Carol Aronson-Shore’s Portsmouth paintings raise classic New England architecture from the merely charming toward the classically beautiful. Aronson-Shore accomplishes this by infusing her “architectural landscapes,” as she thinks of them, with assertive elements of abstraction, still life, and figuration, carefully arranging and editing geometric shapes and colors. At the center of it all is Aronson-Shore’s feeling for light, both its drama and its serenity, and always its colors. Most often this light is the radiance of early morning or late afternoon, when slanted sunbeams can illuminate a burst of blossoms or splash pink and violet shadows on a salt-box wall.

In these confident compositions, Aronson-Shore refines and clarifies her work’s smooth color planes and clean geometric lines. Combined with a sure sense of shifting color-warmth, hue, and intensity, the angular edges and planes amid glowing colors at times lend a faceted, gem-like quality to the work.

The core of this exhibition of Aronson-Shore’s paintings comprises 20 square-format landscapes paired by seasons. “Across the Piscataqua in Fall” (a view of Badger’s Island) counterpoints rich autumnal ambers and buttery tangerines with the Dutch blue and eggshell of winter. Likewise, a “golden section” of sunlit houses in the city’s South End, crisp and dry in a fall painting, reappears snow-muffled and nearly windowless in its wintry counterpart. The pairings can be very striking in their own right: a supple cherry tree against a sunlit stretch of colonial architecture vibrantly pink in spring, indigo-shadowed after the snow has come.

The seasonally paired paintings are never mirror-copies of each other, though. You can glance from one to the other and see the sun or snow appear and disappear on the same wall, railing, or roofline. But while the scene is the same, the paintings diverge. In “Winter Angles of Light” and “Summer Angles of Light,” for example, a variation in scale changes the terms of the relationships between verticals, diagonals, and horizontals and the corresponding positive and negative spaces. The reason no two compositions are the same speaks to one of Aronson-Shore’s strengths as a painter; it’s that she knows, to remain fresh and alive, each work must inevitably become a whole unto itself, organically composed of a similar but different sets of harmonious relationships – change one thing and you change everything. The paintings’ titles remind us of the formal concerns governing their making.

As she describes it, Aronson-Shore’s formative years, spent in Chicago, were steeped in the rhythmic play of light and shadow. “I saw nature framed by horizontals and verticals and felt how mood and appearance changes as you move through the city,” the “cool, deep experience of shadow, then the brilliant light.” She began by painting the figure, but gradually removed the figure from her paintings, eventually allowing the buildings to some extent to stand in for them. The square format denies painting’s traditional “view through the window” orientation. Working in neither landscape nor portrait format helps to foreground underlying abstraction and allows the artist to see and treat the forms as visual elements to be upset and regained within the frame of a formal composition.

At first glance, high-key colors are everywhere. Shafts of sunlight strike the sides of houses or streak across a green or pale blue lawn. Yet, a closer look reveals that the vivid colors almost always comprise a relatively small portion of a quieter, more low-key whole comprised of neutralized colors and subdued value relationships. Color relationships, sometimes between near compliments, other times between color families, can often be harmonious and discordant in the same work, surprising the viewer with a turn from warm to cool or vice versa, as a red “talks to” a blue and a third thing, a mediating violet perhaps, emerges.

It is Aronson-Shore’s goal to make her visceral and emotional experience of color visible, which also means a pursuit of the intangible – mood, time, space, air, and memory (the works are sketched plein-air and re-imagined on a larger scale in the studio). Although she is an expert colorist (Aronson-Shore has taught university students Josef Albers’ color theories for years), it is sensation, the quality of experience, that drives her desire to create. Given time, each painting unfolds its own subtle sense of simplicity, order, and human emotion

Aronson-Shore’s paintings can seem deceptively simple, a bit like Wolf Kahn’s brightly colored New England barns and landscape arrangements. While their color relationships are nuanced and anything but arbitrary, the paintings’ underlying geometry reveals a classical sense of balance and an unfussy complexity at work within the larger shapes that partition the whole.

