Now in its eighth year, the annual abstract show, “Poetry of Abstraction,” at Vineyard Haven’s Louisa Gould Gallery spotlights eight artists in a broad-ranging exhibit that runs through Thursday, Sept. 17. Curated by summer resident Roberta Gross, the show masterfully explores the capacity of artists to communicate conceptually through abstract aspects of color, form, and medium.
Participating for the first time this year are Martha Mae Jones, Jennifer Ellwood, and Michaele Christian. Ms. Jones, a Vineyard summer resident, works with fabric on canvas to create quiltlike effects. In “Imagine” and “Near the Horizon,” she patterns fabric into horizontal bars, and each of her six colorful canvases provides an illusion of depth that celebrates both the fabric and design of the work. Boston-based and a practicing psychotherapist, Ms. Ellwood creates large oil paintings like “Ocean Beach,” with its large, richly blue sweep of sea and muscular rocks in the foreground. In “Abstract Seascape 98,” a small daub of red orders an angled stretch of water in intense blues. It is reminiscent of how another bit of red is used in a painting in “Mr. Turner,” the biopic of English artist J.M.J. Turner in current release. Ms. Christian, a D.C.-based summer resident and retired oncologist, applies ink to paper in her five works on display. “Reflections” and “Seeing Red” both use red to establish the structure of the compositions presented. Yellow is the powerful element that gives movement to “Transitions.”
Work from Islander Genevieve Jacobs is also on display, including a series of four mixed-media images with the muted colors of geometric and marine formations in “Atoll,” “Convergence,” “Fracture Line,” and “Soundings.” She has also created four monotypes from mixed-media images, “Lunaria” I through IV. Her work there evokes lyrical color and form in translucent, leaflike green shapes outlined in black. Joan Konkel explores multi-textured, three-dimensional effects in “Salicia’s Garden,” a large work on canvas, where mesh, acrylic paint, and aluminum line up.
Vineyard resident Pamela Flam paints with cotton that has been botanically dyed and is stitched onto linen. Inspired by Japanese boro (mended and patched textiles) and the mark-making of Agnes Martin, her palette contains muted earth tones. Her work reacts against the monotony of commercially dyed and printed fabrics. West Tisbury resident Laura Roosevelt has long displayed her work in the gallery’s annual abstract shows. In recent years she has used digital photography to explore the abstract patterns water bodies create, sometimes reflecting boats, pilings, docks, and buildings in rich colors or zebralike blacks and whites.
Last but not least, Ms. Gross, who lives in Philadelphia and summers on-Island, is working this year in oil-based monotypes that have been mounted on wood panels painted and mixed with sand and glass beads. She then collages them with gilded paper or painted and distressed Tyvek, a spunbonded olefin fiber often seen on the walls of houses under construction, but used in many other ways. The effect of these mixed-media works is richly varied and dimensional.
A retrospective exhibition of the watercolors and mixed-media of Gretchen Feldman opens at the gallery on Thursday, Sept. 3, with a reception and live music planned for Saturday, Sept. 5, from 5 to 7 pm.
“The Poetry of Abstraction,” through Thursday, September 17, Louisa Gould Gallery, 54 Main St., Vineyard Haven. For information, see louisagould.com.