Looking to the Light with Painter Jonathan McPhillips

In Jonathan McPhillips’ painting Overlook, three sailboats drift over the flat water of an anchorage. They might be Cotuit Skiffs or Beetle Cats, their topsides sky blue, white, and varnished wood. They could be racing, perhaps sometime in late morning, or making their way home from picnics on a island or sandspit. In the mooring field, about seven small motorboats loll tethered to buoys. It feels like any Saturday in July, but this scene takes place in the background of the painting. The foreground depicts the path to reach it, what you would see if you followed the ribbon of powdery white sand that weaves between scrub saplings and bayberry bushes. The pathway inserts the observer directly into the point of view, a narrow opening into the sights of summer beyond. The path is almost overgrown, to the point where you’d walk single file and carefully place one foot in front of the other to avoid catching briars or brushing stray triadic leaves of poison ivy. You’d want to be barefoot. And if you stay with Overlook long enough, you can practically feel that sand between your toes, taste the salt air, and inhale the scents of the shoreline, even as high tide seems to erase it.

Overlook is both representative of McPhillips’ philosophy and an ironic title because one purpose of his work is to call attention to moments that people often overlook. People living on the Cape might take such scenes for granted, pay them little attention. As the artist states when describing another of his paintings, “It is easy to pass by the beauty that sits just yards from the roadway. The...