Artists

Special Feature OUR TOWN

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS

It is not strange for me to think of Provincetown as a place where, during my visits, I am mostly offshore. There is the initial sense of the mind narrowing to that single road I first encountered years ago in 2006 and the way a journey will continue through you as a vein does, narrowing and expanding in tandem with breathing when your body feels itself to be free and safe.

In Provincetown, my breathing changes. My mind and body erupt with wonder and freedom. I become a mass of senses, endowed with weight and ease, not unlike my most beloved companions, which are the humpbacks in summer. For nearly fifteen years, I’ve sailed on different vessels each summer to listen to their songs and to the song of my heart that is inaudible on land. During this journey, which is spiritual for me, the sight of each lighthouse fills me with a solace that is part of the joy I will store in my body to endure winters and my lives elsewhere. Going out on the water the intensity of this joy forms a harbor in me.

I was in my twenties when I first arrived, on a scholarship residency, to the Work Center. Immediately, Provincetown felt like “home,” and the formality of being a resident or guest was replaced by my certainty that I was an artist and that I would live amongst artists. These artists dazzled me with their gardens, their gallery windows and open studios, their worship of jowly, well-dressed bulldogs, their voices singing a cappella in perfect soprano while roller-skating down Commercial Street for no reason except joy, and that famous unabashed cheekiness, that encouraged me to give serious thought to how delight, fellowship, and pleasure were part of the poet’s calling. Now, in my forties, I can point to benches or trees along Commercial Street where I once dreamt, curled up in love or in my own tears, and how some bear in a mermaid costume might blow me a kiss and shout one word like “Beautiful” or “Honey, that bitch doesn’t deserve you!”

I hear my footfall on the rocks in the courtyard of the Work Center and remember how I once sat in the cool night sand and watched the moon with sister poets, Natalie, Brenda, and Robin after we danced to Marianne Faithfull at Kate and Urvashi’s. How we women could love ourselves so brilliantly and viscerally. That evening was a marvelous feast as are so many of my memories of friendships in Provincetown.

I’ve left some of my laughter there in the sand.

It is the view of my life that appears on the water that I seek. From the water, the perspective of shoreline is about the discovery of my own edges and inner cities—a survey flecked with time, grief, and celebration. I can only trace its shape, like the shape of the humpback just below its circle of breath. Whether I am bobbing alone in the waves or shrieking in delight at the sight of a gorgeous breach, I intuit the fortune I feel in this place.

So I never say good-bye to this world, aware that its humor, its beauty, and its rituals offer me a way to endure difficult geographies within and beyond. However, let’s be clear: homemade ice cream, oysters, love, solitude—all taste better in Provincetown.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet, novelist, and photographer who has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center. For over fifteen years, she has traveled to and photographed Provincetown. She lives in New York City.

From Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits by Barbara E. Cohen. Excerpted with permission of Provincetown Arts Press. Copyright 2021. Polaroid Paintings by Barbara E. Cohen.

kevinhadams.com 540.522.9688 Kevin, known for his American landscapes, has been painting on Cape Cod for almost 25 years. A member of PAAM, he has 2-week solo shows at Gallery 444 on Commercial Street beginning on June 15 and Sept. 21, 2022.

Early Morning oil on canvas 12” x 16” gailbrowne.com Ceramics Printmaking Painting Drawing Ephemera

Bisqueware

BARBARA E. COHEN

studio 646.872.8582 barbara-cohen@verizon.net barbaracohen.com barbaracohenartist No Way In, No Way Out Gouache Paintings AMP Gallery June 24th -July 13th 432 Commercial Street

No Way In, No Way Out gouache on paper VIVIAN DICKSON

508.237.1114 “Nature holds the beautiful, for the artist who has the insight to extract it.” - Albrecht Dürer

Wild Wellfleet Oysters oil on canvas

christineniles.art

@septemberluna

kmoe

397 commercial street 774.239.7811

michaeljhartwig.com portamjh@comcast.net

Represented by 352 Commercial Street

Work Studio | 2nd Floor Whalers Wharf 617.875.2627

Four Eleven Gallery 411 Commercial St. 617.905.7432 fourelevengallery.com An interdisciplinary artist, activist, & teacher, Hocking is concerned with place, emotion, & spatial poetics—in how human identity is inscribed into landscapes & in how the non-human world defies human intervention. Walk to The Atlantic oil on canvas 48” x 48”

MATTHIAS LUPRI

Gallery 444 444 Commercial Street 617-767-8557 LUPRI.com

6/29-7/13, 8/10-31, 9/14-21 Featuring large inner landscapes, seascapes, abstract portraits and archetypal paintings. Please come on by and say hello.

