To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

Ecclesiastes 3:1

Trident Gallery’s summer group exhibition offers more than fifty paintings, drawings, photographs, and mixed media works in the genre of landscape—interpreted, here in Gloucester, to include vistas of the coast and sea.

Gallery Director Matthew Swift has chosen the art to represent a diversity of artistic approaches to landscape, from luminism to abstraction, in order to reveal something about the genre as practiced today, and to reveal through contrast the diversity of aesthetic dimensions beyond the real, in which artists create meaning and beauty beyond the satisfactions of representation.

Beyond Real includes major, large scale works by Peter Lyons, Susan Erony, Ed Touchette, Zygmund Jankowski, and Gabrielle Barzaghi. It is also the east coast debut of Winston Boyer‘s Ocean Series of large scale photographs of sea horizons, works of art in dialogue with the paintings of past Gloucester summer visitor Mark Rothko. Exceptional older works by Albert Alcalay, Nell Blaine, and Roger Martin, and selected recent works by Eileen Mueller, Ruth Mordecai, Pamela Ellis Hawkes, Patti Sullivan, Lynn Swigart, Joe Poirier, Dennis Flavin, and Charlie Carroll complete the exhibition.

A full catalog with artists’ statements and critical commentary is available online and in the gallery.

Trident Gallery is pleased to present Harbortown 2014, an exhibition celebrating Gloucester Harbor and the area’s legacy of more than 150 years of excellence in the visual arts.

Harbortown 2014 proudly displays works of art by eighteen Cape Ann artists, including four guest artists, and introduces Gloucester artist Ed Touchette, now represented by Trident Gallery.  Complementing the exhibition, specially selected additional works of art by these artists will be available to view in the gallery on request.

“I want this exhibition to invite us to look at Gloucester, the city which grew up around a harbor on this rocky extremity of Massachusetts,” says Gallery Director Matthew Swift.  “Gloucester has been a port city for four centuries.  Recently, downtown embraced a new name for itself, Harbortown, when it received state recognition as a cultural district.  What does this say about who we are today?”

“Living by the sea in Gloucester, we see horizons, grand perspectives that offer more than can be understood, giving us a way — a salty, tempestuous way — to think about the twin horizons of the past and the future.  We came from the sea long ago, most of us as immigrants, all of us much earlier as walking fish; and in another few centuries, our city at the edge of the continent may be back under the sea.”

This exhibition is about these ideas and others — it is about what some of today’s artists here are thinking about and saying.”

Gloucester Harbor is America’s oldest seaport.

Trident Gallery is located in the heart of downtown Gloucester and the Harbortown Cultural District.

Trident Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of figure paintings and drawings by Dennis Flavin. New and recent works on canvas and paper are displayed with earlier paintings illuminating Flavin’s path from realism to abstraction into the uninhibited and confident expressive style which has earned him notice and acclaim.

After training at Vesper George School of Art and the Gloucester Academy of Fine Art, Flavin painted on Cape Ann for nearly four decades before his first public exhibition in 2012, which resulted in immediate attention from curators: a solo exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum followed in 2013, and subsequently his work has been shown at Trident Gallery.

In Flavin’s best work from the 1980s and 1990s, strong colors and forms, gauzy layers, and nightmarish distortions threaten to subdue realism. Flavin experienced a breakthrough in 2007 when he began to paint “completely from [his] mind, not looking at anything other than [his] canvas.” The freedom was exhilarating, and making art became an increasingly intense experience. In this creative trance, Flavin and his creation mutually transform each other. Neither has independence, and there is no intermediating scene between the artist’s creative engagement with memory, composition, color, and form, and his sensory engagement with the art surface. “When you paint,” says Flavin, “you have to have emotional feeling, you have to take risks, … you can’t hold back.”

The new direction led Flavin at first into purely abstract paintings and then toward figure paintings possessing an exalted energy and expressiveness which his foray into abstraction seems to have uncorked.

The signature of Flavin’s evolving style is a riotous abundance of color, which creates meaning and honors the subject by attesting with nuanced craftsmanship to its inner complexity. Likewise, there is more than sensual richness in Flavin’s thickly layered oil and pastel medium, which corresponds to a history of evolving versions of the figure, layers of experience that have built up a unique personality and work of art.

“The cycle of seasons is deeply imprinted in human consciousness; it matters to everyone and has meaning for all. The idea behind Winter Meditations is to remind ourselves how engaging with art deepens our experience of life by drawing forth our own creativity. Good art has the power to enlarge our views, develop our sensibilities, and fuel our spiritual journeys, but viewing art becomes a dry exercise if we lose touch with the experience of art as a creative act itself. I want to mount an exhibition which emphasizes the pleasure and creativity in the viewer’s experience of art, rather than the goal of grasping the artist’s unique gifts and vision, which though important can distract us from the reasons we value the hard work of artists so highly in the first place; the reasons we choose to bring art into our homes, schools, and workplaces; the deep, human reasons why stories, images, movement, and music matter.”

— Matthew Swift, Director

From Friday, January 24th, through Sunday, March 2nd, Trident Gallery is proud to host a loan from the Massachusetts Audubon Museum of American Bird Art of more than thirty prints, paintings, and miniature sculptures by the renowned and important artists John James Audubon, Milton Avery, Andy Warhol, Allen James King, Robert Verity Clem, Lars Jonsson, and others. All the works of art depict bird species present on Cape Ann in winter, and their exhibition constitutes a new extension to the Cape Ann Winter Birding Weekend (Friday–Sunday, 31 January – 2 February) a festival which celebrates the winter bird life of Cape Ann, especially those Arctic species rarely encountered farther south. Sponsored by Mass Audubon and the Cape Ann Chamber of Commerce, the event draws several hundred participants to hear expert presentations and embark on bus tours and a boat trip to see the birds. A birding guide for the event in past years, Director Swift has this year orchestrated the festival’s new art component at Trident Gallery.

Works of art by Gabrielle Barzaghi, Winston Boyer, Charlie Carroll, Susan Erony, Dennis Flavin, Eileen Mueller, Joe Poirier, and Lynn Swigart will be on display during the entirety of Winter Meditations. In the final phase, Persephone’s Return, additional works of art by these and other Trident Gallery artists will take the place of the departing Mass Audubon winter bird art.

First come, first served. Bring your intellectual appetite, moral cravings, and spiritual hunger, and find satisfaction in art, which may be taken home immediately to nourish families, invigorate infants, and revitalize the elderly. Art is wholesome and recommended for all living, loving beings.

Trident Gallery’s inaugural exhibition shows the work of twelve artists representing the excellence and variety of contemporary fine art on Cape Ann.

Gallery Director Dr. Matthew Swift has assembled 39 works of art that explore ideas of “home,” a theme he will examine in programmed discussions, gallery conversations, and written materials.

• Home is a point of departure and a place of return.
• Home is the place of one’s dwelling or nurturing — Gloucester, Cape Ann, the United States, the planet Earth.
• Home is the seat of one’s domestic life and overlapping communities; it is a place of safety and comfort.
• Home is a target, the destination of a creative mind striving to think, to forge meaning, to provoke, to pay homage, to become beautiful.