BERTA WALKER GALLERIES Provincetown & Wellfleet You are invited OPENING in Wellfleet Saturday, June 17, 4 - 6 PM continuing through July 15, 2017 WELLFLEET ARTISTS of the Berta Walker Galleries Currently living and working in Wellfleet Robert Henry Grace Hopkins Sidney Hurwitz Penelope Jencks Gloria Nardin Pe ter Watts Wellfleet artists years past Elizabeth Blair (1908-1995) Edwin Dickinson (1891-1978) Gilbert Franklin (1919- 2004) Budd Hopkins (1931-2011) James Lechay (1907-2001) John C. Phillips (1908- 2003) Selina Trieff (1934-2015) (AND) Opening the following week in Provincetown FRIDAY, June 30 JOSEPH DIGGS "Life's Layers" Abstract and Figurative Paintings The Many Languages of Landscape VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN, BRENDA HOROWITZ, SKY POWER, MURRAY ZIMILES WELLFLEET ARTISTS of the Berta Walker Galleries JUNE 17 - JULY 15 Reception Saturday, June 17, 4 - 6 PM 40 Main Street, Wellfleet, MA In this exhibition, we hope you'll enjoy discovering and celebrating the work of artists from Wellfleet's past as well as those who continue to live and work here. These artists had, or continue to have, studios in Wellfleet and the exhibition includes work from as early as 1924 through to today. These artists are now part of the Berta Walker Galleries' ongoing effort to celebrate the history of American art through the lens of the Outer Cape's historic art colony, founded in 1899, and which encompasses the towns of Provincetown, Truro and Wellfleet. We are delighted to now have a presence in Wellfleet, thanks to the help of The Wicked Oyster Restaurant who made their building available, affording us the opportunity to expand on presenting the art colony's major and important American art contributions. ELIZABETH BLAIR (1908-1995), painted her entire life, studying half days at the Arts Students League with John Sloan while still attending high school. She went to Paris in 1931 and studied with Andre L'Hote, Louis Marcousis, and Fernand Leger. Leger rarely wrote about his students but was so impressed with Blair's work that he wrote about her, congratulating her on her accomplishments. She returned to New York and started painting in Provincetown in the mid-1940s, living in Wellfleet the summers of 1950 and 1953. She took up residence in Tepoztlan, in Mexico, in 1949, where her figurative paintings eventually moved into a semi-abstract mode in Elizabeth Blair, "Provincetown Dunes", 1948, the mid-1960's. In 1985, she moved to Provence where oil on canvas, 24 x 30" she created some of the gouaches in this exhibition. Blair is the mother of photographer Blair Resika and art historian Hayden Herrera, and Herrera has noted, "Blair was an expatriate even in her art. The confluence between my mother's excitement as she looked at nature and the energy with which she lay down her strokes is especially palpable in this series." GILBERT FRANKLIN (1919-2004) was born in England and grew up in Attleboro, MA. He came to Provincetown in 1938 to study with John Frazier at the old Hawthorne School. He always thought of Provincetown as a fascinating place, saying: "It think it's a place of freedom; people can do what they like, mostly, and other people let them do it." Franklin's father was a jeweler and so he was exposed to the tools of working with metals at a very young age. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design and continued his studies at the Museo Nancional in Mexico City and the American Academy in Rome. Art writer Lynn Stanley wrote, "Touring Gilbert Franklin's studio of finished pieces and wax forms in progress, a restrained elegance and simplicity of line were evident everywhere. The features of each face were nondescript, the forms stylized; one had the sense of the archetypal body moving in time, not confined to the specifics of identity." During his long and impressive career, Franklin received many public commissions for his sculpture including pieces for the Hallmark Collection, Kansas City; the Gannett Building, Arlington, Gilbert Franklin, Torso, 1989, bronze, VA; the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington, DC; the Harry S. 15 x 5 x 5" Truman Memorial, Independence, MO; and the Orpheus Ascending Fountain at the Frazier Memorial in Providence, RI. His sculpture can be found in the permanent collections of important Museums across the Country, and his outdoor sculpture, Seaforms, stands at the Wellfleet Public Library. EDWIN DICKINSON (1891-1978) came to Provincetown as a young man of 20 to study with Charles Hawthorne and lived and painted in Wellfleet for much of his life. He became one of the finest of painters associated with the early art Colony. On first arriving, he had his studio at the now Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, along with his great friend, fellow painter, Ross Moffett. Edwin Dickinson, Cove House, Wellfleet, 1941, Moffett, Dickinson and Hopper were close Oil on