Exhibit revisits creative energy of gallery partners

By David B. Boyce, Standard-Times correspondent

The city of New Bedford, and the towns and hamlets that hug the shores of the jagged coastline and inlets of Buzzards Bay, have long been an inspiration to artists. There's something quite unique here about the relationship between water and light, which changes dramatically with the seasons.

But whether the subject is the littoral life of the people, the abundant natural beauty of land and waterscapes, or the many resplendent examples of 19th and early 20th century architecture, the SouthCoast has engendered a tradition of representational painting that harks back to such New Bedford artists as William Allen Wall, Robert Swain Gifford, Clifford W. Ashley, and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

This aesthetic pedagogy was affirmed and celebrated at the former Swain School of Design, and in February 1987, six local painters, four of whom had been students at Swain, opened the Water Street Gallery as the first cooperative gallery venture in SouthCoast. Occupying a small waterside storefront in Mattapoisett, the gallery grew through the course of the next few years to add seven additional artists to its roster, four with connections to Swain. But in the dwindling economy of late December 1990, the Water Street Gallery closed permanently, its members diverging to follow their separate paths.

To celebrate their fond remembrance, their shared productivity, and the camaraderie of their Water Street Gallery years, 11 of its members have rejoined for an exhibition, "The Water Street Gallery Revisited," currently installed at the New Bedford Art Museum through Jan. 11. Curated by Peggi Medeiros, Water Street's original director, the show recalls the members' artistic exuberance as a precursor to and incentive for the current cultural rebirth of downtown New Bedford's historic district.

Laura Anderson, Henry Campbell Avery, Dennis Broadbent, Craig Coggeshall, Meredith Wildes Cornell, Jeff Fallon, Phil Gidley, Severin Haines, Nancy Dyer Mitton, William Shattuck, and A.D. Tinkham have contributed 81 works that represent their Water Street Gallery years, as well as examples of their current output to reveal their individual artistic journeys and evolutions. The result is a rich and stylistically diverse exhibit, weighted predominantly with examples of their continued interests in representational painting.

Six works by Laura Anderson demonstrate her enduring interests in light and realism as metaphor for internal mind states. "Six Blue Chairs #2," a 1991 acrylic on canvas, depicts a casual collection of empty canvas director's chairs on a lawn overlooking a becalmed bay view. These crisply rendered vacant spectators of a long-finished sailing race imply their former occupants' shared experience, but they're now the remnant of memory, the evidence of a past momentary meeting or event.

Ms. Anderson's more recent paintings, bearing titles like "Dark Mysteries, Light Affairs" and rendered in oil, focus more concentratedly on light itself as the residue and evocation of remembrance. These more abstract works reference retinal reality with far less specificity -- perhaps a vague treetop or cloud edge in an aping of the interplay of dawn and twilight glow, on and within forms of dimness and shadow. Locating the profound within the prosaic, they speak, like portraits of periphery, of visual moments that exist almost exclusively in the mind.

Severin Haines earned his BFA from the Swain School in 1968, and his MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1972. Currently the director of graduate studies for the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth, Mr. Haines has spent his painting career investigating both manmade and natural structures and forms of the SouthCoast, and, more recently, of his ancestral home of Norway.

From 1985, "The Tree" is a 7-foot-square oil painting of commanding presence, its branches seeming to break the confines of its picture plane in all directions. Stately in its vertical posture of death and decay, the radiating angles of its attenuating limbs segment and grid the sky, clouds, and landscape of its background like a more dimensional early Mondrian. Mr. Haines' use of color and linearity to crop, dismember, and activate space compartmentally recalls the Dutch modernist's interest.

Similarly, "The Lobster" from 1997 uses foreshortening to thrust the crustacean's armored claws beyond the picture's flatness as a graphic threat which subsides to giddiness in the perception of its festive coloration. Mr. Haines also proves to be an accomplished colorist, contrasting the warmer oranges and reds with greens and chalky blue highlights. The sensuality of paint itself imbues this scavenger with a humorous and unexpected sex appeal.

