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BERTA WALKER GALLERY - WELLFLEET

GLORIA NARDIN In Memoriam (1921-2018)

FRIENDS CELEBRATING GLORIA Robert Henry Selina Trieff Peter Watts Robert Rindler

June 16 - July 14, 2018 RECEPTION SATURDAY JUNE 16, 4 - 6 PM

Please join the family of Gloria Nardin and Peter Watts in celebrating the incredible life of Gloria Nardin, who was a woman way ahead of her time. She was widowed in her early 40's and thus a single parent with four children. Nonetheless she managed to keep making art for most of that time, always with humor and a smile. She had been in Provincetown in the mid- fifties, and moved to Wellfleet in the early sixties after she met and married, Peter Watts. "I have adored Gloria since the first day I met her," says Berta Walker. I always thought she was just a few years older than I, as she was YOUNG IN SPIRIT, was so full of light and smiles and love. Only when I curated the "Naughty Nineties" show two years ago did I find out she was well into her nineties! She was a joy to know, and a trusted friend to many, as well as a talented artist.

I scheduled this exhibition to treat myself, and to surround myself with her energy and the

energy of her special friends: her beloved Peter Watts and Gloria Nardin, 2012 at 80th Birthday husband Peter Watts, along with the artists, celebration of Peter Watts and Selina Trieff at Berta's house Selina Trieff, Robert Henry, Robert Rindler and Robert Rindler's spouse, James Connors. They were a fabulous "six-Pack" of laughing friends, and it was a joy to greet them at dinners, movies, openings, always together

As I write this, I feel Gloria's light and twinkle, smiling humbly and happily.

GLORIA NARDIN (1921-2018) In Memoriam

Gloria Nardin was both a painter and photographer. She was born in New York, studying art at Cooper Union and photography with Sid Grossman and Berenice Abbott, but her studies were interrupted by WWII. She first came to Provincetown in the mid-1940's and stayed in a little shack off Bradford Street.

Nardin had always painted and taken photographs, even in her early teens. In recent years, she had a major

photography exhibition at The Wellfleet Preservation Hall GLORIA NARDIN, Jewel in the Weed, 2002, and a one person show at Berta Walker Gallery as part oil on canvas, 28 x 20" of the "Naughty Nineties" exhibition celebrating a number of artists in Provincetown making art at ninety or more.

"I got my first camera in 1945, a 5"x7" bellows Kodak with a fixed lens. I did all my early street photography with this cumbersome but loved instrument. I did less painting during this period because I now had two children and it was simpler to run around with a camera while kids were in school and study photography at night. During the 1950's I had two more children. I still did mostly photography, but also some painting. My first husband died suddenly in 1962, putting a halt to much of my art while I raised my children." During this period, all of my photographic work was lost during a warehouse mix-up and never retrieved, and my paintings, stored elsewhere, vanished."

Gloria met her husband, the painter Peter Watts, in 1969 while working at Columbia University as curator of the Slide Library in the Art History Dept. They married and moved to Wellfleet, where they have lived year 'round for almost fifty years. "I had begun again with art and now turned back to photography using color and doing mostly still-life and landscape photography. I was also painting a lot during this time, sometimes incorporating paintings as backgrounds for still-life photos. She told me just prior to her final illness, "I paint mostly from imagination and memory these days, and enjoy it all very much!"

PETER WATTS

PETER WATTS first came to Cape Cod as a student of Laforce Bailey in 1954. Living at first in Provincetown and working at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Watts moved to Wellfleet in 1970 with his new bride, the artist Gloria Nardin, whom he'd recently met in New York.

For over half a century, Peter Watts has walked the land of the Outer Cape, waiting for

the inherent order to make itself known. When PETER WATTS Swamp, 2016, oil on canvas, 24 x 28" it does, he uses that natural order of contrasting shapes and shifting light to render canvases that walk the line between landscape and abstract expressionism. He often alternates, painting a primarily dark canvas and following it with a light one and he is always aware of the history of human touch that nature quickly covers over.

For Watts, these images are part of the larger fabric of nature. "I am interested in nature's changing patterns and the patterns that repeat themselves." Ripples in the sand at low tide are like the ripples of a clam shell. Interlocking branches in a grove of locust trees are like a forest of deer antlers. These patterns also relate to Watts' view of the world through the lens of botanical archaeology. A riot of lilacs deep in the woods is the marker of where a home once stood; a pine needle and moss-lined pit is the old cellar. A stand of pines on top of a knoll is a former pasture returned to seed, surrounded by the oak forests that will one day conquer it. "History gives me ideas," he says. "At one time," notes Watts, "I was more interested in the landscape itself. Now, I look at how an abstract element of a landscape feels." He once told Banner writer Sue Harrison that the actual subject fades in comparison to the meaning it represents, "The ideal painting would be when the subject matter disappears entirely."

