No matter how many times you may have visited the Granary Gallery in West Tisbury, you’ve never seen it like this.
“The gallery looks very different than it has in the past, because the artists we are featuring painted large-scale paintings,” said co-owner Chris Morse. “We had fun installing them.”
These jumbo-sized works on the Granary walls include Vineyard native Dan VanLandingham’s expansive acrylics on canvas, capturing iconic Island views of farms, ponds and shorelines; local housepainter-turned-artist Terry Crimmen’s lightstruck beach scenes and six-foot-high Mae West life preservers; Cuttyhunk-based Tamalin Baumgarten’s coastal oils, and Alison Shaw’s photographic prints of boats and beaches.
Mr. VanLandingham earned an MFA in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design and acknowledges the influence on his work of the 19th-century Hudson River School painters as well as eminent contemporary Vineyard landscape painter Allen Whiting. Always showing the influence of humans on nature, Mr. VanLandingham’s landscapes are bathed in Vineyard light, the skies above blue, cloudy or iridescent.
A newcomer to the Granary, Ms. Baumgarten paints landscapes and beach scenes that often reflect her surroundings on Cuttyhunk Island, where she is the co-founder and director of the Cuttyhunk Island Artists’ Residency. Her works often summon a sense of magical nostalgia for simpler Island times. In Boat Launch, half a dozen children wade and play with toy boats on the shore of a calm evening sea, beneath a silver sky, as a sailboat glides past. In End of Season, an autumn mist is just beginning to gather around a small house where a young girl stands in the back yard.
Ms. Shaw’s section of the show indicates the artist’s recent turn toward photographing objects — specifically, boats — in colorful detail. A pair of her quietly powerful beach scenes and a strikingly abstract print of waves, along with a set of her beloved black-and-white animal close-ups, hang in contrast to her nearly tangible, closely observed portraits of vessels like Julia Lee at Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway.
“People have responded to them very well,” the Granary’s Sara Aibel said of Ms. Shaw’s new pieces, some of which have already sold since the show’s June 23 opening.
Self-taught artist Terry Crimmen began his career on the Vineyard as a decorative painter in the 1990s and didn’t begin showing his own paintings at Island galleries until 2011. His swimmers and beach scenes owe a debt to Edward Hopper, while his gargantuan life preservers will strike a nostalgic chord with anyone who’s ever strapped on the familiar orange harness stuffed with kapok.
Not all the works in the Granary’s current show are large in scale. Ms. Baumgarten and Ms. Shaw both have smaller pieces and longtime Vineyarder Frank Rapoza’s intricate, often abstract mosaics, made with wampum, abalone, minerals and stained glass, measure as little as 6 by 12 inches. Mr. Rapoza also is showing full swordfish bills inlaid with mosaics.
Mr. Rapoza was working as a shipwright and ship’s caulker and spending his summers living aboard when he discovered the mosaic work of Manny Sarmento at the Cuttyhunk Church. Each of Mr. Rapoza’s square pieces is framed with ebony from the schooner Dolphin, out of Santo Domingo, which was wrecked off Cuttyhunk in 1854 with a cargo of ebony logs. It takes him more than 50 hours to create one piece, which Ms. Aibel said can be displayed on a table, on a wall or in a window.
The Granary Gallery is open daily, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and Saturday and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. For more information, visit granarygallery.com.
Comments
Comment policy »