Nantucket Arts Buzz

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.

Art by Rives (l) and Rosen (r) occupy a corner Off-Shore...

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?

What happened to the dino?

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.

The Nantucket Film Festival finished its fifteenth year of movies and programming, and the quality continues to hold steady.  Fred Strype, the 2008 winner of Showtime’s Tony Cox Award for screenwriting, told me that though he has attended many of the world’s festivals, this one has quickly become his favorite. And not just because it focuses on the writing. He calls it intimate and intense.

I didn’t see my usual bundle of films, but the one’s I saw were excellent.

“The Concert” (Le Concert) was perhaps my favorite…in French and Russian with English subs, the film follows the charming misadventures of Andreï Filipov, “The Maëstro” whoses Bolshoi career was broken by the Brezhnev Communists, as he tries to reconstruct his old orchestra with virtuoso violinist Anne-Marie Jacquet to secretly perform a Tchaikovsky concerto in Paris, the very piece that 3 decades earlier cost him his career and the life of his lead violin–Jacquet’s Jewish mother. Funny, emotionally powerful, filled with sublime music. “The Concert” has it all.

A pair of documentaries revealed a sad reality inside mainland China when you overlap their content. “Last Train Home” focuses on a single family that stood in for the 130 million migrant workers within China’s borders, all of whom go home once a year for New Year’s. The parents worked in a large sewing sweat shop, while the children lived in the country with their grandparents. The ever-present Chinese propaganda machine proclaims the need for top grades and a top-flight education so that youth can escape this fate, but the family relations were so weighted down by these pressures that the kids weren’t going any further. The second film, “Summer Pasture,” was set among the nomads of Tibet, incorporated into China since the 1950s. The nomadic life on the plateaus is very hard, but the rewards are obvious. Yet Chinese propaganda pushes into reality here as well, enticing families to give up and move to the cities to get a better education for their children. Only when you consider it in the light of the first movie does “Summer Pasture” embody a tragic quandry, for the ethnic Tibetan children struggle to learn Chinese and have little chance of getting beyond the squalid conditions of the sweat shops of “Last Train Home” even if they are gifted.

Also seen–”Winter’s Bone,” an excellent indie film written and directed by the 2002 Cox Award winner. Don’t miss Jennifer Lawrence’s knockout performance as an Ozarks hill-country teen fighting to keep her family together. And “Heartbreaker,” a French romantic comedy about a trio who break up relationships as a profession. Inventive enough to overcome its predictable ending, this is a sweet, lively confection.

What did you see?

It certainly looks like the tower of the Unitarian Meeting House — here seen through the brick gas and electric buildings downtown — was taken over by Christo and Jeanne-Claude as one of their wrapped environmental art works . . .

Accidental art

The weather is seasonable and the bugs are minimal (for now). A perfect time for en plein air painting. Here are some photos from a recent painting trip I took to Great Point/Coskata with island artists Vince Calarco, Ed Rudd, and Billy McLane, along with visiting painter Lenny M.

Lightship Basket car

I found this vehicle, a SmartCar, parked near the White Elephant. Someone paid good money for truly special detailing, and the theme is soooo Nantucket. There is no way that a commercially available painting job could be so specific in the imagery, yet the paint job probably involves a transfer process rather than an individual painter. Have you seen the Lightship Basket car? Someone provided the imagery. Someone worked it out to fit on this model car. If the painting involves a commercial process, is it art? Is the idea the art?