Christie Scheele

Whether she is painting in oil, pastel, or mixed media, Christie Scheele’s message is carried on atmospheric elements of light, air, and moisture. By softening her images’ shapes and lush colors behind a silky veil, viewers are free to gather their own message or simply a stirring—perhaps a forgotten memory or dream.

In Scheele’s eyes, the more minimalist her artwork, the more evocative it is. “I prefer the shape to be simpler, so the eye doesn’t get snagged on too many things, including brushstrokes,” she says. Images of big sky and water—pools, marshes, tidal rivers—abound in her work, much of it inspired by our area.

Scheele, a resident of New York’s Catskills, began coming to the Cape at age eight. Today she spends large chunks of every summer here with her husband, usually staying in Brewster and sometimes accompanied by their college-age twins. She finds many happy moments in places like the Brewster tidal flats or Paines Creek marsh, camera in hand, capturing settings for her studio work. She loves stepping back from the ocean into quieter areas and stiller waters. “The way the sky reflects on a tidal pool is completely different from way it reflects on the ocean,” she says.

The effect is mesmerizing. Wide swathes of color as weightless as clouds float across Extravagant Sky. Scheele is fascinated by how the eye travels across art. In Two Trees, a color field painting composed of a bit of shore, a couple of spare trees, and a water hole reflecting the sky, the eye first goes to the water hole or the trees, then circles around to masses of color. Her multi-panel works, such as the three-piece Exuberant Wave, are opportunities for her to increase the effect. She almost never paints foreground, relying on “simplicity of shape,” to carry her message. “In abstract painting, it’s all on the surface,” she says.

After Scheele “kind of tumbled” into landscape painting in the early 1990s, she quickly developed her visual voice. “I had no rules about what I was supposed to do,” she says. She found she loved reducing the details in landscape paintings to shapes of minimalist luminescence. As Scheele says, “My nature is to get blissed out when I’m outside.”

Christie Scheele’s art may be seen at both locations of the Julie Heller Gallery, 2 Gosnold Street and 465 Commercial Street in Provincetown (juliehellergallery.com) and at christiescheele.com. The gallery is hosting the group show “Three Visions,” featuring Scheele with artists Jenny Nelson and Polly M. Law, at the Anchor Inn in Provincetown, through September 16. An opening reception is being held on July 28. Scheele is teaching a landscape painting workshop July 30-August 2 at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.

Sarah Slavick

Sarah Slavick’s abstract art explores some of the most basic elements of the body’s interior—DNA, blood, veins—and their societal implications—birth, family, disease, recovery. Expressing such complex concepts in a minimalist framework is no easy feat, but Slavick has spent her full artistic career doing just that.

Slavick loves polarities and other puzzles. “I’m interested in duality,” she says. Her nature is not to prescribe messages for viewers to take away from her artwork, but to encourage them to travel their own interior paths. “I look for broad interpretation,” she says. “I don’t want my work to have singular meanings.”

That may be how she manages to turn out paintings that are raw and intense, but also lyrical and joyful. Her “Phylum Series” is comprised of works with deeply colored patterns that are almost a system of shapes—beautiful, complex, organic. Some of the pieces have dizzying numbers of wooden panels of varying sizes and depths. “I was referencing nature visually and conceptually,” Slavick says. She quickly settled on her key theme for the series, mostly oils on wood: phylum is the primary subdivision of a taxonomic kingdom. “I was thinking how we categorize nature and control it,” she says.

A resident of Jamaica Plain, Slavick travels with her husband and their teenage son every summer to Provincetown. She also visits the Cape-tip town with her students from the Art Institute of Boston at Leslie University, where she is a professor of painting and drawing. She grew up in a large family, and several of her sisters are artists as well. The siblings assembled the exhibit “Flesh and Blood,” which touched on genealogy and the body and traveled to points including Carnegie Mellon University, Florida, and Hong Kong.

Her current work is in the “Phylum” vein: paintings composed of hundreds of pieces of wood in varying shapes and sizes. Slavick sees it as a journey to understand how separate entities are linked with their “surrounding neighbors and how they change by becoming something greater than themselves.”

Change is in the air for Slavick; for one, her materials are more refined. “I use this teeny little paintbrush now, close up to canvas,” she says. “I can’t tell you why that happens.” Her color sensibility is changing as well. “I think it’s more optimistic in certain ways,” she says. Where she will be with art in 10 years is anybody’s guess—10 years ago, she says, she had no inkling that she would be where she is today.

Sarah Slavick’s work may be seen at Tao Water Gallery at 352 Commercial Street in Provincetown (taowatergallery.com); at sarahslavick.com; and at the Ellen Miller Gallery at 38 Newbury Street in Boston.

