Rebecca Doughty
Here We Are
We are pleased to be showing Rebecca Doughty’s Here We Are, featuring three separate bodies of work: Partly, Tangles, and Portraits. Doughty tells her story through the eyes of animal characters who travel the world mirroring human emotions, situations and complications.
Partly, a series of acrylic and oil on wood, reveal a portion of the figure – tumbling in the air much like Aaron Siskind’s divers in his Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation – the characters are falling, exiting the painting’s edges, leaving only parts behind – legs, ears, half a torso.
Tangles are small 6x6” acrylic paintings on paper applied to wood – to say these figures are tangled is an understatement—life as we live it can become a maze of entanglements some of which we cannot unravel. Characters with long, endless appendages encircle and encase their bodies restricting their physical capabilities.
Doughty tears Japanese paper and reassembles it providing a textured surface for Portraits. These characters with animal like features and human gestures have piercing eyes which engage the viewer. The work is playful yet somber.
“The animals of childhood, both real and imagined, were my closest companions. They were confidants, comforters, clowns, heroes. They stood by me and stood in for me. I see them now as stand-ins for all of us, still navigating life’s comedies and tragedies, bearing the weight of our anxious world.” —Rebecca Doughty
Daniel Ranalli
Iconic Cape Cod Paintings (This is Not a Photograph
As you drive to Provincetown along the shore line, you pass through Truro and the famous row of cottages, each named for a different flower. These cottages, shaped like the green plastic Monopoly houses, have been a source of inspiration for artists and are the subject of many photographs and paintings. Daniel Ranalli’s newest series, Iconic Cape Cod Paintings (This is Not a Photograph) is his interpretation of these dollhouse sized dwellings. The final prints are saturated with large cube shaped pixels becoming building blocks of color to reconstruct the cottages. Even with this surreal representation, we know immediately that these are the flower cottages.
“Provincetown and the Outer Cape have a long history of painting. The artist's colony there is over 100 years old, and perhaps the oldest in the U.S. As with such places, there are certain subjects or motifs that are painted many times over the years by many artists. There is also a great deal of similarity in how they are composed and painted.
This series is based on the Day's Cottages in North Truro. Using a search engine to look for "Day’s Cottages Paintings" and “Highland Light Paintings” on the Web I enlarged the found images, resulting in extremely pixelated images. I became fascinated with the color (which I altered slightly at times) and the degree to which the compositions were so similar – painted frontally in an almost two-dimensional manner. When pixelated both the cottages and the lighthouse paintings lose their solidity and become striking arrangements of geometry, color and light. And so, as with the paraphrasing of René Magritte in the title above, This Is Not a Photograph!” —Daniel Ranalli
Kimberly Druker Stockwell
Just What I Came For
All of us live very busy and complicated lives and trying to balance one’s expectations, relationships, careers, children, the unexpected, can be overwhelming and stressful. Balance in one’s life is not always easily accomplished and personal “alone” time is often at the end of the list. Kimberly Druker Stockwell’s gestural gouache paintings, which she refers to as self-portraiture, capture the emotional ups and downs (literally) of women finding this equilibrium! Stockwell’s women are fictional but their situations, energy levels, and multitasking lives are anything but. Her paintings reveal the exhaustion, elation, pride, happiness and the raw vulnerability of her individuals.
These paintings are a mirror to our own desires, choices and the reality of the to-do list! Whether you’re standing on your head, Feet Over Head, or using you last bit of energy, Grocery Store, you can find yourself in this work.