Beauty calls to both painter Paul Beebe and sculptor Gwen Marcus, whose works are on view at the Louisa Gould Gallery through August 31.
Beebe’s oils capture the gorgeous, distinctive light in his Vineyard coastal scenes and seascapes. He first visited the Island 36 years ago, and was immediately captivated by the natural wonder around him. That experience inspired him to take up painting, first with watercolors, then in oils.
Beebe aims for the feel more than the exact replication of reality: “Wherever I go, I have my sketchpad with me. I’m always looking for an idea for a painting. I might move things around, though, to make it better, which is my ultimate goal.”
“I’m a realistic impressionist,” he says about his style. “I enjoy painting the light that hits things, as opposed to the things themselves. The light is most important because it’s transportive.” We see this transcendental quality in “Sunset at Aquinnah.” The warm hues skip atop the waves rolling in and out along the beach, the foam rising as the water hits the boulders.
At the opposite end of the day is “Morning Light,” with its dominant cool shades of violet, blue, and green. Beebe draws our attention to the central boat with its billowing sail that just catches the warm yellow of the rising sun, anchoring our gaze amid the other boats sitting quietly on their moorings.
We see a similar play of colors in the full sails of the schooner in “Sailing Home.” Beebe notes, “My goal is not to capture a specific boat and every piece of rigging. I find that I enjoy painting things where I just get the feeling of the scene, rather than photorealism.” The painting didn’t originally include the schooner at all. Beebe was initially drawn to the way the late-day sun hit the lighthouse in the distance. “When I was working on the composition, I thought it would be perfect to put a classic schooner in there, so I went through my sketches and photos to find something that would enhance the painting. I really liked the light effect on the water and the clouds. But I decided to throw caution to the wind and put the boat in.”
Beebe places us directly in his quite large painting, “Afternoon Sun at Lighthouse Beach,” which conveys the essence of Edgartown Harbor later in the day. The footsteps in the cooling sand are ours as we make our way down the path toward the Edgartown Lighthouse. Beebe first sketched the scene on the back of an envelope, but knew he wanted to, as he says, “capture it on an epic scale. With Edgartown Harbor, I knew I needed a lot of real estate right off the bat.”
Gwen Marcus celebrates the beauty of the human body. She created her first sculptures at 9, and by 11, had her first exhibition at the National Academy Museum in New York City. Her bronze figures, caught mid-action, pulsate with life, as does the fabric that drapes their forms.
We see this in “The Tempest,” which she has sculpted in various sizes, including eight-foot-high versions. We are drawn to the well-muscled, slender man, head down, leaning into an unseen gale, walking around him to see the figure from all angles. Naked, with drapery around his waist, the cloth flies about amid the storm, constantly moving our eyes about his body. The figure, balanced precariously on one foot, hair streaming back in the storm, is a nod to Shakespeare’s play, but goes beyond it. Marcus says, “He’s very powerful, yet there’s a vulnerability to him. He’s struggling against these forces, but there is a beauty to his resilience under pressure. Everybody has that private tempest inside them that they carry.”
Marcus portrays women in quiet, intimate moments, such as off for the day’s shopping in “Tillie” and “To Market,” or standing in an open robe, stretching upward as though just arising from bed or getting into or out of a shower. The fabrics that cover these women accentuate their forms, endowing the sculptures with vitality and motion. Marcus begins sculpting by looking at a nude model, adding the garment only after it is well-defined. “Otherwise, you lose the sense of the body underneath,” she says. “The drapery is not an embellishment; it is used to enhance the form and increase a sense of drama and the dynamic of movement,” Marcus said in an interview in American Art Collector.
All her works have a narrative quality, inviting us to create our own stories. For instance, what is the long-haired young woman in “The Bather” thinking as she sits on a boulder by the water, one leg extended as if to dip her toe in?
Marcus’ keen vision starts with a live model. In an article in Fine Art Connoisseur, she explains, “The most important reason to use a live model is to stimulate the emotional and visual energy that makes the sculpture live. It is the inner energy that gives a work its true individuality. It is not formed on the surface, but pulled from its inner core, a life force from within.”
Although she starts with an idea of what she wants, Marcus notes that once she begins working, initially sculpting the figure in clay, “The piece will shift. It changes with the model’s energy. It starts to take on its own feeling and breath, and with that comes a different story. I just let it happen. It’s hard to fight it when it’s starting to go into its own space.”
Marcus creates a wax replica of the piece, which is encased in a heat-resistant mold and then melted away. Molten metal is then poured into the cavity. She refines the resulting bronze sculpture, and finally develops the patina by brushing on thin, transparent chemical layers and heating them with a blowtorch, so they adhere and create different colors, adding visual depth to the metal surface.
Once out in the world, the spirit in Marcus’ figures exists beyond their physical form. She says, “Sometimes, when I leave my studio and close the door, I feel like somebody’s in there.”
While their subject matter diverges, Beebe and Marcus share a visceral passion for beauty that creates a powerful show.
“Paul Beebe and Gwen Marcus,” new figurative bronze sculptures, and oil paintings of M.V., on view at the Louisa Gould Gallery through August 31. For more information and to see additional images, visit bit.ly/LGG_BeebeMarcus.