A Persian cat in stately regalia, a hummingbird poised amid honeysuckle and a beret-wearing beaver are among 12 new paintings in Island artist Margot Datz’s annual show at Grange Hall in West Tisbury.
The one-day show takes place Saturday, August 1, and each of the new works comes in an antique frame, sourced on the internet by Ms. Datz and chosen to complement the painting it surrounds. Her rufous hummingbird is framed in dark red velvet, with two tiny doors that can close it away like the gleaming jewel it resembles.
Ms. Datz found a frame with a faux-tortoiseshell effect for her triple portrait of a turtle, a snail and an inchworm — titled Get Ready, Get Set, Slow — and a woodwork one for the beaver, who’s working on a sculpture with his teeth as a woodpecker hammers away at a nearby tree.
Along with these whimsical touches, Ms. Datz’s paintings bring viewers close to the natural world she loves.
One of the show’s larger works, with a striking double frame, shows a baby vervet monkey peering eagerly from his watchful mother’s arms amid lush greenery and flora.
Ms. Datz painted the gentle pair from photos she took on the Caribbean island of Nevis.
“They visited us every morning, a troop of monkeys with lots of babies,” she said. “What I wanted to show in this painting was that the mothers were so wary, but the babies were so curious.”
Ms. Datz herself appears in one of the paintings, wearing a golden hat ablaze with candles as she works at an easel in a high-ceilinged room hung with framed images from her life, art and family, while empty frames stand nearby waiting for more.
The candle hat — and its inventor, the Spanish master Francisco Goya, who wore it in a famous self-portrait from the 1790s — inspired Ms. Datz’s theme for this year’s show, Painting Through the Night.
“He was driven to paint into the night, and I think that a lot of us are being asked right now to persevere through adversity of various types, from political climate to health to just all sorts of adversities,” she said.
In her Grange show on Saturday, Ms. Datz said she aims to spark some optimism in a time of confusion.
“A lot of people are very, very emotionally tired right now and don’t know what to hope for. How do we keep going? How do we keep our juice flowing? What keeps us persevering through the things that want to shut us down?” she asked.
For Ms. Datz, two big parts of the answer are her art and her family — which sometimes converge.
Her 11-year-old granddaughter, Georgette Blair, has been picking up some skills while observing Ms. Datz’s progress on a new bas-relief wall piece, to be installed in the children’s room at the Vineyard Haven Public Library next month.
Working with the same plaster materials her grandmother is using to sculpt the library piece, Georgette has created a series of small bas-relief tiles for her own pop-up during the Grange show.
“She’s kind of springboarding,” Ms. Datz said.
Bas-relief work, in which a three-dimensional image is built on top of a flat backing, is a new direction for Ms. Datz as well. Instead of painting with a brush, she’s been applying bland-looking plaster of Paris, clay and putty to a fiberboard base, building the shapes up and then sanding them smooth to reveal her storybook scene of young people, animals and magical creatures beneath a spreading tree.
The finished sculpture will be about 15 feet wide, six feet high and eight inches deep. Ms. Datz is using an especially hard epoxy putty for vulnerable details such as rabbit ears and raccoon paws.
Only once all the shapes have been formed will she begin to add the colors that will bring the 3-D illustration to life, before it makes its debut at the library later this month.
Library trustee Elizabeth Bates told the Gazette that Ms. Datz’s commission is being funded by a single donor.
The Grange Hall show is Saturday, August 1 with sales beginning at 4 p.m. on a first come, first served basis. Limited-edition prints of 30 earlier paintings also will be available during the show, which ends at 8 p.m.
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