Provincetown pigment

“Eric Aho, Peter Hutchinson, Peik Larsen, Sarah Lutz,” DNA Gallery, Provincetown, MA. Through Sept. 16.

“Tabitha Vevers: Eden,” artSTRAND, Provincetown, MA. Through Sept. 12.

Cate McQuaid reports in the Boston Globe: “Aho is a master of tone and texture. In ‘Truro Beach,’ his loose, broad brush strokes brawl into one another, evoking the turmoil of a cloud-filled sky and the force of surf hitting shore. Hurling this way and that, those strokes appear spontaneous and out of control, yet Aho is exacting with details. He interrupts this storm of paint with two still passages: the blue-black water and a calm patch of pink, almost iridescent sand in the middle of the painting. Between those two placid areas, water clashes with land, and the paint rises off the canvas in a thick impasto. Above, the sky roils in layers of color, mirroring the violence of shadow and light in the foreground….Vevers’s art, which stylistically brings to mind early Renaissance paintings and Persian miniatures, describes a population destroying itself with pollution. Her people, always nude and positioned on the shoreline, often with factories in the background, have mutated. They sport three legs or, in “Mammasupial,” too many breasts to count, not to mention a couple of pockets in which to tote several infants.” Read more.

Joanne Mattera covers the Provincetown shows on her blog with lots of pictures: “At DNA, a large loft upstairs from the Provincetown Tennis Club (!), a group show that included Eric Aho and Sara Lutz was terrific. Aho, whom I know of as a painter of fairly reductive Vermont landscapes, did some pink-hued, sweepingly gestural dunescapes of Truro (Edward Hopper country), the town just west of here whose spectacular bluffs face Cape Cod Bay. Lutz makes a particular kind of abstraction that looks sweetly pretty from a distance and which turns out to be more satisfyingly stringent when you get up close.”