In “Summer Geometry at Strawbery Banke” Aronson-Shore creates color vibration throughout the central motif by interweaving soft pink, blue, and violet shadows against the warm, canary clapboards of an historical building’s wall. Starting with the house’s far-right shadow side, Aronson-Shore reprises these colors abstractly in solid, upright shapes of higher intensity blue-violet, gold, and buff. A narrow dash of high-key red extends past the creamy triangle’s apex into a tilted pentagon that halts the rhythm. Despite all this intricacy, the painting reads remarkably simply: The eye climbs the left-hand tree shadows and slides through the successive geometric shapes of brighter and deeper color to be deflected back by contrary pinks and the level green foreground below.

In the painting’s wintry counterpart (“Winter Geometry at Strawbery Banke”), the same motion more subtly obtains, but this time a trellis stops us from traversing the clapboards. Here, the action shifts to the relationship between the sliding line of rooftops and an opposing diagonal shaft of light in the blue-violet snow. With its arabesque patterning (again in blue-violet, pink, and yellow) the introduction of that foreground vector of light literally underlines the interplay between warm-cool light and color at the painting’s core.

Viewers studying the seasonal paintings side by side will have the pleasure of discovering the myriad of ways in which the works reveal themselves in relation to each other. The upward reach of a vibrant coral tree in flower sheds light on the sweeping, circular composition in play when the branches are weighted down with powder-blue snow. The counterpoint between a series of candy-apple red walls and the brilliant cadmium-orange of a young sugar maple in “Fall Reds at Strawbery Banke” becomes all the more apparent when the “reds” of the trees disappear. Only then does the subject of “Winter Reds at Strawbery Banke” – namely, the relationships not among the trees but among the architectural forms – fully emerge.

Amid the back and forth, the “color of light” in these paintings flickers between worlds, from melon-pink, lemon-lime, peach, and pale gold, to mauve, lavender-violet, and cornflower blue. Yet always it remains a constant and stately pleasure for the eye.

To view works from this exhibition please click here.


-Christopher Volpe for The Banks Gallery

August 27th - October 2nd
Opening Reception: August 27th 5-7:30PM

Pinned to Lisa Noonis’ studio wall is a print of Picasso’s 1918 painting “Les Baigneuses,” a grouping of three women at the beach in old-fashioned bathing suits. The figures’ odd, angular, and uncomfortable-looking poses suggest life’s ordinary, yet generally unnoticed, eccentricities, which helps the Modernist image transcend the specificities of portraiture and place.

With a similar allegiance to the untidy nature of reality, the gestural, semi-abstract beachscapes in Lisa Noonis’ Tidal series convey a concentrated experience of reality. Unfettered by a too-literal focus on form, Noonis conjures oceans, tide-pools, clouds, and semi-populated beaches from scored, indelicate surfaces lush with an unapologetic, post-Abstract Expressionist love of color and paint.

Noonis attacks her paintings’ surfaces with brushes, knives, oil sticks, squeegee, and graphite. Tidal’s colors flow and glide between clear, high-intensity oceanic blues and subtle, complex grays, often concocted of warm ochres, cool lavenders, and de-saturated, sea-weedy greens. Splinters and gleams of high-chroma red and yellow, modulated pinks, and flecks of acid green or cadmium orange punctuate the muted color harmonies.

Bright beach days alternate with moodier, overcast mornings and brilliantly lit dusks. “Just Us,” with its holdout pair of day’s-end beach umbrellas, evokes the ambiance of late afternoon after a long day at the beach, when only one or two other stragglers roam the shoreline as the sun heads down. In other canvases, grouped and singular beach-goers connect glowing red and yellow beach umbrellas among the unstable eddies and flows of intermingling light, water, and sand.

In several paintings, such as “In Between,” the umbrellas unmoor from their pictorial forms to function primarily as design elements in a mostly abstract composition. Here the rounded, vaguely pentagonal shapes become islands in a current of multi-colored marine pigment. In the diptych’s left panel, a horizon line is suggested at the top left, while on the right a kite tethered to the beach is represented as it would look if seen from the ground. But the conjoined foreground plane is tilted toward the viewer, so that the umbrella forms and tidal channels are seen aerially. At the same time, scale shifts dramatically between the two panels, and the waterline on the left panel becomes on the other a coastline, as if seen from the kite’s perspective.

