BERTA WALKER GALLERY OPENS FOUR EXCITING EXHIBITIONS
JUNE 18 - JULY 4, 2010
Gallery Reception Friday, June 18, 7 - 9 PM

HERMAN MARIL, paintings
RENATE PONSOLD & BLAIR RESIKA, B & W photographs
KATHRYN LEE SMITH, white line prints
"MUSIC IN ART", a group show to benefit "Great Music on Sundays @5"

HERMAN MARIL (1908-1986)
Serenity  in Light

          Herman Maril lived and painted in Provincetown summers from 1934 until his death in 1986. He was born in Maryland in 1908. Since he spent equal time as an artist in both places, both Maryland and Provincetown claim him as their own.  Maryland touts Maril as widely recognized as the quintessential Maryland painter," while Provincetown describes Maril as an extraordinary American Modernist. (Chris McCArthy, Director, Provincetown Art Museum)
Marils paintings -- landscapes, seascapes, interiors --are lyrical and spacious, filled with light and a serenity seen in everyday environments such as a woman hanging the laundry, a fisherman cleaning the catch of the day, a family playing by the sea.  His simplified subjects and abstracted environments result in visual elegance. His paintings emphasize clarity and  simplicity, achieved through broad, flat color masses in a style related to Cubism.  Said Maril:  I like the painting to look as if it is going to breathe on without any effort....  He also said he wanted the viewer to know that (each painting) really is a work of love.  The sources of my work have been a response to nature and the world around me, Maril once said. I am interested in the language of paint, and my ideas must be expressed in terms of space concept on the plane of the canvas. I want my paintings to have an organic oneness which should be the result of a constantly growing understanding and feeling for the lyricism possible in the plastic units of the picture struggle.
Art historian David A Scott, former director of the National Collection of Fine Arts and the Corcoran Gallery, says of Maril: His early experiment with cubist devices gave him the ability to deal with landscape forms selectively and analytically. Building on this, after the war, he developed an increasingly personal style, expressed in direct, vigorous ink drawings and arrestingly simple, evocative oils. What meets the eye in his work is delightful but we realize the apparent simplicity is deceptive.  The process of simplifying, a thoughtful and intuitive elimination of detail is important.  Starting in his later paintings with a motif in nature that moved him, Maril broadened the statement, simplified space and form, reconciled them to the picture plane, eliminated distracting elements and tensions, and achieved a harmony that focuses and enhances pictorial energy.  The result, in his most successful work, conveys a deep sense of peace and harmony.
Celebrating Marils Centennial in 2008,Christine McCarthy, Executive Director of the Provincetown Art Museum, curated a major retrospective  which later opened at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. He had an amazing career of painting and teaching, and his work is featured in numerous premiere art collections around the country, including New Yorks  Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Academy of Design, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and The White House. He is the subject of several books and catalogs and is currently part of the Smithsonians travelling exhibition on WPA art. 
Maril began painting in 1928 after graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art. The Howard University Gallery of Art exhibited his first solo show in 1935. And as a WPA artist, he was later commissioned to paint murals for post offices in Virginia and Pennsylvania. He taught at the University of Maryland for more than thirty years, and was a trustee of the Baltimore Museum of Art. 

RENATE PONSOLD & BLAIR RESIKA
Impromptu Moments:  Artists Eyes on Artists

          Berta Walker Gallery is proud to present the personal photography of Blair Resika and Renate Ponsold. Both have had long careers as photographers, and both are known for their special focus on other artists as their subjects.  Friends for many years, the exhibition, opening on June 18th and continuing through July 4, marks the first time Ponsold & Resika have shown together. Through the lenses of these artists, we are treated to glimpses of the intimate moments which they alone were invited to witness. Trusted and respected by their fellow artists, these photographs offer us an insiders view of the lives of their subjects.

BLAIR RESIKA
Blair Resika, a professional mezzo-soprano as well as life-long photographer, is in the enviable position of being able to bring the viewer along on Paul Resikas outings in search of his next subject. We are invited to look over Blair's shoulder as she captures images of Paul Resika at work in the fields overlooking Provincetown Harbor, on the beach looking toward the Provincetown pier and Monument and sunsets, all familiar motifs to the viewer. We stand in the fields of Tepoztlan where the bulls roam freely, looking at the mountain both on the horizon and appearing on the canvas; and like birds perched in the trees, we visit the hidden woods of Wellfleet where Paul is working on drawings and paintings of his nude models, Blair deftly and unobtrusively recording the scene. We are invited to drink coffee with Paul as he sits naked over breakfast, sketching his favorite modelhis wife, the artist Blair Resikawho is simultaneously photographing Paul sketching her.  Rarely has a photographic record of an artist at work revealed the sense of contemplation and silence as have these photographs taken by Blair throughout their married life.  Says Berta Walker, revealed to the viewer is the artist IN the subject he's painting, intimately captured on camera by Blair Resika creating HER motif -- The artist at work.
             I became serious about photography in the 1960s, focusing then on my husband, Paul Resika, in his studio, painting en plein air, or socializing with family and friends.  I learned to move fast, and stay out of view, as he really doesnt like me taking pictures while hes painting. Over time, and with practice and learning more deeply the various elements of black and white photography textures, reflections, structural composition my interest expanded to photographing compelling images of the landscape and the interiors of rooms (and often the relationship between them.) I continue my interest in portraits, animals, and, of course, Paul Resika, and his models."         Blair Resika will perform a concert of mostly Torch Songs with Dick Miller at the Provincetown Art Museum on August 18, 6:00 PM.    
                                                   