In celebration of Watts' 80th Birthday in 2012, Rudolph Zwirner organized a major survey of Peter Watts' art from private collections, which opened at the Wellfleet Public Library. In the accompanying catalog, Hayden Herrera discusses the paintings. "Much of their vitality comes from the artist's pleasure in laying down marks. Stroke by stroke the image emerges. Watts' brushwork varies according to what aspect of the landscape he is addressing... the dark and distant forest may be painted with short stabs of the brush while the beach grass waving against luminous sand is described by long swift strokes. "And Curator Rudolph Zwirner wrote: "Watts...is a painter of twilight and indirect illuminations peeking out between tree trunks, shining over the tops of trees, reflecting the setting sun, shimmering in early morning light or breaking through the mist. His is the same light that gives the painting of William Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, Claude Monet and , their specific glow. Watt's color palette, which ranges from pale pastels to brilliant contrasts belongs to the same tradition...(they) transform the materiality of oil on canvas into an experience of natural light and color."

In 1978, Watts joined the Board of the Fine Arts Work Center and in 1980 he became a Trustee of PAAM, serving for over thirty years. For years Watts was Wellfleet Representative on the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Council and has worked for years with the Seashore and the Town on the Herring River Restoration Project.

ROBERT HENRY

Robert Henry is an emphatic painter. Mostly figurative, his subjects are intensely emotional. By turns they can be exuberant, in a fit of unbridled dancing; tormented, in the throes of roiling water, curious and cautious, approaching un-curtained windows in a woods at night. Henry's technique and compositions further the tension. Often the paintings reverberate with color and composition. Henry confronts with gusto the imbalance and

impermanence in all that surrounds him, ROBERT HENRY, At the Academy, 2017, oil on hypro, 18 x 24" whether by the vigor of impasto, the placement of a distinct figure among a blurred crowd seemingly unaware of its interior condition, or the image of precariousness.

Art historian Eileen Kennedy observed: "Henry appears uncategorizable to me. He is an artist statesman of our age, much as Picasso was/is - or Goya" Henry presents epic conflict between and within individuals and social mores, rather than among nations as they did. He presents the human impulse to harm and heal in the emotional atmosphere, the psychic space that human turbulence creates. His works express the distillation of emotion, the spiritual and psychic space that the times we are living in have created." On view in this exhibition is a selection of drawings created throughout his almost seventy-year career.

A native New Yorker, Henry earned his BA from College, studying with and Kurt Seligman. In the early '50's, he spent three years studying with in New York and in Provincetown. He has been featured in the documentaries "Their Lives in Art: Robert Henry and Selina Trieff", a Vineyard Videos production; and Artist/Teacher, Teacher/Artist, a PBS documentary. Henry's work has appeared in numerous solo exhibitions in New York and Provincetown, including the original East End Gallery and The Group Gallery in Provincetown and has exhibited at Berta Walker Gallery since it opened in Provincetown in 1990. Henry is Professor Emeritus of Art at , and is a highly sought-after teacher whose classes at the Fine Arts Work Center are in huge demand, not only by emerging art students, but also by professionals.

SELINA TRIEFF (1934-2015)

Selina Trieff was dubbed "an American original" by John Russell of the New York Times. And indeed, all these years later, it is still so! Trieff generated allusively gripping figurative compositions, abstract images in oil & gold leaf, richly pensive, introspective, strangely self-like. The subjects distilled to their essence in rich fields of color, reveal an entrenched passion for the push/pull technique of painting she first learned from Hans Hofmann. Trieff goes back to the same format in her work, but each return is a very different experience, an ongoing meditation of the human spirit through color and paint.

SELINA TRIEFF Chicken, n.d., oil on hypro, 24 x 18" Trieff creates deep passages of beautiful emptiness on her canvases. Her use of color is luminous and jewel-like, bringing to mind medieval stained glass windows and early Renaissance alter pieces. The gold leaf evokes the heightened spiritual presence in religious iconography. Her formally arranged figures are poised in a moment laden with private emotion. Always reserved, they possess a formality that seems to offer them emotional distance, safety. Still, they call to the viewer from that distance. The work is the center, so to speak, the point of meeting in a relationship with the audience, a three-pronged relationship -- the painter, the figure, and the viewer. "The figures are guarded, but they are also vulnerable," Trieff says. Like the artist in the harsh world of earthly experience, they are archetypal pilgrims wandering, searching for a home place."