For all that, the initial impact of Noonis’s paintings is immediate and direct, while their less tangible character reveals itself over time. Paintings like “Towards Straws Point” and “Dusk I and II” court sensation, the glimpse, the unspoken, the striking thing seen as you turn away. Their genesis is the world not as the eye and mind want to make sense of it, but rather as it is experienced between seeing and memory. Refusing Realism’s bracketing of experience and leaving the painting open allows for not just what the mind says is there but what the body knows, and for an extraordinarily intimate engagement with the viewer.  

Because nothing is fully rendered, “the audience is free to create its own story,” Noonis says. “The sentence isn’t fully punctuated with a period at the end. It unfolds and unfolds as you look at it – it isn’t a closed box.” Given this intangible dimension, it’s no surprise that the artist inhabits her subjects the same way. “When two people talk, there’s a whole other layer of conversation going on in addition to whatever’s being said,” she says. “I think artists look at the landscape in the same way.”

For perhaps obvious reasons, Noonis eschews photographic reference material. Instead, she works from life, responding to her subject in small, rapid sketches in gouache or oil. These sketches later become starting points for studio paintings, though what happens next has more to do with memory and sensation than with literal representation. Invariably the studio canvases take on a life of their own as the artist vigorously adds and subtracts paint, draws and paints over, considers the results from multiple angles and orientations, works and reworks her paintings’ surfaces.

It’s this process that pushes the paintings beyond place-based rendering and, paradoxically, ever closer to the experience of reality. As paint layers rise and recede over time, textures build and the canvases grow rich with pentimenti, residual marks, alternate readings, and new, ninth-inning linear strategies. Some areas are resolved in certainty, others left in doubt. The result is a visual record of process, what Noonis calls “the grit, the fight,” as well as paintings that align not just with vision, but with the intangible. “My eye sees so much more (than the camera),” Noonis says. “In memory, I see even more than that.”

It isn’t the memory of how something looked that these paintings convey. Rather it’s the sense of a moment – a series of emotional and psychological experiences, not so much, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “recollected in tranquility,” as reconstituted in the materiality of paint. Composed from memory, “Clouds Reflecting on Shore” reads like sheet music. The bright reflections in wet sand enliven and deepen the foreground’s descending color-chords that are the painting’s true subject. This diagonal, Morandi-like arrangement of muted grays in shifting hues of violet, blue, and green forms a rhythmic bass-register of luscious drifts, scrapes, dabs, and blends for a counterpoint of higher-key notes that glide across the painting’s top third. The effect is to evoke sensation through a lyrical, intuitive engagement with the paint while remaining anchored in the experience of a definite place and time. Still, “Clouds Reflecting on Shore,” along with many of the works in “Tidal,” seems ready to transcend place altogether.

The largest paintings in the series push most thoroughly into abstraction, yet still without fully abandoning representation. With leanings toward the early Diebenkorn’s landscape-based abstractions, “In the Mist” gorgeously records the low tide dolor of New England’s Atlantic coast in prismatic seashore grays and clouds of lilac paint.

In the minimalist, climactic “Summer,” the most abstract piece in the series, everything happens in the paint. The jewel-like flecks and glimmerings of primary color-notes and polygonal shapes remain, but they’re no longer assigned to bathing suits or umbrealls. There’s the distant memory of clouds and a horizon line, but the seam between sea and sky is pitched so diagonally as to not exist per se. The familiar palette is now flushed with dynamic variants of tidal blue that somehow never become discordant or redundant. Noonis orchestrates the surface tension with restrained diagonals and dynamic, directional brushstrokes, and counter-directional scrapings, traces, and lines. As a summation of the series, “Summer” most evocatively conveys Tidal’s expressive goals with confidence and seeming ease.

This is painting at a high pitch, intuitive, honest, and vulnerable. Each work performs a balancing act between order and disorder, carried out to capture perception at its freshest, at equilibrium between “out there” and within.