Born and raised in the New York City area, William Shattuck didn't begin his formal art studies until he reached his twenties. Working as a freelance illustrator while attending Manhattan's Art Students League and the School of Visual Art, Mr. Shattuck developed his talent for the techniques of realism, and relocated to the SouthCoast region in the late 1970s.

One of his 12 offered works, a small and delicate charcoal on vellum drawing titled "Suddenly" from 1988, represents his Water Street Gallery years, and reveals his superb illustrator's eye and technique. Since that time, Mr. Shattuck has honed his accomplished talents further while broadening his visual reach. A recent grouping of six small oil on board landscapes mimic the appearance of exquisite Arts & Crafts ceramic tiles with deep velvety matte surfaces.

"Striped Bass," a 36- by 48-inch oil on board of this year, receives a similar treatment, though the fastidiously rendered fish floats atop the planar surface rather than deep within it. Densely worked for detail, the bass is placed alone and compositionally high in its field, as though a roving and oversized solitary occupant of a confining aquarium.

A magnificent drawing from 1998, "Epiphany Waits for Thee," is a monumental 73- by 43-inch charcoal rendering of a Victorian armchair which exudes a regal presence. Seemingly evoked out the paper itself like a charcoal of Seurat, the angled light which bathes the chair casts sharp raking shadows from its graceful legs. Powerful and even haughty, yet the image provokes a metaphor of loss and loneliness.

A.D. Tinkham is represented by one oil from 1984 and seven undated watercolors. A SouthCoast native, educated at the Brooklyn Museum School in New York City, the Swain School, and at Brooklyn College for his graduate work, Mr. Tinkham has an extensive exhibition history. He was the founder of the First Street Gallery in New York City.

With a masterful command of both mediums and an effective economy of brushstrokes, Mr. Tinkham captures the misty coloration and flora of SouthCoast marshscapes with an assured and minimal ease. Currently residing in Key West, where he pursues a lifelong interest in boating and painting, Mr. Tinkham's work has always been held in high regional esteem for its almost Eastern-tradition simplicity.

The paintings of Meredith Wildes Cornell, a current resident of Little Compton, R.I., and another Swain graduate, are represented in the collections of BankBoston and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica, N.Y. Ten of her works are offered in this show, which demonstrate her principal interest in figure painting. Among them are several with biblical themes, including "Trilogy" of 1995-6 which depicts a madonna with two children, and "Expulsion" from 1995, a singular nude Adam-figure, striding across the canvas while ashamedly covering his face. "Nude with Sheets" from 1990 and "The Yellow Bed" from 1993 are "bedscapes," the latter showing a sleeping couple with the male having two faces indicating movement or possibly dreaming. A self-portrait, appropriately titled "Self," from 1998, is a thin vertical canvas, capturing the artist looking out at the viewer from over her shoulder with a commanding look that both invites and holds off. Ms. Cornell's use of expressionistically applied impasto celebrates the sensuality of her images and medium.

Other painters in this exhibition with direct links to the Swain School of Art include Dennis Broadbent, Craig P. Coggeshall, Phil Gidley, and Henry Campbell Avery. The paintings of Marblehead resident, Jeff Fallon, and Marion resident, Nancy Dyer Mitton, are also represented, and though unaffiliated with Swain, they practice sympathetic modes of realism that fit amiably in execution, style, and theme.

"WATER STREET GALLERY REVISITED" WHAT: Exhibit curated by Peggi Medeiros. WHERE: New Bedford Art Museum, 608 Pleasant St., New Bedford. WHEN: Through Jan. 11. Hours are Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., except until 7 p.m. Thursdays. ADMISSION: $3 for adults, $2 for seniors and students, and free to children under 17. MORE: For further information call (608) 961-3072, or log on to the website, www.newbedfordartmuseum.org.

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