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about our artists . . .

GEORGIA M. COXE

Roses

Color Photographs

          “The bee and I have something in common!” photographer Georgia Coxe exclaims.  Her up-close and personal color photographs of luscious, in-full-bloom roses, are taken so close that “occasionally pollen dusts my lens,” she shares.  

          Georgia O’Keeffe once commented that “nobody sees a flower, really – it is so small…”  Remarkably, like O’Keeffe, Georgia Coxe has taken the time to really see these roses, “exploring the blossom like a landscape, seeing each individual rose as possessing an “inherent mysticism of composition, colors, tones and textures.”   Carefully choosing each individual rose as a painter would choose her model (and these textures are sensuous, fleshy, even corporeal), Coxe invites the viewer to see a flower as they have never been seen before.  “Rose Rise III” (12 x 18”) is particularly startling!   Here Coxe presents a large dramatic pink coral rose, so perfect, it glows like a heavenly archetype as it appears to sit on a blue sky horizon line, effectually transforming this luscious flowery form into a mountain (or cave, or conch shell) on a surrealist plane.  Coxe creates magic here, and all with her ability to shape compositions that transform one natural entity into another, what she might refer to as her “mysticism of composition.”    

          With an old Pentax 35 mm in hand, shooting in daylight and using full negatives, Coxes arranges her hothouse roses in  diptychs, triptychs, and polyptychs.  As she says, “although they’re grown to look the same, each one has their quirks, ruffles that are really different when you look closely at them.  It is what the rose presents to me.  They are landscapes with design elements.   One petal may corkscrew into another; others don’t.”   Coxe squeezes, refracts her composition., intensifying the power and energy of a blossom’s core.   This exhibition marks her first “rose show,” and reveals that Coxe, like O’Keeffe,  recognizes  the inherent mysticism of penetrating a flower’s center. 

      Growing up in a family of artists, Coxe studied photography with Eugene Smith at Indiana University, attended Sarah Lawrence College, the John Herron Art School in Indianapolis, and the Philadelphia Museum School.  She has been a working photographer since the age of sixteen, when she had her own darkroom.

     Georgia M. Coxe is the mother of three, and  grandmother of three. She moved to Provincetown year ‘round in 1977.  She serves on committees at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, is a member of the Provincetown  Art Commission,  and a participant in the Visual Artists Cooperative.

NANCY CRAIG

Epic paintings

The New York Times has described Craig's work as "intensely and incredibly joyous," and she has been called "the best American portrait painter since Eakins and Sargent."

"A talent like hers only happens once in a generation."  Hans Hofmann

 "She has the most evident natural talent for drawing that I've ever seen."  George Grosz.

  Nancy Craig returns to Berta Walker Gallery with a selection of epic paintings focusing on liberty, Apollo emerging from the fires of 9/11, and new Renaissance Dream paintings.

Whether Nancy Craig is painting a great, tumultuous Amazon battle or a magnificent shell absolutely still on a deep blue ground, she paints with enormous strength and passion, capturing in her paintings the ultimate emotional charge.  She enters into painting full force, as if the act of painting itself were another world, and the art she makes a tale of creation.   Craig pursues several different series simultaneously.  A recent series presents figures on horses or musicians and dancers on the beach, juxtaposed surrealistically with magnificent shells, almost trompe-l’oeil in appearance.  For years, she has painted large epic themes, often shocking and violent, based on the great Greek myths, Amazon battles, abductions of virgins, Cronus eating his children.  She is interested, she says, in extreme states. . .the shell magnificent in its extreme stillness...the battle -- bloody, chaotic, the huge canvas straining with the aggressive energy of violent encounter. "I like subject matter that's either violent and shocking like childbirth or rich and traditional like nudes and abductions."  