Lisa Noonis’s work in “Tidal” demonstrates painting’s continued power to exceed the lens of sight, to invigorate the senses and to distill beauty and meaning from seen and felt experience.



-Christopher Volpe for The Banks Gallery

Robert Eric Moore (1927-2006) created watercolors from close observation of coastal Maine and New Hampshire.  He painted with a unique style and point of view that resulted in paintings with distinctive elegance, grace, and precision.

This month the gallery is highlighting Moore’s instantly recognizable imagery with 11 paintings, each a masterwork of artistic transposition and contemplation. 

Moore’s paintings reside at the semi-abstract yet representational end of a spectrum of watercolor approaches to the Maine landscape, a gamut that includes, on the representational side, Rockwell Kent, Andrew Wyeth, and on the abstract side John Laurent, Charles Burchfield, and John Marin.

A lyricist of the rugged outdoors, Moore was less interested in Modernism for its own sake than in the visual pleasures to be won from close observation and a careful balance of freedom and discipline.

Another Maine painter, Moore’s friend Edward Betts, captured Moore’s aesthetic well when he wrote, in Creative Seascape Painting, that Moore seized his subject matter’s abstract qualities to “invest his particular brand of realism with a crispness of handling and formal control of shape and space,” that privileged  “order and organization” over literal rendering.

Like Hokusai and other classical Japanese masters of design, Moore joins his irregular lines and shapes into coherent, flowing compositions with a strong sense of organic unity.  The disparate shapes and widely varied lights and darks in Porcupine in Winter Woods, (Watercolor, 15" x 21 ¾") cohere with a tremendous “variety in unity.” Moore tends to organize pictorial space much like an abstract painting, employing large interlocking geometric shapes with strongly varied weights and densities. Over this he often raises stark rocks or lanky waves, tree trunks, or branches. In Porcupine, a dark vertical swath of pines on the right connects the outermost edge of the background hills all the way to the foreground’s extreme right corner via contrasting trunks of trees. To bring us immediately back into the sweep of the circular composition, connecting horizontal lines shoot out from the foreground mass. These lines trace the already pronounced edge of light gray snow before curving back up on the far left straight into the central ring of middle and background trees, where the eponymous porcupine perches on a branch in relief against the painting’s brightest lights. Everything is literally connected with everything else; no line or mass stands stranded outside the whole.

The same kind of pictorial unity connects the more angular and less self-embedded shapes of Meadow Birds in Snow (Watercolor, 20 1/4" x 27 3/4"). In this foreground, a bold series of grasses pokes through a night-black drift. Yet, as the wind bends their stems uniformly to the right, each separate plant literally connects to its neighbor, forming a delicate chain that roughly parallels the edge of the snowy meadow. But rather than leave the painting’s left hand side as does the edge of snow-shadow against which it has been moving, the sweetly rendered meadow-grass curves back up to connect (actually, not just figuratively) to a more or less subtle vertical thrust of trees and weeds that in turn connects to a sloping diagonal that leads the eye back down toward the center of the painting.

In Cormorant Grouping, Maine (Watercolor, 19 1/8" 27") Moore gives his jagged crashing waves and sea spray a frozen, Hokusai-like intricacy. Unlike the tranquil, Zen-like emptiness of space in some of the landscapes (particularly the snowy ones), the foregrounds of Moore’s surf paintings often contain caches of stones, shards, shells, or sea glass – small fragmented treasures for the eye. Moore in Cormorant opens a window onto churning stones and chunks of ice within the linear confines of just one of his black, foreground waves.

Clear and Cold (Watercolor, 15" x 21 7/8") has the sparse expressiveness of a Japanese brush painting or a late watercolor by Cezanne. Here, a wide range of sharp and pliable horizontal shapes undulates in a counterpoint of jags, waves, bulges and dips, punctuated by the sharp verticals of foreground trees and background outcroppings. Gracefully swerving forward from the middle ground, a procession of flat-black rocks gains momentum as it approaches the viewer then dissipates into the unbroken field of foreground snow.