Born in Brooklyn, Selina Trieff studied with Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown, Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt at Brooklyn College, and Morris Kantor at The Art Students League. Of her early experience at Brooklyn College the artist has said: "From Reinhardt and Rothko I learned that art is a philosophical exploration and that art making involves a mysterious process of self-discovery."

ROBERT RINDLER

Robert Rindler has been coming to Wellfleet for over twenty-five years, moving to Wellfleet full- time in 2005, with his spouse of 40 years, James Connors.

Rindler has been creating most of his life, in architecture, and later the visual arts. When he moved from NYC to his first academic position in Vermont in 1974, he encountered a community of artists who were interested in craft and technique.

"Having been educated in studio practice, I became newly interested in making art that "denied my hand" and moved away from painting and drawing. For 45 years my craft has manifested itself in obsessively collecting and re- employing hundreds of manufactured objects, recycling and repurposing this massive collection

into highly designed and organized ROBERT RINDLER, Potted Saplings,Constructions, environmental sculptures and installations. My recycled found plastic objects current immersion in critical inquiry employs found plastic detritus as a generator for assemblages that save the otherwise discarded and ephemeral products of our society into sculptural objects of color, beauty and profound meaning."

A native of , Robert attended Music & Art High School, received his undergraduate degree in architecture, and his Masters in Environmental Design from Yale University. He has been a professor, lecturer, critic and curator, and has taught in the arts for 40 years. He has served as the Chair of the Art Department at The University of Vermont; Provost at Rhode Island School of Design; Dean of the Cooper Union School of Art; and President at The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

Robert has also served on several non-profit boards in both the arts and higher education on Cape Cod. He currently chairs the PAAM (Provincetown Art Association and Museum), Education Committee, and serves on the Board, Strategic Planning and Education Committees at The Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. He was a founding member of the Board at Wellfleet Preservation Hall and has served on the Board of Cape Cod Community College in Hyannis.

OPENING NEXT AT BERTA WALKER GALLERY, PROVINCETOWN JUNE 22 - JULY 14, 2018 RECEPTION FRIDAY, JUNE 22, 6 - 8 PM

SALVATORE DEL DEO A Wise Youth at 90, Paintings Over The Years

GREAT MUSIC/GREAT ART A Collaboration and A Celebration of Musical artist, John Thomas

Provincetown and Wellfleet Gallery Hours

May 25 to June 30: Thursday to Sunday 11-4

July 1 through Labor Day: 11-5 daily (closed Tuesdays)

"Berta Walker's gallery mission is voiced in the motto that has guided her over the years, 'Presenting the History of American Art as seen through the Eyes of Provincetown'. She aims for nothing less than documenting the role that artists associated with Provincetown have played in the major movements in American art...making the past vital to the living artists she represents, replenishing the present with a curatorial finesse that is highly regarded." Andre van der Wende, Provincetown Arts

Representing: Donald Beal, Varujan Boghosian, Polly Burnell, Romolo Del Deo, Salvatore Del Deo, Joseph Diggs, Rob Du Toit, Ed Giobbi, Elspeth Halvorsen, Robert Henry, Brenda Horowitz, Penelope Jencks, Judyth Katz, Anne MacAdam, Danielle Mailer, Erna Partoll, Jim Peters, Sky Power, Paul Resika, Peter Watts, Murray Zimiles Estates: Gilbert Franklin, Budd Hopkins, John Kearney, Gloria Nardin, Selina Trieff, Ione Gaul Walker, Nancy Whorf Photography: Grace Hopkins, Susumu Kishihara, Dana McCannel, Blair Resika, John Romualdi, John Thomas

Masters in Our Collections: Gerritt Beneker, Byron Browne, Oliver Chaffee, James Floyd Clymer, Jim Forsberg, Sue Fuller, Dorothy Lake Gregory, Marsden Hartley, Charles Heinz, Charles W. Hawthorne, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Karl Knaths, Blanche Lazzell, Lucy L'Engle, Herman Maril, Ross Moffett, Vollian Rann, Helen Sawyer, Carl Sprinchorn, Agnes Weinrich.

Provincetown Folk Art and Ancient African Carvings and Bronzes

Grace Hopkins, Director David Henry Perry, Manager, Provincetown Cristina Hadzi, Manager, Wellfleet Berta Walker, Curator