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Kathryn Lee Smith

If anyone is living their art, it is Provincetown printmaker Kathryn Lee Smith. Smith was barely out of baby shoes when her maternal grandmother, the late Ferol Sibley Warthen, started exposing Smith to the art of white line printmaking. Warthen, a painter and printmaker, had learned the technique from the renowned painter and printmaker, Blanche Lazzell. “She got hooked and started making prints,” Smith says. “I was fortunate to have my grandmother take me under her wing.” In the summer of 1981, Smith spent the season with Warthen, learning from a master.

Today, Smith lives in Provincetown, the home of the famed Provincetown Printmakers, where her life centers on a powerful fusion of art expression: creating prodigiously, teaching, and lecturing, at such institutions as the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Her first woodblock prints tended to be representational; her later works still have an organic feel but are more abstract. “Ancestor Series,” such as Dawn #3, are both primitive and modern, with a range of rich color infusing each print with its own life force. “The ‘Ancestors’ were a vision,” Smith says. “They build as they go along, with each one informing the next.” Subjects, she says, draw on one fleeting moment snatched from the past, whether that moment is conveyed as a representational image or an abstraction.

Smith’s technique is very physical; as she manipulates color, she pulls each print, with the work constantly informing her theme. Large prints, such as Provincetown Daylilies, are challenging, she says. “You’re continually moving the paper, lifting,” she says. “You sort of hold your breath.” Because every print has a full color range and she can change the colors in every successive print, or not, each print is unique. Provincetown Daylilies is a delicate floral print of butter-yellow and green against a flat background.

The summer she reconnected with her grandmother and refined her printmaking was life changing. As Smith says, “It gave me the pathway of my life’s work.” She is embarking on new themes, but they are still in vision form.  “I’m on the cusp of a new body of work,” Smith remarks. “I can’t say exactly what it is. I don’t know yet. I have ideas floating in my head, as always.”

Kathryn Smith’s work may be seen at Gallery Ehva at 74 Shank Painter Road in Provincetown (galleryehva.com); Crowell’s Fine Art (crowellsfineart.com); and Fine Framing in New Bedford; and at kathrynleesmithwhitelineprints.com. Her work is showing through Aug. 26 at the Cape Cod Museum of Art exhibit, “Tides of Provincetown.”

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Ovid Osborn Ward

Ovid Ward’s paintings jostle all the senses: the smack of a catboat hitting the saltwater in Racing Off Chappy, the skin-prickling chill of Winter on Cape Cod, the salty smell in Clear Morning Air. In Ward’s art, you are there: on the waterfront, walking the snowy field, riding the hulking ferry. “I like the paintings to tell a little story,” Ward says, “a glimpse of time.”

The artist’s impeccable execution places the viewer square in the center of the scene; not by way of photo realism, but by a looser method that engages a deeper part of the interior mind. “I think of my work as slightly less real than photorealism,” Ward says. “You can see brushstrokes, and not all areas are tight. It’s a little more painterly.”

The pristine technique is no surprise. Ward designed cars for Chrysler for many years and then boats for Hatteras Yachts. In between he painted a “vision”— an artistic plan—of the waterfront in Oakland, California. Now he is in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard, where he has lived for 40 years, photographing his subjects and returning to his studio to paint. It’s a simple island life, what he had always wanted. “I’m not the richest person in the world,” Ward says, “but it’s okay.”

Back in the studio, Ward draws a grid on a board and the photo to get correct proportion before applying paint. He paints exclusively with acrylic on board. “It dries quickly and cleanup is easy,” he says. The board gives him freedom to compose his paintings and introduces a rigorous physical aspect to his work. “Sometimes I might whack a part of the board off to change the center of focus,” he says. “Canvas seems so delicate and fragile.”

He loves action, movement, and weather that can knock a person to the ground. One painting, Sunrise on South Beach, is a taste of the way the oceanfront weather can turn on a dime: “I like the darkness of it,” Ward says. “I wanted to get the violence of the weather.” The physicality of his paintings is often cut with a calming nature. Cat Nap, a lonely scene of a gaff-rigged day sailor, is draped in a purplish-blue autumn sky, the boat reflected in the still surface. Water, in fact, is somewhat of an artistic bar Ward reaches for, what it all boils down to. “It’s the water,” he says. “I try really hard to be good at water.”

Ovid Ward’s work may be seen at North Water Gallery, located at 27 North Water Street, in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard (northwatergallery.com); The Hearle Gallery at 488 Main Street in Chatham (thehearlegallery.com); and at ovidward.com. His work is also shown at A to Z Gallery in Wellesley (azfineartgallery.com).