A similar strategy enlivens Weasel Tracks Near Cider Hill (Watercolor, 14 3/8" x 21"), where amid two rounded, asymmetrical swaths of lighter snow, the animal tracks sweep into the foreground field with an almost Fibonaccian inevitability, as if the tracks and snow shadows are moving according to hidden natural laws, like ripples in a pond.

Complementing this lively yet “formal control of space and shape,” Moore’s masterful technique in this most unforgiving medium impresses with its variety and sureness of hand. Passages of atmospheric color wash beneath meticulous almost skeletal marks resembling burin-strokes in an etching. Flat black areas punctuate liquid flows of subtly modulated halftones and lights. Vague edges throw sharp ones into relief, and fluid lines slither into balance with straight ones. 

Moreover, the watercolors of Robert Eric Moore are never still. Rhythm, the implied, directional movement of lines, masses, and brushstrokes, animates these paintings, especially the seascapes, with a quiet vitality. Not immediately apparent is the role played by chance, a sort of occupational hazard of the medium, and an important part of why Moore chose it.

“I love chance,” Moore once stated, “So did (John) Marin. But after all that’s what watercolor is all about: possibility.”

As noted by Michael Culver, curator of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art’s 2008 exhibition of Moore’s watercolors, it was perhaps the unpredictable, elusive nature of the Maine coast that tempted the artist again and again to try and capture it. “The ocean, because of the way it moves, is very, very hard to get a grip on,” Moore said. “Unlike a house, or a boat, or tree, it is there one minute and gone the next.”


-Christopher Volpe for the Banks Gallery

Never Break the Chain:

Walt Kuhn, John Laurent, and Tom Glover, Three generations of American painting in Ogunquit 


"Place is not a static mental or perceptual construct converted to paint and canvas. Place is the vehicle by which the artist moves out from his own creative center to discern the universal truths of man and his environment." 

- Marsden Hartley scholar Gail R. Scott


What if painting’s function isn’t to depict the world but to make visible the actual weave of it, the interlace of reality and experience? What if mark, color, and rhythm aren’t “formal elements” but expressions of the life force of their maker?

The vital mark distinguishes 20th century painter John Laurent’s work. It is also a hallmark of his mentor, Walt Kuhn, as well as Laurent’s own pupil, contemporary painter Tom Glover. All three are associated with southern Maine and currently have paintings in the gallery. 

John Laurent’s Three Rocks conveys a visceral relationship to the elemental character of the Maine coast. The painting communicates in terms akin to paleolithic sculpture and cave paintings the raw, hand-hewn sense of reality encountered on a very basic level.

Everything is stripped to essentials. Laurent centers his three isolated natural objects in a foamy tempest of thick white paint applied with the palette knife. Stark contrasts and colors (ostensibly black and white, but not) belie intriguing nuances in the lights and darks, especially in the deep green-black field subtly modulated to suggest fluid depths of ocean. The flattened picture plane and gestural facture indicate the formal structures of Abstract Expressionism, but Laurent employs the avant-garde language of the New York School to give his Maine rocks the rude, elemental character of something far older, rough-hewn, hand-colored, outlined as if with a charred natural tool. 

The artist’s father, Normandy-born sculptor Robert Laurent, first arrived in Ogunquit in 1902, the adopted son of New York art connoisseur Hamilton Easter Field. Field established a school of modern art in Perkins Cove, the heart of a thriving art scene initiated a few years earlier by respectable Boston painter Charles Woodbury. The school would pass into Robert’s care upon Field’s death 20 years later, but not before John met, through his father, American Modernist painters Marsden Hartley and Walt Kuhn, the latter of whom became his mentor. Kuhn, a primary organizer of the seminal 1913 Armory Show, established a studio in Ogunquit in 1920. From him John would sop up firsthand the work and avant-garde theories of Modernist giants like Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. 

The school passed to John when his father died, then closed in 1954 when Laurent joined the painting faculty of the University of New Hampshire, where he taught for the next 30 years. Tom Glover, whose work carries on the lineage, was a standout pupil whom Laurent took under his wing.