Craig paints from imagination, often beginning with poses recorded in her sketchbooks over the years.  Many of her subjects are taken from Greek myth or the Renaissance iconography of such painters as Titian or Raphael. She is attracted to these epic themes, she says, because "the Greek myths embody extreme universal truths --"

Another ongoing series Craig calls “Renaissance Dream” paintings refers to the astonishing mystery and visual play of one-point perspective, first explored by early Renaissance painters.

  For Craig, painting is an active, physically exciting activity.  The paint is loosely applied wet on wet. The figures emerge from fantastic, dream-like backgrounds to dominate the foreground with vigorous action.   Craig has lived and worked in Truro for 30 years, going out into the world, as necessary, to complete portrait commissions.  She is, in fact, an internationally renowned portraitist and has painted royalty and celebrity clients around the world.  This talent as a portrait painter has provided a means of support for her, and that most desirable condition for the artist, the freedom to paint without concern for the business of art.  There have been extended sojourns in Europe.  Craig and her husband lived in Spain throughout much of the 70's and early 80's, while she painted many portraits.

Craig attended a very progressive school as a child, a school developed on the Dewey system, where she was encouraged to express herself and her talents.  She remembers often going to the art room for entire afternoons, drawing and painting.  Even then she painted huge, rearing horses, bigger than life size.  Later she attended Sweetbriar College in Virginia and Bennington in Vermont.  At Bennington she was told it was her destiny to be a sculptor, but "all I ever really wanted to do was paint," she says. "I could always draw.  It was like breathing for me. But I needed to learn the technique of painting -- underpainting and glazes, these things."  She studied at the Art Students League in New York and the Academie Julien in Paris. She was a student of Edwin Dickinson, Hans Hofmann, and Frederic Taubes.

At 26, Nancy Craig won the most important American prize for figurative painting: $3000 First, Benjamin Altman Figure Prize of the National Academy of Design. In those early years, she exhibited her work often and won many prizes. In the 60's, she exhibited at the influential Graham Gallery in New York. For Craig, the praise came too easily, and she felt a kind of an imposter in the art world.  She needed the challenge of anonymity to develop.  So she stopped exhibiting and secluded herself on Cape Cod., finally starting to exhibit again in 2000 with the Berta Walker Gallery.

Craig's paintings are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Baltimore Museum, the New Britain (CT) Art Institute, among others.  She was awarded the First Benjamin Altman Figure Prize from the National Academy of Design; Gold Medal, Allied Artists; Ranger Fund Purchase, National Academy of Design; Mary E. Karasick Portrait Prize, National Association of Women Artists; Julien F. Detmer Award for best oil painting, Hudson Valley Show, and many others honors and prizes.

Craig's portraits of note include: Frank Lloyd Wright, Tyrone Power, Angelica Huston, Cliff Robertson, the Duke of Argyll, Norman Mailer, Princess Marie Luise of Prussia, Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Forbes, George Abbot, Hans Hofmann, Irwin Shaw, John Ringling North, Princess Pimpinela Honenlohe, Paul Cadmus, Prince Alexander Romanoff, Edwin Dickinson, Guinness Plunket, Marqués and Marquesa de Portago, among others.

ERNA PARTOLL

“Harmonics”

color ink drawings

  ERNA PARTOLL’s work has been described  by art historian Dr. Emily Farnham as possessing “an unusual sense of monumental expression”.  In her latest work, 9” x 9” colored ink drawings on paper, Partoll explains she’s introduced even “more air, more space” into compositions that read like brilliant color and musical improvisations.   Starting with her recurrent circle as her “sustained tone”, Partoll’s abstract compositions expand and vibrate with portals, waves, architectural structures, simplified repeating symbols of rhythmic light and color.  In an article by Eileen Kennedy in CapeArtsReview, Kennedy writes;  “Partoll works in a series with deep jewel-colored inks and black line, creating highly geometric and curvilinear abstract “landscapes” very reminiscent of American  modernist Arthur Dove….Through portals, arches, and waves, her  compositions read like the visual score of a jazz work, re-inventing beats, intervals, and scales like a Miles Davis classic.”  The small works remind one of the grand scale paintings achieved by Sonia and Robert Delaunay, with a playfulness likened to Paul Klee.

