Pathways Arts staffers had to break out extra chairs Sunday afternoon to accommodate the audience for a talk by two young abstract artists, Islander Walker T. Roman and Brooklyn resident Kristin Texeira, whose works are displayed at the Chilmark gallery and gathering place this month.
Close to 40 people turned out in person for the hybrid event, which was also streamed online, with Ms. Texeira joining from New York while Mr. Roman spoke directly to the group in the gallery.
Classmates at the Massachusetts College of Art, the two painters have followed very different aesthetic paths since graduating more than a decade ago. In her small oils on paper, Ms. Texeira uses precise lines, simple curves and lustrous colors to explore concepts of time and memory. Her work at Pathways also adds language to the mix, with painted words and jotted narratives.
Mr. Roman leans more to the gestural, often creating large, dynamic works. After art school, he said, he had learned how to look at paintings and how to discuss them — but “I didn’t exactly know how to make them yet.”
On Sunday, Mr. Roman shared some of his evolution as an artist. In addition to the paintings displayed in the gallery, he showed the audience slides of other art — not only his own, but key works that have influenced him. Philip Guston’s ominous The Deluge (1969), J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840) and Franz Klein’s Buttress (1956) have all made their mark on Mr. Roman as he developed an artistic language that honors both his abstract-expressionist influences and his origins as an Islander.
He also saluted the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, with their abstract forms and compelling paint.
“There’s something elusive about them that I’m always after,” Mr. Roman said.
Returning to the Vineyard, where he grew up, as an emerging artist, Mr. Roman faced a challenge he called “trepidation over being a landscape painter, and especially a regional one.”
But his works like Great Pond Study (2021) and Dolphin Painting (2019) apply a refreshing energy to Island themes. The latter, centering a single Steamship Authority dolphin — the reinforced timber bumpers that help guide ferries into their slips — at sunrise, Mr. Roman described as “something that looks like a Brutalist sculpture hanging out in the middle of our harbor.”
By comparison, a slide of Mr. Roman’s 2016 painting Departure — a white and black steamship glimpsed through a hulking, black bridge-like shape — is more transitional, suggesting an artist still balancing his abstract and representational impulses.
“”I couldn’t just paint it straight,” he said. “This black form in the foreground reminded me of a Tony Smith sculpture.”
The Pathways show also includes a series of works by Mr. Roman in acrylic, polymer and graphite that gleam like brushed and burnished steel.
One element in their painting that Mr. Roman and Ms. Texeira share is the gift of light, which gleams forth from both her draftsmanlike works and his energetic pieces. Mr. Roman even mounted one of his graphite works in a frame that causes the painting to bow slightly into the room, capturing reflected light.
“They change a lot, depending on where you are in the room and the light,” he said of the series.
Curated by Tanya Augoustinos, the dual show of paintings by Mr. Roman and Ms. Texeira is open to view in person at 9 State Road, Chilmark, Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., Friday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., by appointment at 508-645-9098 and online at pathwaysmv.org.
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