Laurent’s Three Rocks bears more than a passing family resemblance to the work of Maine-born Modernist Marsden Hartley, whom Laurent adored, and who also painted simplified, primitivistic visions of the coastal landscape. These include an important series of paintings with heavily outlined boulders executed during the 1930s in Dogtown, near Gloucester, Mass. Hartley’s work explicitly blends abstraction and mysticism, applying the lessons of Cezanne, Matisse, Kandinsky, the Cubists and the German Expressionists to express his own deeply felt truths in the stark, simplified lines and rough-hewn surfaces of the weather-beaten northern Atlantic coast. 

From this perspective, Laurent’s painting carries forward Hartley’s project and even surpasses it in the degree of abstraction, expressive paint handling, and sheer grit that it brings to the transmission of a personal mysticism. Like Hartley, Laurent paints not the landscape but his primal relationship to it, using the material of paint to explore intuitive ideas about human existence and the world. 

Laurent was digging deep. For his part, Hartley used poetry to defend his choice to paint the primal stones of Dogtown over the picturesque Gloucester waterfront: 



“Persistently mid nuances of lapis grey

So much more wonderful this way

than summer in a trance

of chlorophyll or other circumstances. 


- from Marsden Hartley, Beethoven in Dogtown


Hartley early in his development regularly visited visionary painter Albert Pinkham Ryder in his New York studio, as John Laurent would visit Walt Kuhn in his (Tom Glover was lucky in that his mentor, John Laurent, lived not in New York but year round in Maine). Kuhn is remembered best today as one of the principle organizers of the Armory Show and an important promoter of Modernism in America. Recent shows of his figurative paintings have begun a reassessment of his work, emphasizing its quiet assimilation of the work of Modern artists such as Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne, placing his late paintings, as Wikipedia has it, “among the most memorable, confidently painted works of twentieth-century American art.”

Kuhn's painting in the 1910s often showed the influence of the Modern European artists whose work he promoted such as Cezanne, van Gogh and Gaugin but also that of the Impressionists such as Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Pierre-August Renoir, and Edouard Manet. Both of the gallery’s recent Kuhn acquisitions, “Ogunquit, Maine” and “Four Boats,” display Kuhn’s mastery of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, respectively. 

Kuhn’s portrait of Ogunquit captures the serenity of the seaside town on a quiet summer day. The painting’s surface is choreographed with thick, directional brushstrokes that flow together and apart in harmonious, lively animation. In many ways, Kuhn blends the traditional realism he learned in Munich as a student with the interests and techniques of Modernism. This characteristically Kuhnian approach is visible for example in the way he seamlessly marries traditional aerial perspective, Cezanne-like manipulations of the picture plane, and post-Impressionistic color, brush and knife work, with the flattened compositional strategy of American folk art, which the avant-garde art world was avidly discovering and appreciating for the first time.

In “Four Boats,” Kuhn renders the familiar dories of Perkins Cove even more audaciously, in yet more brilliant, Post-Impressionistic color. Here he further dismantles and simplifies the use of broken color and extrapolates the visible brushstroke into vigorous, multi-colored mark-making. Nowhere is the painting static; every inch contributes to the sparkling, constantly moving whole. “Four Boats” is remarkable for its unity, given the range and vigor of its hues and surface handling. Laurent was known to urge his students to use “juicy paint,” something Kuhn certainly did here. 

Even in the absence of his louder and trendier peers, Kuhn, it seems, has yet to come fully into his own. As a reviewer for the New York times recently remarked, “maybe, viewers schooled in 20th-century polemics of avant-garde versus kitsch were a step behind him.” The longer you look at his work, the more you wonder, as that critic did, “whether Kuhn’s also-ran reputation stems from his limitations or ours.”

Tom Glover is taking the Hartley-Kuhn-Laurent project into the 21st century. In paintings such as “Blue Harbor” (20” x 16”) he re-envisions coastal Maine through the lens of abstraction, in particular the second and third-generation Abstract Expressionists, especially Richard Deibenkorn. Glover’s “putting together,” as one of Kuhn’s supporter’s wrote in 1931, “shows years of composing … I see years of clarity, years of intuitive meditation, years of metaphysical study and feeling.” (Genevieve Taggard, Landscape Drawings by Walt Kuhn, Marie Harriman Gallery, New York, February 1931). 