A Minuet of Semblance oil on canvas 48” x 48” rjkatz.com 917.692.9768 R.J. Katz, considered by Bay Windows to be “One of P-Town’s Finest Artists of the Lens,” captures the natural beauty and mood of the area in light, color, and shadow. Her images are unique, painterly, and utterly striking. To view and purchase, please visit rjkatz.com

P-Town Sunrise photograph 20” x 30”

CHERIE MITTENTHAL

Studio at Stable Path 43 Race Point Road cheriemittenthal.com 508.237.9327 A painter and photographer, Cherie Mittenthal works predominantly in encaustic, pigment sticks and mixed media. Her subject matter revolves around the landscape & place, flowers,

dogs, boats & rising tides. Waiting for peace encaustic/mm 16” x 16” 2022

VALERIE ISAACS STUDIO 857.445.7969

HAMMOCK GALLERY 361C Commercial St.

46 Bradford St.

@valerieisaacsartist valerieisaacs.com valisaacs@yahoo.com

Special Feature OUR TOWN

BARBARA E. COHEN

A collector friend suggested I contact her mother-in-law, Tam Hapgood, who rented a small room above a garage on Allerton Street to artists and writers. She said it would change my life if I spent a summer in Provincetown.

Tam was in her 90’s, a tough old geezer. “It’s $2,000 for one, $2,500 for two, for the season, cash up front, make up your mind by tomorrow, and no eating from the raspberry bushes in the yard,” she said. The eight-by-ten foot room came with a toilet in a tight, slant-roofed closet, a two-burner propane stove, a carton-size fridge, and a lovely outdoor shower covered overhead with vines of pink clematis. A mustard-yellow table surrounded by three worn-out chairs hugged a picture window overlooking a tall, blossoming lilac bush. A single bed was crammed in the corner beneath two windows that faced Kim Rilleau’s leather shop.

I moved in May of 1993, feeling a chilling breeze but warmed from the bright spring sun. At the crack of dawn, I was on my bike every morning with my SX-70 Polaroid. The streets were empty, and I photographed everything in sight: shops, restaurants, bars, historical landings, the dunes, beaches, the pier. It was a deeper introduction to Provincetown; before, I’d only been a tourist, though I’d visited in summer for more than twenty years. I had no idea people actually lived here.

The Polaroids of the town became my signature, and the Love Shack became my home. I lived there for three years, until I moved to a house on the bay with my honey, Honey. She died unexpectedly in 2007. My life changed again. I found my way back to the Allerton Street compound, where one could often find a band of older women wrapped in colorful beach towels after a cold exhilarating swim, rushing to take a hot outdoor shower in a garden of Eden. This garret of a tree house shack still is my home, with new solar panels, and a family of raccoons trying to evict me.

Barbara E. Cohen is a multimedia artist whose artistic work in painting and sculpture spans five decades. In addition to numerous books featuring her painted Polaroids, she is the author of Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits (featured in this edition of Provincetown Art Guide.) Barbara divides her artistic time between New York City and her long-time studio in Provincetown, MA.

From Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits by Barbara E. Cohen. Excerpted with permission of Provincetown Arts Press. Copyright 2021. Polaroid Paintings by Barbara E. Cohen.

Selected Works July 29-Aug. 4 Opening Rec July 29 7-9pm

ARTHUR EGELI GALLERY 382 Commercial Street 626.695.0551 egeligallery.com

Special Feature OUR TOWN

VICTORIA REDEL

Early mornings or just before the tilt toward darkness, I park in the pull-off. Here, the hem of scrub woods. A scrabble of shrub, vine, and tree. Here, wrappers blown in from Route 6. Here, after the first bolt uphill, shoes tossed off. Snail Road is the gate between town and the monumental, but never once am I prepared for the vastness. For the dune wilderness of wind, salt air, beach grass, the ever-shifting carve of sand. I have walked with destination. To dune shacks. Ocean. Or without destination. Lingering by wetlands. Napping near fox tracks. Following illusions of light and shadow. Once, during a snowstorm, I got lost. Time and compass gone. Pressed down to crawling by the whiteout’s pressing gale, I somehow found my way out to the narrow scruff of woods. Each walk here, a glorious lesson in proportion, alters me.

Victoria Redel is the author of three books of poems and five books of fiction. She first came to Provincetown in 1986 as a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center.

From Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits by Barbara E. Cohen. Excerpted with permission of Provincetown Arts Press. Copyright 2021. Polaroid Paintings by Barbara E. Cohen.