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Cammie Watson

Truro artist Cammie Watson is from a long and storied line of artists, but her surreal ability to create sumptuous color palettes and use them in compositions is uniquely hers. Watson’s oil paintings—such as Brush Hollow, Little Pamet House, and a new work, Pamet Harbor—tap into an intuitive sense of self.

While she also works in watercolor, collage, pen and ink, and sumi-e (a Chinese and Japanese art form in which she lays shades of black ink on white washi paper), oils seem to give Watson the most freedom of color, not a small thing for her. “Color is extraordinarily important to me,” she says. “Colors remind me of the taste of food. They’re very luscious.”

Watson achieves this lusciousness by starting with an under painting of reds and yellows. “For the final painting, I paint over that, so some of the under paint shows through,” she says. “It gives warmth to the painting. It also allows something to happen without me doing it.” After the rigors of starting a painting, she steps back and lets another force take over. (She says she owes her sense of color mixing to a three-year apprenticeship in Germany with a puppet-maker.)

Watson grew up in a family of artists, writers, and illustrators. Her grandparents, Ernest and Eva Watson, were pioneers in color-block-printmaking. She and her siblings traveled with their parents from Vermont to Truro every summer. That experience and her unique perception of the Outer Cape allow Watson to capture its boats, barns, fields, big sky, and blue ocean. Brush Hollow, with its earthy colors and soft contours, has particular meaning for her: she recalls riding horses through blueberry bushes and beach roses to reach that special place on the Truro beach.

Watson, who lives in Truro with her two school-aged children and teaches at Truro Center of the Arts at Castle Hill, has won accolades from Kirkus Reviews, the Society of Illustrators, and others. She holds it all in perspective, especially regarding her children. “The children are a work of art, just as much as a painting,” she says. “They’re a work of art themselves, but much more beautiful. Watching a child develop is sort of my philosophy about my art. I like putting stuff down and watching it grow, not imposing myself too much. It’s a lot like looking at another person.”

Cammie Watson’s work may be seen at Addison Art Gallery, located at 43 Route 28 in Orleans (addisonart.com), and at cammiewatson.com. The Addison Art Gallery hosts a show of Watson’s work on July 6, 5-7 p.m., at Watson’s home studio, located at 6 Swale Way in Truro. The Addison Art Gallery is also presenting a demonstration, “Behind the Oil Painting with Cammie Watson,” on August 18 from 3:30-5 p.m.

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Wendy Weldon

Wendy Weldon’s large, color-laden canvases of structural shapes seem, at first, to have little tie to the wee birds she paints on cigar boxes. But the two styles have uncanny commonalities: both were her subjects when she decided, as an abstract expressionist, to learn to draw, and both types of subject matter have continued to garner audiences through the decades.

A resident of Martha’s Vineyard for many years, Weldon first studied abstract art at Bard College in the 1960s. “It was cool in the sixties to be an abstract expressionist,” she says. Eventually, living in Vermont, she had a yen to learn to draw. “So I started drawing barns,” she says. Then the birds captured her, becoming another way to refine her pen-and-ink technique.

Although she also produces monotypes, Weldon is probably best known for her large-scale, color-field paintings of structured objects—boxy barn designs, rocks, and doors. She says the massive canvases (some are almost five or six feet in dimension) most represent who she is. “I’m the most vocal on the big abstracts,” she says. “They capture more of who I am.”

The setting she used so prolifically to practice drawing—the barn—continues to hold her. “I’m still reconstructing the barn image I’ve done through the years, seeing what’s going on in it,” she says. They are symbolic too, of course—it is what the structure holds, its essence, which fascinates her. One of them, a mossy green barn with a red door—the inspiration for many of her barn paintings—may look familiar to Vineyarders: the painting is based on the Keith Farm barn, on Middle Road in Chilmark.

Look no further that the wide-open plains and fields of Indiana for Weldon’s affection for barns. She grew up on a farm in that bucolic state and spent plenty of time feeding animals and checking on her horse. She began coming to the Vineyard as a child in the 1950s and charts her prolific years as an artist by the decade. “When you change it up, it can be complex,” she says. “I don’t want to get formulaic.” For Weldon, the basic goal is innate: keep reaching for the voice.

Wendy Weldon’s art may be seen at North Water Gallery at 27 North Water Street in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard (northwatergallery.com) and at wendyweldon.com. She is holding an open studio on Sept. 8-9 at her home in Chilmark from 10am to 4pm as a benefit for Featherstone Center for the Arts (featherstonearts.org).

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