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PROVINCETOWN GUIDE
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Provincetown :: Friday, February 10th 2012
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The Roots of Jeannie Motherwell
Lyman-Eyer Gallery - July 24 to August 5
By Mary J. Martin Schaefer of Provincetown Magazine
July 23rd, 2009
Jeannie Motherwell dances as she paints. “I listen to stuff that makes you move. I have to be moving. Anything that’s bluesy I like.”
| “I think that many of my paintings have typical, earthy Provincetown tones, because that’s what influenced me.” |
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Among her current favorites are Annie Lennox, “a big, big influence”; the soundtrack from Babel, “it was so significant and important to the movie”; “Aretha’s latest, which is really, really good”; Alison Krauss, “I love her”; and the likes of Dave Matthews, John Mayer, and “any contemporary bluegrass.”
Her arrival in the studio comes with the need to efface the white of the canvas. Like a writer, Motherwell finds the haunting ghost of a white sheet something she must exorcise.
“To walk into a studio and see a white canvas, it’s freaky, it’s just intimidating. The way I can naturally draw is to put color on it first.” Then she tilts her canvas, allowing the paint to create its own shape, achieving randomness.
“The initial color is kind of important. It’s what I feel like dealing with that day.”
Sometimes she discovers that the colors on a calendar of Georgia O’Keefe’s works are the same as her own. “It’s not totally random: I live in my studio, and those things that are hanging on my wall influence me.”
Motherwell’s palette has changed over the years. “I think that many of my paintings have typical, earthy Provincetown tones, because that’s what influenced me.”
“I don’t know why the colors are changing. Maybe it’s because I’m not summering in Provincetown anymore.”
Works of over two years in the making will hang at the Lyman-Eyer Gallery (432 Commercial St., Provincetown) from July 24th through August 5th. The “pictures,” as Motherwell calls them, all have a watercolor feel to them in spite of the acrylic paint she uses, and are rich in violets, greens, blues, and sometimes a wash of black.
James Lyman, who has eagerly represented Motherwell for eight and a half years, is alert to her particular style. “Her use of black is for contrast, like her father,” he says as he brings the canvases out. “It doesn’t denote despair, morbidity, any of that.”
Indeed, in a swath of color, one black stroke, like a synecdoche of image, tells us quite clearly there’s a boat before us.
This series, called “New Paintings,” represents an evolution towards greater abstraction in her work.
When she began to consider trying her hand at painting, Motherwell decided to spend her first winter in Provincetown. “With my background looming over me, “ she leapt into the “desolate Provincetown winter. You can either get into a lot of trouble, or you can see if you can maybe apply yourself.”
In that winter of 1976, disaster struck. A local scallop boat went under, taking fishermen with her. “The Patricia Marie was such a community event,” Motherwell says. “Community is very important to me. It was not so important to my father and stepmother.”
The shipwreck proved to stoke her desire to get to the canvas; it continues to inspire threads in her work. While the painter says, “It’s not really something I’m thinking of on a regular basis,” the Patricia Marie did offer her a subject that touched her heart and has inspired her hand.
As Lyman explains it, the steady shift from collages to this current selection is direct and rich in poetry.
Motherwell herself says, “I was trying to convey that it was a boat, because it was the tragedy.
“It’s not transitional, it’s about moving into, for lack of a better word, happiness.”
As her biological mother Betty L. Kimball passed away in early July, this exposition is for her.
“She did like my work. You have to look at it from her point of view: It’s just a world which wasn’t her at all. Because I’m her daughter, she loved everything I do.”
From the age of five, Motherwell, along with her sister, spent her summers with their father, Robert Motherwell, and their stepmother, Helen Frankenthaler.
“It was the ‘50s then, and in those days, psychoanalysis was the big deal. Every morning he would have us come in and talk about our dreams. It was an interesting half-hour every morning.”
How beautiful.
“Yeah, but it’s weird, right?”
She worried about it; mornings became anxiety for her. She would say to herself, “I have to remember what I dreamt the night before for Dad and Helen.
“Then we’d paint images; they’d go up on the fridge. If Dad or Helen particularly liked one, it would get framed.”
The conjunction is not lost on Motherwell, which makes her laugh. “And now I’m doing the same thing.”
Jeannie Motherwell’s “Veil Series” will be featured in an exhibition at the Lyman-Eyer Gallery, 432 Commercial St., Provincetown, July 24 - August 5.
There will be an opening reception on Friday, July 24th at 7 p.m. For additional information, call 508.487.3937.
Also visit ProvincetownMagazine.net for more articles and information.
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