Popko Studio & Gallery

N. Truro, MA/ Prague, CZ april@popko.com

PopkoProductions.com Popko paints on both sides of the Atlantic, infusing ocean air into her paintings, transferring energy onto canvas. As a means of communicating between two worlds, her work transports viewers through color, texture & light.

Dreamboat acrylic on canvas 31.5” x 31.5”

CATHERINE SKOWRON

studio: 508.487.0980 cathyskowron@comcast.net Cortile Gallery gallery: 508.487.4200 Luminous oil paintings of Outer Cape scenes focusing on dune landscapes of the Provincelands. More images of artwork are available at cortilegallery.com.

Shelter oil on canvas 16” x 20” Four Eleven Gallery 411 Commercial St. 617.905.7432 fourelevengallery.com A painter and sketchbook filler who lives and works in Provincetown, Paul Rizzo works with and from 70s gay porn, portraiture, abstraction, houses and text. He is obsessed with the past specifically old Hollywood and the 1970s.

The View from the Past mm on panel 9” x 12”

JOANLEE STASSI

Studio visits by appt. stassiworks.com stassiworks@me.com My work contains elements of nature, investigations into psychological conditions and recollections of past cultures. The sea continues to play a prominent role as an endless source of inspiration.

Departure mixed media 6” x 8”

Spreading Clouds oil on canvas 30 x 30” Summertime oil on canvas 24 x 24”

Thanassi Gallery 234 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA Also showing in California San Francisco | Pacific Grove | Aptos

jane@janeParadise.com janeparadise.com @janeparadisephoto 415-321-0382

Dune Shacks of Provincetown A 192-page book featuring nearly 100 color photographs exploring exteriors and interiors of the 19 shacks and the breathtaking dune and seascapes that surround them.

- David W. Dunlap author of Building Provincetown Available locally at East End Books 389 Commercial St.

Special Feature OUR TOWN

Yes, 466 Commercial Street (The Mary Heaton Vorse House)

KEN FULK

I say yes. In fact, I say yes most of the time. I’m not always sure why I do it, but it’s become my own secret superpower. Or maybe it’s simply an act of rebellion. Perhaps both. I say yes to something and then figure out how to make it happen. I think the very idea of this scares most people to death. I find it exhilarating and a little frightening . . . thus the exhilaration.

It seems we spend most of our early development learning no. Then, by the time we’ve become adults, no is so ingrained in us that many forget the freedom in saying yes. I wonder if, in the end, that’s what actually makes us grow old? Forced to become adults and say no for ourselves, we keep on saying it until we can no longer imagine the new and unknown and eventually wilting under the weight of the status quo.

When my friend Kristin sent me photos of the mysterious, dilapidated, 250-year-old house across the street and asked if we might be interested in saving it, I said yes. When Gail and Sally asked if we would buy the house and help protect the legacy of their grandmother—the legendary Mary Heaton Vorse—I said yes. This was all despite the fact that I had no idea how we might pay for it or exactly what we would do with it. It just seemed to me that something needed to be done.

When we had used up nearly half of the construction loan and were maybe ten percent complete on the restoration, I asked our contractor, Nate, if he could somehow make it work with what was left. Could he take a falling down, soggy structure and make it not only a viable and inhabitable building, but also maintain all of the eccentricities and character that only time can create? Without a breath of hesitation, he said yes.

Perhaps it is this steadfast affirmation that links us, the stewards and inhabitants of this tilting, meandering building on the fishhook at the end of the Cape. The great Captain Kibbe Cooke, whose family had built the house, said yes to far-off adventures and danger by circumnavigating the globe in search of whales and riches. He always returned home to his crooked house. Even when he’d lost everything and the house was no longer his, he remained.

Mary Heaton Vorse, overwhelmed by a sense of place and connection, said yes to the town and yes to the house after her first visit. Then one day, riding past a fish shack on a decaying wharf, she noticed a “For

Sale” sign and said yes—a decision that echoes to this day in American theater. As a writer and labor activist, she traveled the world fighting for the rights of others, often putting herself in harm’s way. Twice widowed, she left her children and said yes to supporting her family, and yes to shining her light on great injustices. She too returned, time after time, to live out her years in the house and the town.

Could that be the tie that binds us—all of us who’ve played a part in the long story of this place, which continues to unfold? Our unspoken pact to agree to a world of unknowns? A secret agreement to anchor ourselves in a place of certainty? I like to think yes.

Ken Fulk first came to Provincetown in 1991. His life goal is to someday be considered a townie.

From Our Provincetown: Intimate Portraits by Barbara E. Cohen. Excerpted with permission of Provincetown Arts Press. Copyright 2021. Polaroid Paintings by Barbara E. Cohen.