canvas, 10 x 21" friends throughout their careers. These days, it's unusual to find a good Edwin Dickinson painting, especially like the one in this exhibition which he painted of his own studio in Wellfleet. Unlike his large studio canvases on which he sometimes worked painstakingly for decades (still remaining dissatisfied), the small landscapes were quick, immediate, and improvisational, and focused directly on the view at hand. They are masterful in capturing the atmosphere of the moment, the liquidity of light in the moment, so that the viewer is moved to an awareness of the illusive in nature. In these paintings, Dickinson stressed broad areas of color and eliminated details. He shard with the coming generation of abstract painters a commitment to emphasizing the process of painting, the gesture.How to paint, not what to paint, was paramount. A major retrospective on Dickinson was curated at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum with accompanying important catalog by our own Mary Abel of New York and Truro. ROBERT HENRY came to Provincetown as a young art student to study with Hans Hofmann, and many years later returned with his wife the painter Selina Trieff to live full-time in Wellfleet. Henry is a 2lst century social-surrealist, and his work is always about human relationships and conditions in society. Discussing his work, art historian Eileen Kennedy observed: "Henry appears uncategorizable to me. He is an artist statesman of our age, much as Picasso was, or Goya, but he does not confront epic conflict between and within nations in the direct way that they did. He presents the human impulse to harm and heal in the emotional atmosphere, the psychic space that human turbulence creates. He grapples with the heavyweight philosophical concerns of our times, often employing a note of humor. His more abstract works seem to me to be what so much of contemporary art is trying to express, the distillation of Robert Henry, "In The Spiral," 2009, emotion, the spiritual and psychic space that the times we are oil on canvas, 12 x 12" living in have created." BUDD HOPKINS (1931-2011) was a member of the noted Long Point Gallery in Provincetown and will be featured in a one-man exhibition this summer at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, from July 21 to September 3, which will then travel to additional museums. There will also be an exhibition of his work at the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown from July 28 to August 19. Both exhibitions examine his earlier years creating abstract expressionist works, through his collage-based hard-edge period to his guardians and altars, and, finally, his return to action painting with his series of "dancing guardians." Budd Hopkins, Study for Mahler's Castle, 1973 Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 24" Art historian John Perreault wrote, "Budd Hopkins was embedded in his time but also removed from it. His intelligence, which is clearly revealed in his writings about art, also shines through his paintings. He was an original." As Perreault noted, "These two exhibitions for an artist of considerable talents . make a case for his place beyond the category of second-generation abstract expressionism." GRACE HOPKINS has been creating photographs since 1991. She builds a highly energized visual image from a tiny piece of reality. Susan Rand Brown wrote recently in the Provincetown Banner, "Hopkins is a photographer with the eye and soul of a painter. She creates an image by isolating a fragment of something larger, perhaps a wall, textured and brightly lit, or flickering in shadow. Hopkins' images ask that we take nothing for granted. We are jolted into seeing the smallest detail, something we would rush past, as something unexpected, marvelous and . .something quite grand. Hers is a vision rooted in a pure form of abstract expressionism [where] the viewer feels surrounded by the freshness of expressionist imagery and motion, each piece different, each piece allusive yet quite original." Grace Hopkins, London 28, 2017, digital photograph mounted, 16 x 16" SIDNEY HURWITZ studied at the School of the Worcester Art Museum in the 1950s where he met and was influenced by the printmaker Leonard Baskin. With a gift of technical precision, he went on to study the intricate art of etching and aquatint printmaking and received his MFA at Boston University in 1959. He spent his career on the faculty of the School of Fine and Applied Arts at BU, from which he retired in 1999. Hurwitz became fascinated with the industrial landscapes of the Boston area-warehouses, elevated railways, rooftops, and iron bridges-and focused on their intricate structures and mechanics. His series of aquatints inspired by oil and gas terminals was inspired Sidney Hurwitz, Bethlehm XIII, Watercolor/etching, by "the wonderful complexity of storage tanks, conveyor 16 x 20" belts, supports, etc.