Surface Tension: Stephanie Roberts-Camello

African Art Through Different Eyes

EXHIBIT DATES:  March 24-April 21, 2018
OPENING RECEPTION & ARTIST TALK:
March 24, 5:00-7:00pm
Please join us for a talk with the artists at 5pm
followed by a reception.

About the Exhibits

Donald Beal, Paintings

Moving to Provincetown in 1985, Beal has made the art colony his permanent home. He digs deep into the medium of paint in his search for form and color. About his work, Anna Dempsey writes in the 30th anniversary issue of Provincetown Arts Magazine, “Though the artist depicts the power of nature, his work does not simply document it. Rather, Beal’s landscapes illuminate a conversation between humanity and the natural world that occurs over time. He captures this unfolding conversation with thin layers of paint through which we can see material traces of the built environment. Clearly, these once sturdy structures are now frail and crumbling. In the image, they function as a visual synecdouche for human civilization.”

Beal is a Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts in North Dartmouth where he has taught since1999. He is one of two recipients of the 2013 Lillian Orlowsky William Freed Fellowship Grant (LOWF) from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

Surface Tension: Stephanie Roberts-Camello

Stephanie Roberts-Camello’s work embraces both painting and sculpture in her new exhibit “Surface Tension”.  Her work is made primarily with encaustic paint, with series that include Encaustic Shrouds, Free Forms, and Missing Pieces.  For a number of years, she has been developing this physical relief series where layers of encaustic wax are built up and fused to each other.  (She and her husband run an apiary where she harvests some of the beeswax that goes into her paintings.)

While still warm, she removes areas, manipulates and fuses them back on, reworking the material quickly and deftly as the warm wax solidifies. She uses references to human emotions and limitations that trap people as sources in the work to further explore her use of old family letters beneath many encaustic layers.  “Seemingly destructive to the surface, the peeling plays a positive roll in removing a build up and seeing what has been lying dormant. The depth created working this way is jarring to me, confrontational, alluring and frightening.  There is risk involved, but the presence of this relief work conveys a sense of resilience and life which keeps me returning. It speaks of a boldness and beauty which is also fragile. The opposition between image/content and material is the catalyst for the development of my encaustic relief work.”

Stephanie graduated with a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1985. She was awarded a residency at The Vermont Studio Center in 2016 and 1997. Her painting “The Breakaway” won the Centerfold in the March /April 2016 issue of Artscope magazine.  Stephanie’s paintings are exhibited widely and most recently at the Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons College, the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, Artblock Gallery in Boston, and The Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Ma in 2017.

African Art Through Different Eyes

Joanna and John McWilliam have spent much of their adult lives in Africa, living in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Tanzania and Kenya.  Joanna is an African historian and John, a demographer working in public health.  They began collecting art in the 1960s and fifty years later, their collection is large, mainly sculptures, terracotta, and masks – three dimensional art.  This exhibit explores how artists, both African and expatriate, express themselves in two dimensions, a relatively new form for many African artists.  How these artists utilize the two dimensional media to express their reality is what this exhibition is about.