The dogwoods outside my window are covered with red berries, still scarlet, bright among foliage that has begun turning from green to dark mahogany red. I can see the tips of other leaves colored pink, red, orange-gold, and yellow. Abby and I can hardly step on the lawn it’s so littered with acorns.
I was curious about acorns, something about it meaning a harsh winter or a mild one, so I looked it up. The New York Botanical Garden website said there was no correlation. We are having a mast year, meaning extra-heavy acorn production, which occurs every two to five years. Unfortunately, that means plenty of food for chipmunks, squirrels, mice, and deer, so we are likely to have a lot of ticks come spring. I’ll try to be positive, though, and look up pictures of Christmas decorations and other crafts I can make out of acorns.
Lucy Mitchell, Julia Mitchell Christensen, and John Christensen invited the Island to a show of Rez Williams’ paintings at the Grange Hall last Saturday. Julia announced that Rez didn’t want any formal eulogizing, but we all had much to say among ourselves about the paintings and the painter.
The paintings were beautifully hung, and it was such a pleasure to slowly examine them, many for a second or third time, to be sure they will be imprinted in my mind for whenever I wish to recall them. Every time I look at Rez’s paintings, his mastery and vision thrill me again.
I was surprised at the impact of this roomful of paintings. I had seen many of them before in Rez’s studio. He often spoke about his work needing to be hung in large rooms so someone could step back, then close up again, kind of like what artists do when we are painting them.
Paintings look different in different spaces, anyway. Different light. Different backgrounds. Different furniture in a room. The dark wood of the Grange presented a very different background than the white walls and bright lighting in Rez’s studio.
I stood close to examine details, to wonder about what he had mixed to make a certain color, how he laid one color over another to produce the patterns that described his open woodlands or the ocean’s waves. I looked carefully at the marks where his brush slid across the canvas, and thought of the hand that made them.
I especially liked seeing the self-portraits. Rez painted one every year. They presented a continuum of his physical life and his art life, of similarities and changes, of his artistic preoccupations at the time. Some were hard-edged and dramatic of color, looking straight out from the front of the canvas. Others were softer, with brushstrokes that caressed the edges they described. As a group, they were a reminder of the complicated, funny, thoughtful, incredibly innovative painter and friend he was.
It was also pretty amazing to know almost everyone there. I saw so many people I haven’t seen since my old gallery days in Edgartown, a reminder of the smaller Island I moved to in 1982.
If you have any West Tisbury Town Column suggestions, email Hermine Hull, hermine.hull@gmail.com.
