Meet artist Mitch Gordon and see his latest work at Turpentine Gallery in West Tisbury. —Dena Porter 
Artist Mitch Gordon, painting one of his many panels of a calm water scene. —Dena Porter 
A portion of Mitch Gordon’s oil on canvas panels from the “36 Meditations Kayak Dreams at Sea Level, Poge Pond.” —Dena Porter 
Artist Mitch Gordon, assembling an array of his oil on canvas panels at Turpentine Gallery. —Dena Porter 
Painter Mitch Gordon displays some of his artwork on the exterior of his gallery in West Tisbury. —Dena Porter 
Mitch Gordon’s sculptures flank his latest work “36 Meditations, Kayak Dreams at Sea Level, Poge Pond.” —Dena Porter
The Turpentine Gallery, nestled just a bit off State Road in West Tisbury, exudes a welcoming warmth. With large paintings displayed inside and out, and sculptures dotting the grounds, it’s an enticing blend of art and land, quintessential to the Vineyard.
The beautifully hewn, exposed-wood gallery is the brainchild of artist Mitch Gordon: “I first came here from Boston in 1980 to be an artist, because I’d heard there was an island with clay cliffs. I quickly realized the clay was not for digging out to make pottery. Within the first week, I met a guy who was managing Kennedy Studios in Edgartown. I dove into being a Vineyard landscape watercolor artist.”
After some time back in Boston, in art school and then as a successful artist at the Tepper Takayama gallery, he returned to the Island in 1988. He worked as a contractor, designing and building houses. But after a serious health scare, Gordon decided to follow his dream and devote himself to being a full-time artist.
Gordon opened Turpentine in 2021, and says, “It’s been growing as I’ve been developing. Now I’m 65, and I’m just getting started. It’s a wonderful place to be. Every day you’re excited to chase your dreams, get up in the morning, and make that painting and beautiful sculptures, which were my original passion.”
The sculptures have an intuitive quality. Gordon works with large pieces of driftwood, allowing their natural surfaces to create textures that invite us to run our hands over them. He crafts metal and stone into, around, and between the wood, to create a dance between nature and human-made materials. Gordon says, “I’m influenced by Japanese sculptors who take the spirit of living stone and wood, meaning they are unworked or minimally worked. This means the spirit of the stone ‘speaks,’ and the wood does the ‘talking.’”
Gordon’s landscape paintings are transportive in both their scale and subject matter. There is a Zen-like quality to “36 Meditations: Kayak Dreams at Sea Level.” The paintings, read from left to right in three rows, draw on his years kayaking the waters around the Vineyard, and the deep serenity and peace found in the wild sea along this ribbon of land. Taken together, the separate panels tell a symphonic story as we drift through time across the seascape. Depicted from the perspective of being on the water, looking back at the shoreline, we seem to drift peacefully along. Standing before the installation, a meditative, spiritual sensibility washes over us. Gordon notes, “I get this feeling when I’m in the open ocean in a kayak because I’m a very small thing connected to a much larger universe. When I’m on land, it’s busy, and I lose that connection to the rest of the world.
“I dove into painting because it was a much larger challenge than sculpture. It comes from a very different place. It’s a much slower process than sculpting, which is much more intuitive and playful. The roots of my painting are a very deep thought process.” The works are inspired by Mark Rothko, a color-field artist of the 1940s and ‘50s who painted in an abstract style defined by large, flat expanses of solid color across giant canvases. Look at Gordon’s artwork long enough, and swathes of color emerge in the sky and water. Gordon says, “I feel that with Rothko, people generate the emotion in his pieces. They are filled with these big, calm, sacred spaces where you can feel safe letting your emotions go. I use the land as rhythm, but you can dive into the big, quiet areas of color and let your own emotions fall into a space evoked by the sky, Vineyard, and light we have here.”
Gordon adds, “At this time in history, and in my own place in life, I want to create a space that is peaceful and evokes nature, so that when we step away from the news, we have everything we need around us. Thus, I’m hoping that when I’m working on the paintings, they evoke that in the viewers.”
The current Turpentine Gallery exhibition runs through Oct. 12 at 554 State Road, West Tisbury. For more information, visit turpentinegallery.art, contact mitch@turpentinegallery.art, or call 508-693-5963.
