Nantucket Arts Buzz

The island’s dedicated art store, Create!, celebrated their first birthday with a chalk art contest. Over two dozen competitors filled 5 foot squares with color and imagination. The prize system was not thought out, with no age categories or family category established even though the flyer said “ages 5 to 200″. But it was great fun under the sun. And there’s a promise to continue with more chalk stuff so, hopefully with teams allowed. Sidewalk chalk competitions are catching on around the country, and bravo to Create! for starting one. Look for the event next year.

SAS in 1931, Maud Stumm in the middle

Founded by Maud Stumm—an illustrator who made a name drawing chic yet active women from the beginning decades of the twentieth century—the Sidewalk Art Show began in August of 1930.

The annual show required good weather, in the tradition of the “Exposition En Plein Air” Stumm had seen when she studied in Paris, and it became a cementing force for the local arts community. Artists from all walks of life were welcome in the outdoor exhibition—including popular figures like Colonel Yates and Robert Perrin—and they developed a casual camaraderie that for many fostered tight friendships. Stumm herself was close to several students of art instructor Frank Swift Chase, and they helped with the logistics of the show: Anne Ramsdell Congdon, Rae Carpenter, Emily Hoffmeier. Several participants would become founders of the Artists Association of Nantucket, the oldest arts organization on island and arguably the cul­mination of the art colony that blossomed in the 1920s the way similar associations in Woodstock and Provincetown solidified those places into bona fide arts hubs.

Upon Stumm’s untimely death in 1935, Hoffmeier took over the organization of the event until 1952. Hoffmeier’s assistant, William Price, managed the SAS until he handed it over to the AAN in 1960. The association officially hosted it at several downtown locations until this arts tradition faded in the mid-1980s. The Sidewalk Art Show restarted in 2006 after two decades of inactivity and has quickly become a fixture again.

This year’s first Sidewalk Show was in May, and the second is August 13^th.

Many painting instructors claim that you have to learn how to draw in order to get where you want with a paintbrush. To a great extent that rings true. Even if you work in abstraction, you must draw in paint or into the paint.

I propose this corollary…that you need to sometimes paint “en plein air” in order to understand the landscape. To understand what paint can do to bring the spirit of the scene to the forefront of your composition. Painting from a photograph is okay for getting the basics sketched onto the canvas, but copying a photograph is a futile exercise without that experience on location. Is it a windy spot, like most on Nantucket tend to be? What wildlife haunts the locale? Where does the light shift to in the afternoon? You can’t get that info from a photo, even one in the highest of definitions. Plein air sketching also tends to give you more character. You simplify the excess of detail and get to the heart of the subject. You work harder at capturing the place, instead of letting the lens capture it for you.

This spring, get out and sketch on the moors and the beaches, paint by the ponds and the marshes. Even if you prefer working inside, the experience will inform what you create.

‘En plein air’ means ‘in the open air’ in French, and this phrase was first coined for the work of impressionist painters, who ventured out of the studio so they could paint the shifting properties of light.

Hipstamatic History

Take two brothers in a Wisconsin lake cabin, add some art student savvy, dash in an obsession for the revolutionary Instamatic camera, and bingo, you have the legendary Hipstamatic camera. Legendary? Yes. Bruce and Winston Dorbowski built a plastic camera with switchable lenses in 1982, and sold it through a local electronics store for $8. The hitch. The brothers produced only 156 or 157 (depending what account you find) before a drunk driver nailed their car in 1984 and ended their lives. Truly a rare item, even in the world of camera collectors, the Hipstamatic was forgotten. That is until their older brother Richard set up a blog about the little wonder and his “crazy hippie’ brothers. The site grew popular enough to peak the interest of a few software designers. They pitched an idea to Richard Dorbowski and bingo, again bingo, this leads to the Hipstamatic iPhone app that has started a truly crazy retro-photographic revolution. The various old-time filters which change the results from your iPhone (and now iPad, soon the Android phones) camera are now sought after by professional photographers as well as the average user. Soft imagery, odd coloration, rough edges, bright saturation. Hipstaprints offer an immediate, snapshot appeal. Check out Dr. Greg Hinson’s facebook page or his blog here on Nantucket.net. Talk to Daniel Sutherland. Bump into Russ Wieland in Marine Lumber, he’ll preach the good word on Hipstamatic. Lauri Robertson has a Hipstamatic collage up at the Student/Faculty show of the AAN until April 16. It’s an art form for everyone. The above is a HipPrint I took of my granddaughter, Chloe.

If you’ve been on or near the Whale Island section of Tuckernuck, you’re probably familiar with the flotsam beach sculpture that has grown over the last years. The wind and waves have taken their toll, but it seems to survive. If you’ve driven from Berkeley to San Francisco along the shore you can’t miss the structures in the marshlands, made out of stuff washed into the marsh. Folks there have made a true artform of people’s sculpture. Now a new one has cropped up in a much more accessible and protected location for us, the inside of Smith Point (before where the cut has relinked to Esther’s Island). My hope is that this flotsam construct will survive and grow, and that means people have to add to it when passing by. There’s plenty of stuff washing up on the beaches, even some jetsam thrown off of boats, so join in. Make something haphazardly lovely while recycling. Make art out of life.

