If you got dragged to art museums in your youth, you may have approached the field chronologically, starting with those huge, dark and ancient canvases: slain horses, bloody battles, and suffering saints, especially poor Sebastian looking frail and green with arrows aquiver in his emaciated flesh. And then, at last, a merciful parent might have taken you by the hand and placed you before the Impressionists. Suddenly everything was beautiful again, just as it is in the real world — flowers, sunlight, flowers, birds, maidens with flowing hair, flowers.
“In a work of art we are charmed and attracted by forms which represent or at least suggest the forms of such objects as we find attractive in nature — flowers for example.” So wrote Aldous Huxley in a 1950 essay.
For 19 years, art curator Holly Alaimo has instinctively grasped the appeal of flowers, and starting in her iconic gallery Dragonfly in the arts district of Oak Bluffs, and for the past six years at Featherstone Center for the Arts off Barnes Road, every year on Mother’s Day, she displays an amazing range of flower art by our amazing range of Vineyard artists.
This past Sunday, another of these sumptuous events took place, with an opening reception that included prosecco, treats, and pastries by Rose Kaszuba, executive chef of the Campground Cafe, who for the past few months has turned the Parish House in the Campground, Wednesdays and Saturdays — while a violinist fiddles away — into the Grand Hotel Budapest, Vineyard-style. Last Sunday on the Featherstone deck, sultry music spooled from the keyboard of the great jazz pianist John Alaimo — “Mr. E-Flat” (or so reads his license plate).
It also didn’t hurt the amazing-ness of the event that the late afternoon simply sparkled with May sunshine.
Through the throngs of happy art-lovers and schmoozers — Featherstone openings attract a giddy crowd — various works stood out, such as a large oil by Ruth Kirchmeier, “Eleanor’s Room with Model,” of a woman seated in a navy-striped wing chair, with a vase of white daffodils in the foreground. A vivid and huge giclée-on-canvas by Harvey John Beth stops people in their tracks: A crop of lavender crocuses catch sunlight in bowls of open petals, as if the flowers themselves produce an inner radiance.
Katy Upson’s twin watercolors of red and yellow daylilies bring bold Cezanne-style strokes to the fore. In an oil by Joan Hewson, two perfect white lilies twine around each other.
A jaunty diversion is offered by Kate Feiffer in her watercolor-and-ink “Coming Together,” as an old woman and old gentleman meet under an arc formed by two trees. In his brash and incandescent style, Washington Ledesma wrought “Tulipa” in glass and enamel, in a field of shiny lavender and aqua tulips. Another unique offering is a grouping of small oil-on-copper flower fields by Nina Gomez Gordon.
Hydrangeas — perhaps our emblematic Island garden flower — are much on display. Charlotte Cole’s “Hydrangeas and Shells” offers exactly that, along with books on a shelf, set before a window with a splendid Chilmark-y view of the sea, concocted from counted cross-stitch, otherwise known as needlepoint. The much beloved Harry Seymour, in his specially honed pastel-scratchboard technique, in “View from the Porch” rendered a beach house couched in dunes, banked in hydrangeas, and gleaming with silver-blue hues in rocking chairs and gingerbread fretwork.
There are more hydrangeas in a textile bas relief by Romilda Pinto titled “Vase with Orquidecs.” Peonies get plenty of attention from the oil-dipped brush of Valentina Estabrook, and from the precociously talented artist from our high school, Jack Yuen, whose “Peonies” are splashed on canvas in shades of purple, azure, orange, and yellow.
The talk of the show was Bill Ellis’s “Pluquet of Flowers”, a hilarious and surprisingly pretty vase of painted faucet heads resembling a bouquet spiking from a silver plumbing part blowtorched into a vase. When asked about his work — “Are you more of an artist nowadays than a plumber?” he laughingly replies, “I’m a plumber. A lazy plumber.” A plumber, it turns out, who spends a lot of time, not so lazily, concocting works of art. And “talk of the show” is no hyperbole. Every conversational duo or cluster included, “Have you seen Billy’s pipes?”
The Flower Show will last through May 27, 12 to 4 daily. You’ll want to attend and buy up every single stunning piece of art your bank account will allow. Also, check out the Featherstone website featherstoneart.org for all upcoming shows, classes, poetry celebrations, plus the Flea Market and Art Fair taking place every Tuesday of the summer.
Up next: The St. Sebastian with Arrows inaugural — kidding, of course!