Large format is the size of the summer on the walls of three Martha’s Vineyard art galleries, with expansive landscapes, abstracts and abstract landscapes by several distinctly different painters.
Carol Brown Goldberg’s one-woman show Mirror Universe, in the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse lobby gallery, is a carnival of color, form and motion, with each painting revealing different elements depending on where in the room you stand to view it.
Ms. Brown Goldberg’s nine purely abstract acrylics, with playful—even suggestive—titles, like Bobby Bloom on the Boardwalk, Oh Baby Baby Baby and Ecstasy, exuberantly cross action painting with geometric stencils overlaid by grids of brightly painted, perfectly round or oval dots.
This jazz-like expression of emotional freedom within a powerful rhythmic structure is enhanced in several of Ms. Brown Goldberg’s works by her use of polymer particles, which add a glitter-like sparkle to the 3-D effect created by the grids of painted dots.
To gaze at one of her paintings for any length of time is to see shapes emerge, like clouds that fleetingly resemble familiar objects. Is that a spinnaker? Does that checkerboard look like a parquet floor?
Move slightly and the shift of light will change everything. You might even catch yourself thinking that the work is breathing, no longer flat against the wall but pressing forward into space.
Ms. Brown Goldberg is also a sculptor, with installations at several American universities and museums, and she collaborated with filmmaker Anthony Szulc on the award-winning short The Color of Time (2012).
Her paintings are on view in the playhouse lobby during box office hours: Monday and Saturday from 4 pm. to 9 p.m. and Tuesday through Friday from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m., through August 1.
At Tanya Augoustinos’s A Gallery, now housed at 510 State Road in West Tisbury, Rez Williams is showing his latest series of Monhegan Island oils through August 7.
These energetic coastal and woodland scenes, painted from snapshots Mr. Williams took on the Maine island, are the work of a master in abstraction confronting a dynamic environment one moment at a time.
His beaver-gnawed snags, human-felled tree trunks and swirling tide pools capture the less-scenic side of coastal New England and its second-growth forests, while unexpected colors—a pink slope, bright blue shadows on a fallen limb, boulders splashed with yellow—highlight the stark forms that shape Mr. Williams’s images.
A Gallery is open Sunday through Wednesday from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Tuesday by appointment.
Granary Gallery in West Tisbury held a reception Sunday for three painters in its summer exhibition. Along with David Wallis’s contemplative oils and Heidi Lang-Parrinello’s sun-splashed watercolors, the Granary is showing new Island scenes and sights by Jeanne Staples.
Ms. Staples’s latest large paintings—including Twilight Ferry, of the Island Home loading cars under a sickle moon on an off-season evening, and a peaceful, affectionate view of Up-Island Automotive in West Tisbury—pay tribute to Edward Hopper’s influence with their interplay of light and shadow.
Golden sunlight bathes the flanks of cattle grazing in an up-Island field, long shadows streak a barnyard and in each of Ms. Staples’s two smaller paintings, a man cuts fish in a narrow swath of light from an unseen window.
Nearly all of Ms. Staples’s works in the show were painted this year. Her views of Eastville and of the Vineyard Haven waterfront near the Black Dog Tavern date from 2017.
The Granary Gallery is open daily, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.
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