A wine-sipping squirrel, a night-watchman mouse and an owl both crowned and collared with moths were among the 12 new paintings in Saturday’s annual one-woman show by Margot Datz at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury.
For Ms. Datz, who does not have a website or gallery of her own, the one-day August show is when she meets fans, re-connects with friends and sells her latest original work, as well as prints of her popular images. For Ms. Datz’s fans and collectors, it’s a chance to greet the artist and potentially purchase a new painting.
But this year was different, and not only because everyone was masked. For the first time in the history of her long-running annual show, Ms. Datz offered her new paintings for sale ahead of the event—and sold 11 of the 12 before Saturday arrived.
“This is the first time I ever pre-sold,” said Ms. Datz, who used Facebook and email to reach customers she feared might not make it to the August show.
“To some people, it was a disappointment,” she told the Gazette Sunday. “So I’m digging in, and I’m going for another show before Thanksgiving.”
Ms. Datz painted all of the work in Saturday’s show during the pandemic shutdown earlier this year, after returning from a midwinter trip to the Caribbean island of Nevis. Taken together, her personable woodland creatures, forest scenes and magic-inflected portraits seemed all to inhabit a single imaginary world.
“I’m coming from this place of using nature as metaphor, and each year the show is what’s on my mind that year emotionally,” she said. “It turns into these natural metaphors and allegories.”
Ms. Datz took the title of her show, Into the Bewilderness, from her painting that depicts a young girl carrying a torch along a darkly wooded path.
“This year, what I was really feeling is that we’re in this fairy tale,” she said. “Usually in the fairy tale, things are going along just fine and then something goes really wrong and that is where the story begins—there enters magic.”
The paintings are set in antique frames that she collects for up to a year before each August show.
“I hunt and hunt for beautiful frames all winter,” said Ms. Datz, who takes each frame as part of her inspiration for the painting it will contain.
Her favorites are the Black Forest style frames, made of dark wood with heavily carved designs such as the grapevines that surround the squirrelly Bacchus in her painting Elderberry Wine. But she casts a wide net, also collecting simpler frames of wood, cloth-bound reliquaries and a handsome Art Nouveau frame that sets off her portrait of a wood duck. The owls and moths in Eyes in the Night gaze out from an exquisite setting of Iriquois beadwork.
Among these creatures of earth and air — some fancifully adorned, and others attired simply in their native plumage — Ms. Datz also showed a pair of portraits in the style of 16th-century artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
A Man of the Sea is made up of seashells and crustacean parts while Flora — the only painting unsold on Saturday — is a lady of flowers and vegetables, with flowing green pea shoots for hair and a frame with sculptured fruits. Ms. Datz also accepts commissions to create similar portraits of actual people.
While she’s not ready yet to name the theme for her second 2020 show, Ms. Datz said she plans to create more small paintings like many of those in Into the BeWilderment.
“The thing about a little painting is, you can find a place for it,” she said. “A bigger painting is more of a commitment, but a little painting you can tuck into a nook or cranny.”
She will continue to use her personal Facebook profile to keep fans and friends apprised of her plans, said Ms. Datz, who had not had a strong presence online until the pandemic took hold. Now, she said, she’s interacting on social media every day.
“Sharing my work has been very touching, because I spend a tremendous amount of time alone,” she said. “I had no idea that people liked my work so much. This is a nice surprise for me.”
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