Lee Elliott wrote in the Provincetown Banner, “this series of small abstract watercolors possesses a synergistic energy of high color, suggesting things starting, being and bursting.  Each of these ink drawings has its own meditative beginning which swells by use of shapes and colors.”  And Stuard Derrick wrote in Provincetown Magazine “The work of Erna Partoll is immediately recognizable:  her electric, luminescent images of orbs, waves, portals, arches, suns moons mountains and pathways are rendered in the boldest palette of colors imaginable.”

Partoll was born in St. Gallen, Switzerland.  She has been studying art from a very early age: “When I was a little kid, instead of going to Sunday school, I’d go to the museum and look at paintings.”  She attended art classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule St. Gallen and has lived and worked in Zurich, Paris (where she studied at the Sorbonne), London, Montreal, Toronto, and New York.  She supported herself as a trilingual  translator and  interpreter.  She immigrated to the U.S. in 1960.  For the past 27 years she has lived and painted in Provincetown. Throughout  the 1960s she took classes at the Art Students League in New York City, studying with Howard Trafton, Will Barnett and, for three years, with Theodoros Stamos.  She feels that it was Stamos who affected her work the most primarily because of his use of color.  Partoll is very active in the Provincetown community and currently serves on the Provincetown Art Commission.

“Women Hold Up the Sky” for HOW

a group exhibition by or about Women, to benefit HOW (HELPING OUR WOMEN).

The Berta Walker Gallery is pleased to sponsor an exciting group exhibition to celebrate HOW’s incredible story of supporting the needs of women from Provincetown to Eastham. The exhibition is intended to help bring HOW’s  services and needs to the awareness of more residents on the Outer Cape while celebrating such an amazing small group doing large work.  25% of the Gallery’s profits of sales made in this group exhibition will be donated to HOW to help support their stipend program. The exhibition will include gallery and invited artists represented by paintings, works on paper, sculpture; African bronzes and beaded sculpture; Mexican sculpture, even a rare tapestry by Agnes Weinrich. Additional works to be included will be by  Janice Redman, Mary Cecil Allen, Ione Gaul Walker, Sue Fuller, Karen Harding, Dorothy Gregory, Dana McCannell, Mary Kass, to name a few.  The diversity of the exhibition is intended to represent diversity of HOW's clients and support base in the Community.

HELPING OUR WOMEN

HOW! Helping Our Women.  HOW?  Through Honesty, Openness, Willingness (the old adage prescribed by all 12-Step Programs for supporting a return to a better, healthier life.)  And these, too, are the goals of Helping Our Women, a small town group with big city energy working in support of all women from Eastham to Provincetown suffering from chronic and life threatening illnesses. Spearheaded by Director Irene Rabinowitz and her hard-working Board of Directors, there’s an incredible team of volunteers  who drive to medical appointments, provide companionship & coordinate local fundraisers. The great accomplishments of HOW are achieved quietly, confidentially, and without fanfair, accomplished primarily through love and compassion.

         An  Endowment Campaign is currently being planned to help assure the future of HOW, since it’s annual operating budget is raised through special events such as dances, bike treks, dinners,  the Annual “Swim for Life” entrepreneured by Jay Critchley, and individual donations.

HOW was established in 1992 in response to the lack of services available to women with life threatening illnesses on the Outer Cape.   This year over 175 people suffering from heart disease, diabetes, AIDS, Lyme, emphysema, asthma, multiple schlerosis, cancer, took advantage of services provided by HOW.   Over 100 women are receiving monthly stipends.  The needs are increasing, and thus, a wider support group is also needed.  

 A reception to celebrate Georgia Coxe, Nancy Craig, Erna Partoll, as well as the exhibiting artists in the HOW show, and the Board, clients and volunteers of HOW will take place Friday, July 14, 7 – 9 pm.