, "becoming a frequent exhibitor and special friend," say Walker. Whorf has been heralded for her passionate palette of vibrant, expansive Provincetown scenes. Her many views of the town, the narrow streets, the harbor and boats, snowy walks, hidden gardens, sunsets and storms are a testament to her love of this storied seaside town where she grew up.
In 2001, on the occasion of her huge one-person exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Nancy Whorf was honored by the Town’s Selectmen who presented her with a certificate that designated Nancy Whorf “Whorf of Provincetown”, reflecting the European tradition of referring to an artist for the Town whose soul they recorded and loved, much like Van Gogh of Arles or Antonea of Messina.
Whorf's philosophy of painting is a reflection of her way of living: “The world goes around, some things change; some things stay the same; community matters; nature is true.” In some ways, Whorf has created a kind of visual memoir, for behind many of the paintings is a memory. Her eye focuses on the place she knew as a child and young woman - the busy life centered around the wharves when Provincetown was a vital fishing center. She says the work is "thoughtful and sentimental." But Whorf doesn’t ignore the sometimes harsh reality of living by the land and the sea. These are not just pretty landscapes. The extraordinary beauty of Whorf’s work is magnified by the truth she tells. Provincetown is an emotional and visual place for Whorf. In an interview with Suzanne Horoschak, Whorf said: "You feel, as a painter, that you have something to say. You understate it, overstate it. You have to have a certain philosophy about life and living and, for me, the wonder of it all. Cornball as this all may sound, it's marvelous and wonderful -- the seasons, the elements, and our interplay with them....I'm not making a political statement because it doesn't make any difference in the scheme of things. A plant or a storm, those are important, but the rest of it --it's all part of the highway of life. I paint what I feel has magic to it."
Whorf has continued throughout her career to develop her expressive, emotional, abstracted content through both subject and technique. Towards the end of her life, Whorf commented: "I know Provincetown. There's a lot of information here. I think I got better at saying more with less. I wanted to simplify, to suggest. That's what I like about the palette knife. It's easier to suggest." Over time, Whorf refined her knife stroke to the merest twist of line, the touch of color, to express the mood, to suggest the whole world of Provincetown. The viewer is struck by the truth of place; but in the end, Whorf's work is really all about the paint. The rich, saturated color, the flick of the painting knife - she is a master.