Vineyard Haven artist Lanny McDowell, well known for his avian photography as well as his distinctive paintings, has a new show at a location new to art exhibits: MVTV’s Oak Bluffs offices. MVTV began to devote several of its walls to local art last spring with an exhibit of Lynn Christoffers’ photographs. Mr. McDowell’s show went up in August and has been held over by popular demand through September.
The 13 paintings on exhibit range from his newest work to some that date as far back as 2005. New for 2015 are two acrylic paintings, “Mom’s Summer” and “Gannets (Love Conquers All).” The former is inspired by Mr. McDowell’s late mother Martha Hart Moore — a member of the Harthaven Hart and Moore families — and her late first husband Charles Rathbone. Both were artists who spent time in the fishing village of Concarneau in Brittany, France. Mr. McDowell grew up looking at Mr. Rathbone’s large painting of sailboats in a sardine fleet, and he decided to use it as a base for his own work, “Mom’s Summer.”
“I personalized it,” Mr. McDowell said, “I used the design of all the boats and moonlight, and injected a lot of color.” His square canvas is filled with blue, brown, and russet sails and boats on swatches of bold patches of light and dark blue water. The painting seems influenced by the artist’s work with geometric patterns. Some of Mr. McDowell’s most interesting paintings combine abstract patterns with representational images, as he does in “Reflecting.” Here a grid of orange and purple in the foreground seems superimposed over a stretch of water contained by squares. The viewer is encouraged to wander from the abstract components of the painting to its representational aspects.
“Gannets” is another representational work, unlike a lot of Mr. McDowell’s recent paintings. He describes it as “Wild like a narwhale. Elegant as Grace Kelly. Crazy as a fox.” The two birds depicted have bright blue eyes with their almost touching beaks outlined in black. Their heads rise above a background of abstract formations of water and sky colored in gradations of blue, green and yellow. “Spring Fever,” executed in 2014, is dominated by a powerful, yellow circle with blue and green areas in the center that looks a little like an eyeball and appears in front of an abstracted landscape.
“Painting a porcelain scallop shell at this scale is not to be indulged in lightly,” says the artist about “Asteroid Mystery.” The background of this painting is filled with a grid of squares in alternating patterns of orange, peach, black and brown, while the powerful, almost fanlike image of a scallop shell looms in the center foreground. A small, rectangular and delicately executed landscape hovers below the shell. “The chances of an asteroid coming right to where there is a planet in its path are smaller than many very unlikely events, but look at the surface of the moon and your assessment might alter,” says Mr. McDowell. This painter is a master at mixing the abstract and the figurative, and his work is unlike any other on-Island.
Ann Bassett, vice chair of MVTV’s board of directors, heads the committee in charge of exhibits at the station. “We struggled in the old building [which the station moved from in 2013],” says Ms. Bassett. “It had been a tractor shed. Now we are in a brand-new building with this huge space. It’s a win-win-win situation. Artists are always looking for exhibit spaces. I have been collecting a list of artists interested in exhibiting.”
Lanny McDowell at MVTV, 58 Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road, Oak Bluffs. Exhibit available to view Monday through Friday from 9 am to 5 pm. For additional information on the artist, visit lannymcdowellart.com.