Artistic vision is one way to know the inner life of stones: Earth’s densest, inanimate matter, literal bedrock, emblems of the impenetrable fact of mortality, the antithesis of the air. It is our good fortune that sometimes paint can scratch the stony surface of the elemental and communicate something profound about the union of spirit and physical being.


-Christopher Volpe,  for the Banks Gallery

As Lucian Freud once observed, there is a distinction between fact and truth. In photography the camera is assumed to be recording facts; yet in the hands of an artist like Carl Austin Hyatt, the device becomes a medium for the revelation of larger truths.

Hyatt’s work is important because in it the commonplace is made mysterious and monumental. Threads of the spiritual and the archetypal run through Hyatt’s work, including his ongoing series of photographs of the Portsmouth, NH salt piles.

The harbor salt piles, leviathan mounds, yearly appear and disappear from Portsmouth’s working waterfront, where the salt is unloaded from ships and stored for use on northern New England’s wintry highways. So much for the facts.

Hyatt’s salt piles magnificently transcend the actual. Hyatt’s lens documents a spiritual geometry: he fixes not just form, light, and shadow, but the timelessness of the contemporary moment, even as it passes. Removed from their everyday context, their scale rendered ambiguous, the images in Hyatt’s Portsmouth Harbor Salt Pile Series have an epic quality, a sense not just of grandeur, but of the cosmic and the impersonal.

Though apparently as fixed as the Egyptian pyramids (“S17,” “S18”), in fact the Portsmouth Harbor salt piles are ever changing, as Hyatt points out, “constantly moving and yet contained.” For Hyatt the site seems to function something like a zen rock garden, a nexus of chaos and order, inviting spiritual contemplation of the time-bound and the eternal, “a meditation on light, sky, fog.”

These images reflect a lifetime of exacting attention to detail, technique, and assimilated art history. In their begetting also are the majesty of glaciers and the sacred mountains of Machu Picchu, Peru (“S1,” “S3”), where Hyatt has spent significant time photographing the landscape and the shamans who intuitively understand the spirituality of nature.

The photograph designated “S14” in particular recalls the lyrical precision and perfect balance of Ansel Adams, with whom Hyatt studied as a young man. Here, however, Hyatt mediates between earth and the heavens with a mighty manmade Ararat of salt. Caterpillar tire tracks assume the character of ancient petroglyphs; foreground tread marks resembling an outspread wing mirror an overturned arc of radiant cloud.

Several works in the series make dynamic use of abstract industrial elements. Images like “S28” recall Charles Sheeler, the master modernist photographer and painter, whose gelatin silver prints emphasized the harmonious “architectural cadences” of industrial complexes, plants, and factories beginning in the 1920s. Hyatt has a similar feel for the sublimation of industrial complexity within simple shapes and elegant, expansive abstractions.

Other precursors in Hyatt’s work are the great modernist photographers Paul Strand and Edward Weston, both of whom made abstract images of objects in nature as well as the manmade forms and “indigenous architecture” of modern industrial America. Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia had introduced the machine into American art when they arrived in New York in 1913. Sheeler and his contemporaries responded by recalibrating photography. Indeed, Hyatt has mastered what Weston called the “deepest moment of perception,” the intense concentration on rhythm, texture, and form needed to transmute the essence of an object, creating an image more “real” and “comprehensible” than the object itself. (The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, vol. I, p. 195).

Yet Hyatt’s work also encompasses the minimal, the ethereal, and the ideal. The whiteness in salt pile images such as “S17” and “S18” with their pared-down, atmospheric geometry, are distant cousins of Kazimir Malevich’s radically elemental “Suprematist Composition: White on White.” Arriving in 1918, Malevich’s work established a new threshold for abstraction, an evolutionary moment in Western painting, providing an early foundation for important later developments such as monochromatic painting and the American “color field” movement rooted in the abstract expressionism of New York during the 1940s and ‘50s. Hyatt’s fogbound monoliths also bring to mind Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings of the mid 1950s; functioning like visual koans, John Cage called them “mirrors of the air.”

