Kevin King, TSUNAMI, mixed media with sheet metal and oil on panel, 36 x 24 inches, $2,000
Jill Bates, CAPE ROLLER, pastel on sandpaper, 16 x 12 inches, $700
Lance Walker, QUICKSILVER, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches (26 x 30 framed), $3,500
Jason Eldredge, COMMERCIAL STREET, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches (30 x 42 framed), $3,000
‘Making Waves’ Exhibition to Celebrate Ocean in Motion
As a newcomer to the Cape’s art community, Chapman Art Gallery certainly hopes to make waves during its first season. It’s fitting, then, that our first special exhibition will do just that — and not just figuratively speaking. Because artists — particularly Cape Cod artists — often “make” waves quite literally, the group show “Making Waves” will celebrate the beauty, excitement, majesty and power of the ocean in motion.
Appropriately, we’ll kick things off on Earth Day, Saturday, April 22, with an opening reception from 4 to 7 p.m. Hors d’oeuvres and refreshments will be served. The exhibition will continue through Sunday, May 7.
The show was inspired by the realization that the gallery represents two artists — Jill Bates and Odin Smith — for whom painting waves is something of a specialty. For many other gallery artists, waves are often a key element in their marine or coastal scenes. To round out this show of some three dozen works, guest artists Ken Evans, Anne Heywood, Susan Hollis, Lance Walker and Lindsay Hopkins Weld have also been invited to participate.
The interpretations are no more repetitive than the ocean itself, as viewed from day to day here on Cape Cod. The works range from paintings of gentle rollers and glittering whitecaps to “Tsunami,” an abstract mixed-media piece by Kevin King that suggests the towering height and destructive force of a tidal wave.
With an unusual take on Provincetown titled “Commercial Street,” Jason Eldredge uses a cascade of exuberant waves rushing by the Lobster Pot and Governor Bradford House as a device to blend the activities of the town’s bustling commercial area and waterfront. A woman sipping from a wine glass as she floats past on an inner tube enjoys the best of both worlds.
Lance Walker gives the masterful Provincetown marine artist Frederick Judd Waugh a nod as the inspiration for “Quicksilver,” where a large translucent wave explodes into a billow of frothy spray against an enormous flat boulder. But he also credits his days as an avid surfer. “I constructed the painting based on a series of sketches and studies and knowledge of waves and water from 30 years of surfing,” Walker says. “Sitting on my board for hours, studying the development of swells, waiting for the next set, I learned how waves formed.”
As an artist, Jill Bates is drawn to the ocean because of its ever-changing color and because the waves themselves are so many colors, she says. “The color is fabulous. There are a million different blues and greens, and sometimes there’s brown in there. Waves are so different from one another, and they’re always moving. They’re never boring.”
See our complete inventory of works by gallery artists