Crab #9, Annisquam, 2017, watercolor, 15" x 22"
Opening Saturday, May 27, 4-7pm
This exhibition looks at two distinctive shapes of the sea shore: crab claws, part of the non-descript detritus washed up on the beach below our cottage in Annisquam; and the ungainly hulks of trawlers and tugs hauled up on the drydocks in Gloucester. Each is seen unnaturally.
The claws are unsettlingly large but at the scale their sculptural forms and subtle colors can be admired and their engineering understood, when before they were just unexceptional flotsum. The big work-boats are similarly out of their element, oddly levitating and worringly top-heavy.
While the claws are small things seen big, the boats are big things seen small. For the painter, the closer we look the more detail we see and can depict. The reverse happens as we miniaturize: the smaller the scale, the more the tools force us to generalize and find the essential form. In each case, the activity involves looking closely at things, and often, looking at familiar things in a different way.
- Christopher Pullman