Yet of course Hyatt’s subject matter is contemporary and specific. His is always an examination of value relationships across multiple surfaces, the expressivity of texture and nuance. In this he is a bit like contemporary painter Robert Ryman, who has said he wants his minimalist, ostensibly all-white paintings to function like objects capable of producing an experience of enlightenment. Hyatt’s whites, like Ryman’s, are never just “white,” much less are they blank. Rather, both artists employ an intentionally restricted vocabulary to achieve pictorial complexity by manipulating scale and texture. Also like Ryman, rather than considering the work of art as a window onto another world, Hyatt sees it as a means of focusing perception within the time and place of the present moment.

It was Thoreau’s example, that of “picking a place and boring into it,” that Hyatt, who is from the Conneticut, says landed him in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire. Here he has developed his talent for profound observation and his ability to enter so deeply into a place that, as he describes it, the place begins to feel as aware of his presence as he is of it’s.

Hyatt’s photographs represent for the artist, as for us, a hard-won and meticulous record of a visceral response to the world: How alive can you be? They are a calling to a deeper, more authentic way of being in the world, to ineffable truths that transcend the facts: “Things we all know but dismiss because we don’t believe it. This is our condition. It has taken me years to believe in what I know.”

Carl Austin Hyatt’s photography suggests that art is still capable of transmitting the authentic experience of beauty and truth, however ineffably, and that both are always closer to hand than we think. “The value of great art is transmission and transmission is priceless,” he has said. It allows us “to instinctively feel someone has revealed something about life – even if it cannot be named.”


-Christopher Volpe,  for the Banks Gallery

The Banks Gallery is excited to present,  Robert Eric Moore (1927-2006), a collection of  watercolor paintings done in Maine and New Hampshire. This exhibitions will be held at the gallery located at 32 Daniel Street in Portsmouth, NH and will open on July 10th.  A reception will be held on Thursday July10th from 5pm-7pm.  The show will conclude on August 9th 2014.

New Hampshire born artist, Robert Eric Moore, captures a “here and gone” moment expressed in his artwork. His wide array of watercolors primarily focused on landscapes and seascapes, subjects which enchanted the artist. Moore’s time spent with his grandparents in York Beach, Maine sparked his interest in the vast sea and was intensified with his service in the Navy during WWII. While his early years spent hunting and fishing with his father and twin brother contributed to his fascination of the woodlands and fields surrounding him in Maine and New Hampshire. Fifteen of Moore’s paintings reflecting his love of the mountains and the sea will be on exhibit at the Banks Gallery.

Click on New Arrivals to view a selection of this up coming show.

Selecting the perfect frame can make a painting. We work with the very best craftsmen from around the world when selecting our frames. This video from The New Yorker highlights the quality of the craftsmanship we look for in our frames.   

Ross Sterling Turner's (1847-1915) vibrant blue water highlights this important early impressionist painting of the Isles of Shoals. This is one of the galleries most recent consignments. 

Ross Sterling Turner (1847-1915)
"The Shoals", 1887
12.5" x 19", Watercolor
Titled, signed, and dated lower left
Price on request

In 1883, Turner settled in Boston, exhibiting his watercolors and oils at the Boston Art Club and annually at Doll and Richards gallery on Newbury Street. He entered the intimate circle of Childe Hassam and the artistic community surrounding Celia Thaxter at Appledore, where he painted gardens in short, quick, colorful strokes that are similar to Hassam's style. 

Turner's work is represented in many public and private collections including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Public Library, Fogg Museum at Harvard University, National Museum of American Art, Worcester Museum of Art, Peabody Museum of Salem, and Denver Art Museum. In recent years, Turner's work has been well represented in several major traveling museums exhibitions including "The Bostonians: Painters of an Elegant Age, 1870-1930" and "Awash in Color; Homer, Sargent and the Great American Watercolor."