THE VINEYARD LANDSCAPE
by Abby Remer
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Decades ago, I was walking down from the Gay Head Cliffs to the beach. Taking in the spectacular vista, I felt a deep sense of awe, and a single word filled my head — “home.” The 72 island artists in Featherstone’s exhibition, “The Vineyard Landscape,” capture our home’s sheer beauty and the spirit of the vistas we live among. 

Ann Smith says about choosing the exhibition’s theme, “For our 30th anniversary, we looked back at our shows and realized we hadn’t done anything around the Vineyard landscape. We asked people to interpret it however they wished. We wanted there to be different views.” And that is exactly what they received—submissions of all sorts of landscapes. 
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The poster for the show, featuring Kelsie Leonard’s “Menemsha Fish Market,” is a case in point. The original work is fascinating. Looking closely, you realize that this 

“wood collage” is an impressively complex ‘jigsaw puzzle’ of the familiar up-island scene. Leonard first draws an original image with strong black lines defining every surface, from the road to the flowers in the window, and from the front of the shingled shack to the ridged green hill in the background. Leonard then cuts the wood pieces, including the outlines, with a digital woodcutter, meticulously paints them, and fits everything snugly together into a cohesive piece. 

Nearby is Francis McGuire’s moody oil-over-acrylic nightscape, “Oak Bluffs Pipe Rail Fence Under Moon.” We stand across the road from the sidewalk, which runs parallel to the water. The single lamppost, with its illuminated lantern and halos, stands like a sentry in this unpopulated scene. The distant moon to the right casts its own light onto the water, which dynamically rushes toward us.

Linda Wurm Bryant pulls back from the water in her acrylic “Waban Park Trees and Shadows.” She renders the sunlight and shadows that fall across the landscape with mesmerizing Pointillistic precision. In contrast, Lyn Voytershark uses repeated long strokes of color in an abstracted image of Lagoon Pond, conveying the natural world’s vibrating energy. 

We move to the beach in Joanne Bergen’s oil, “Cliffs.” She plants us squarely on the sand, with stones at our feet dotting the beach, drawing our gaze back farther and farther until we reach the Gay Head Cliffs. She includes cool hues we don’t normally associate with these iconic Vineyard formations.

Brad Permar abstracts a familiar scene in his oil, “Lambert’s Cove,” with Impressionistic flair, in which strokes of individual color evoke the very mood of the scene. Judith Drew Schubert also transports us to her landscape, albeit in a realistic style. The still surface of the water in her impressively large “Tisbury Great Pond” oil reflects the glorious colors of the sky above, while the low-lying vegetation draws our eye back to the beach beyond. We seem to stand at the water’s edge, watching the birds feeding before us, unperturbed by our presence.

In contrast, Ann Meleney’s slim, tall “Island Prism” is a riotous collage of color. Here, exquisite slices of paper seem to rise from soft, warm colors at the bottom, evoking the beach, to countless shades of blue, speckled with shimmering gold on the water, topped by an undulating, patterned sky.

Sometimes the sea itself provides the elements of a landscape, as in Corinna Kaufman’s pressed “Seaweed Flowers,” where these delicate undersea treasures resemble flora that could be seen on land or in the ocean.

Bill Buckley’s large horizontal oil, “A View to the Gut,” recalls the saying that art is a window onto the world. We appear to be inside a house, looking out at a water view through a large window. Dawn Warner’s “My Small World” diorama, likewise, is “framed” in a sense, as it snuggles inside a small tin displayed on a miniature artist’s easel. In this landscape, a pink pig stands before gently rolling green hills, trees, and a boat (perhaps the ferry) gliding by on the water in the distance. If we follow the pig’s upward gaze, we notice a bird in a nest atop the tin, perhaps in conversation with the porcine…or deliberately ignoring him.

It appears as though something has just hit the water, sending the cool blue waves upward in Sarah Beth Belanger’s gorgeous bowl “High Tide.” Carol Arrowsmith orients us in the other direction. Silhouetted birds glide across a moonlit sky inside her stoneware bowl “Quiet Season,” where bare trees march around the entire inner edge, creating a serene sensation. 
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The above is just a small sampling of the inventive ways Vineyard artists help us see our beloved island in a new light. 

The Vineyard Landscape at Featherstone Center for the Arts.  On view every day, noon to 4 pm, through June 21st.