The one constant if you are a plein air painter is that nature is constantly changing. That is both the excitement and challenge of the approach. There is nothing like creating art in the elements — feeling the temperature on your hands as you hold a brush, the moisture or lack thereof affecting your paints, and the wind that might be blowing your canvas. And then there is what outdoor artists call “chasing the light.” As the sun shifts, whether there are clouds or not, shadows move, and colors change, which requires the artist to improvise and try new things.
Alex Elvin knows all about this, favoring everyday subjects in outdoor settings. You can see his paintings at “Seasons on the Vineyard” in the Feldman Family Artspace at the M.V. Film Center, curated by the Featherstone Center for the Arts.
Although a West Tisbury resident, Elvin sees potential compositions all over the Island, and throughout the seasons. While he depicts all four times of the year, he prefers a muted palette rather than bright sunshine, allowing for subtleties in hues: “I like the grayed-down colors of cloudy days.”
Elvin, who has been drawing for a long time, and is a landscape photographer, only came to oils during the pandemic. “I love the plein air tradition. It’s great standing outside and painting for a while. You can connect to your environment. And people come by and say hi.”
Elvin began by reading books and watching videos: “You learn along the way. A lot of trial and error.” He is always looking for interesting compositions. We see this in the first work in the show, “Clarence A. Barnes II Moving & Storage.” Standing across State Road, we see a line of trucks in front of “Trip” Barnes’ green-housed business. The single red truck picks up the red Vineyard Grocer barn-shaped building set back slightly to the left. It is a quintessential Vineyard Haven moment as you head into or out of town. “I drive by this every day for work. I set up my easel on the other side of the stone wall in the cemetery and painted it over three days in August and September. Four hours on the first day. Two hours on the subsequent days. I don’t take photographs, or tend to work in the studio.”
“I try to be true to the conditions of the day,” Elvin says. “But they will change, so it’s important to stick with what inspired you in the first place.” His loose brushwork in the sunlit scene of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission parking lot reflects the transitory nature of the shadows as the sun crosses the sky. “Drawing comes in because you want to get the values — the dark and light — correct.”
Elvin likes experimenting with different approaches as part of his learning process. In “Owen Park,” he laid down monotone underpainting the first day, and came back and added color: “Every painting, you learn something new. This one built up, which gives it more depth.”
Sometimes Elvin conflates time. He depicts the brown bovines in “Circling Cows” in a circle, but, in fact, they were at different parts of the field as the day progressed, thus resulting in a sort of time-lapse image.
Elvin’s expressive brushwork alludes to objects, such as the sand and rocks in the wintery waterscape of “Moshup Beach,” or the small, lapping waves in “Lucy Vincent Beach (Shoreline).” He says, “Learning how to apply paint to a surface is something that takes a while. I’m starting to get better at it.”
Elvin says of the Vineyard, where he first started coming in the 1980s and ’90s, “It’s such an interesting place visually. With the distances you see, even though they are not that far away, there is an impression of distance. And the light is always so amazing here.”
He depicts this long perspective in the gently curving, receding roadway in “Beach Road” — the section just after the drawbridge as you approach Vineyard Haven from Oak Bluffs. Interestingly, Elvin creates this sense of great distance, even while painting on a large horizontal canvas. The same sense of distance is evident in his image further along the same road with its line of industrial structures, in “M.V. Shipyard Buildings.”
Elvin is drawn to the ordinary as potential subject matter. He comes in close, looking down at the lower corner of the building in “Garden Shed,” with a small clump of daffodils and his upside-down wheelbarrow and tools lying under a tree to the side: “If you can pull off a good ground painting, it’s satisfying.”
He hopes his art will inspire viewers to appreciate the Vineyard more: “I think there are just many beautiful things in life to appreciate. Sometimes looking at a painting of something like a parking lot or plain house, you can realize there is beauty in that, too, which can change how you see things.”
“Seasons on the Vineyard: Celebrating the Art of Alex Elvin” is on view at the Feldman Family Artspace at the M.V. Film Center through Dec. 1.