RENATE PONSOLD                                                                                                 

In 1959, as a young student of photography, Renate Ponsold emigrated to America from Germany. Soon after she applied her photographic skills to her new job at the Museum of Modern Art. Finding herself in the heart of New Yorks art world at the beginning of the 1960s, with her Hasselblad in hand, her high energy, her fine eye and her intelligence,  Ponsold applied her considerable talents to her passion for photographing artists, musicians, art critics, and friends, becoming an artist of world-wide reputation. With her youthful inquisitiveness and her split-second intuition, Ponsold made artistic decisions that have created some of todays most important portraits of noted artists of the 60's & 70's.  Renate and her camera were everywhere: the jazz nightclubs, the museums, the galleries, the bars and restaurants frequented by artists. She had limited means, but she had eyes open to excitement and cheeks as rosy as apples wrote Meeka Walsh in her interview for Border Crossings Magazine.  In that article,  Ponsold sums up her experiences: In all the poverty, we had wonderful fun and I just felt being in New York that I was in the belly-button of the world.                                                                    
This exhibition focuses  on a number of Provincetown and New York artists.  More than many, Renate allows the eye of her spirit to guide the shot.  She does not demand perfect light or environment, but rather finds that perfection and catches it in the moment.  Ponsold has not neglected the difficult question of context, wrote Dore Ashton. The expression on a face is often not enough to express the individual. Body language, gesture, apparel, objects or attributesall contribute to how an other reads the meanings of a face.   To watch Renate Ponsold in the field, wrote Yvonne Hagan for the Hurlbutt Gallerys show in 1977, is to witness an extremely specialized delicacy of communication . . . (Her) ability to dissimilate the presence of her camera, often feared as an aggressive tool, has proven to be a special asset in the art of the portrait . . . (This ability) has encouraged the subject of her lens to reveal him/herself far beyond the usual outer layers.                                                                               In 1971, Ponsold met and married Robert Motherwell who introduced his wife to Provincetown. She has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and was a member of Long Point Gallery in Provincetown in the 1990s.

KATHRYN LEE SMITH
"Ancestors"   white line prints                                                                                  

Berta Walker Gallery is pleased to premier "Ancestors", a special new series of white line prints completed this winter by noted printmaker Kathryn Smith.   The images started appearing in Smith's dreams, and as she began to bring them to life, she invited Berta Walker to see the earliest ones.   "I was intrigued by the concept, and certainly knew of Smith's expertise as a printmaker,  and decided that she should be encouraged to pursue 'her dreams' and show them this summer.  This exhibition is the result of Kathryn's winter with her "Ancestors".  Also included in this show will be a selection of flowers and abstracts recently included in an exhibition curated by James Bakker for the New Bedford Art Museum who wrote,  "Kathryn Smith represents the culmination of over a century of refinement of the technique first credited to the early Provincetown printers at the turn of the 20th century (1915)."

          Writing about this series, Kathryn Smith says:

          The Ancestors came to me in a very specific dream in August of 2007.  It was a joyous message, as well as an instructive and visually stimulating experience stressing simplicity of design and meaning in simple and direct forms.  The dream was specific as to shape and color to represent the arrival of these ancestral images.The original forms in the series - in brown and of a small format - soon unfolded to developing them in color.   As the series progressed, the ancestors evolved in color and size, further defining themselves, yet remaining simple and pure of form.   I invite you to view this new body of work from the dreamtime.  I hope they bring their message of joy to you as well.

          At the age of four, Smith learned the process of white line printmaking from her grandmother, artist Ferol Sibley Warthen, who herself learned white line printmaking from Blanche Lazzell.  Smith's reputation for this area of expertise became known nationally and internationally.  In  2003, she was Invited to Kami Gori, Japan, by Lamia Ink!  to share her knowledge of the "Provincetown Print" process and exhibit with the Japanese artists. Says Smith, "the inherent warmth of the wood, the use of hand tools, and the physicality are all part of the challenge and excitement of the printmaking process." 
This winter, a survey of Kathryn Lee Smith's white line prints will be on view at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, MA.

MUSIC IN ART
Gallery artists
(A percentage of sales will be donated to Great Music on Sundays @5 concert series at the UU Meeting House, Provincetown)

Berta Walker has been captivated and amazed by the incredible concerts available to Provincetown audiences on Sundays at 5 at the UU Meeting House on Commercial Street produced lovingly by John Thomas and Jon Arterton.  Throughout the summer, there's an extraordinary line-up of musicians from some of the great classical pianists of our time, to popular and Broadway music performed by the extraordinary talent that lives and works in Provincetown -- most year'round!  Concerts are an hour long providing "a musical respite that carries me through the week.  These concerts are not-to-be-missed musical opportunities", says Berta. Tickets are $15, with discounts for seniors. Children under 15 are invited free. 

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION AND PHOTOS PLEASE CONTACT SKY POWER, DIRECTOR, BERTA WALKER GALLERY 508-487-6411 

Installation Photos for this Exhibition