Saturday night saw the opening of another selection by a collective of Nantucket artists that call themselves Off-Shore Art. Though the collective boasts other members, the core of this dynamic exhibition goes to Leilani DeMatteo, Theresa Hadley, Jane Hilst, Barbara Rives, and Rachel Rosen. The barn studio at 19 York Street was lit like a traditional display space, and the presentation was impeccable. I must admit it reminded me of the (x) Gallery, which began when a loose collective of anti-establishment artists were offered a Main Street location for a single summer and turned the experience into a decade as a cooperative gallery that changed the face of Nantucket art in the 1990s. Will Off-Shore Art be as influential? Only time can tell. Yet I feel that the collective is certainly as essential, especially if it represents artists who are working together to advance their understanding of the processes of fine art. Like the (x), their internal dialogue should define them. Instead of being defined by any conscious stance outside the mainstream of a local gallery scene. It will be interesting to follow to them.

In April I posted a note on a Daffodil weekend tradition–the erection of a life-sized scene of animals in the Serengeti along Sconset road. Much later someone added a dinosaur in their midst as a prank…a finely detailed one at that. The dino has disappeared. When is it coming back?

Art demonstrations in the spirit of Bob Perrin have been revived. At 19 Washington Street, a block closer to town than where Perrin performed his signature demos of watercolor, Ed Rudd made a 2-hour demonstration look smooth and sweet last Wednesday. I’m posting a sequence of 3 photos of Ed painting a house painter on a ladder, but first I’ll profile Perrin, an icon of the Nantucket art scene.

C. Robert Perrin  (1915-1999)

A graduate of the Art Institute of Boston, Perrin first painted here in 1946. His painting studio on Old South Wharf evolved into the first active gallery on the wharf in 1956, and by 1966 he’d moved permanently to Washington Street where he established a summer tradition of Wednesday evening demonstrations of his watercolors. Originally an illustrator by trade, he used his inventive nature to illustrate island children’s books (remember Whopper or Nancy Tucket?) and posters that were among the first to advertise the island. As reported in American Artist magazine in 1959, he converted a VW bus into a plein air studio on wheels. Perrin favored Payne’s Gray for his watercolors of puddles and fog imagery and ghosts, and when the premier maker of watercolors announced it was discontinuing the color, he lobbied successfully for its continuation. He remained active in the arts community here for 5 decades. (great photo above by Beverly Hall)

Top: Ed begins laying in washes; middle: getting in detail; bottom: the nearly finished watercolor in hand

Look for news on upcoming Perrin Night demonstrations by Joan Albaugh and Julija Mostykanova in August…

So these muggy oppressive heat wave days are keeping you off the streets and on the beaches, right? But you have to find other summery things to do. I suggest museum hopping. In particular I recommend two small museums with a tight yet artful focus for 2010.

The theme for this summer’s main exhibition at the Lightship Basket Museum is “From Folk Art to Fine Art,” and the show mixes historical work with modern basketry and scrimshaw, with a delightful emphasis on the fine art directions that these local crafts have taken in the modern era. A pure example is a carved scrimshaw piece in the big glass case at the middle of the main exhibition room. It’s a smallish power boat with all the fine details, including fish on the deck, wrought in ivory from Nancy Chase’s long-collected archives. Nancy explained to me that it’s her boat, her dream…a prime display of Nancy’s ability to turn a craft tradition into something purely sculptural. It’s a knock out that created a buzz at the opening reception for the show.

The theme for this summer’s cross-establishment exhibition between the Shipwreck Museum and the Egan Maritime Institute at the Coffin School is “Sea Dogs.! Great Tails of the Sea.” The exhibit is built on a portion of a traveling exhibition from Mystic Seaport, and the local flavor that has been added, especially at the Coffin School, is delightful. Original art that illustrated a series of sea dog children’s books is intermingled with great island photos of boats and their four-legged first mates. The book’s illustrator attended the exhibition kick off and commented in an aside that the combination added zest that she hadn’t seen at other locations for Sea Dogs! Much fun for kids and adults.

Beat the heat with some art. Lay low in a niche museum when the UV index is so high.

Find Nancy's boat...

Viewing dog art

The Farmers and Artisans Market is a beehive of activity almost every Saturday morning, located on the side streets and the intersection between our downtown post office and the Starlight Theatre. Soap, coffee, flowers, baked goods, fresh vegetables—a variety of homemade and home grown goods are available. The secret to our little beehive is in the number of artists involved. Fine artists with etchings and paintings, artisan jewelers, ceramicists, knitters, loom weavers, etc. You can go away with something exquisite and unique. This is surely the basic, unfettered version of the “buy local” phenomenon that has swept places like Portland, Oregon. Only in other locales both the slogan and the reality have been co-opted for political means. Here you don’t get sledged with party line, or shaken down for personal data for a mailing list, or caught in the green headlines. Which makes it a simple pleasure to stroll between the tables for a sunny hour and talk about…. Well, just talk.

Textile artist Sharlene Rudd seeks the shade.