The Gallery will host an reception in celebration of the artists participating in both exhibitions on Saturday, August 13, 4–6:30pm.

Selected works in the exhibition are shown below.

Eleven oil paintings and drawings by Gordon Goetemann will be on display. In addition, four new paintings by Eileen Mueller are on display in the Vault Room. Goetemann family members and the artist Eileen Mueller will be present for the reception.

“Gordon Goetemann, Painter, 1933-2016” will be on view daily through December 31, with closures for holidays as noted on the gallery web site.

Trident Gallery joins the Gloucester arts community in mourning the passing of painter Gordon Goetemann on September 29, 2016. A selection of his paintings will be shown at Trident Gallery December 3-31, 2016, with an opening reception on Saturday, December 3, 5-7pm.

The art of Gordon Goetemann embodies a century of the Cape Ann tradition. In 1954 he became the student of Umberto Romano (1905–1982) at his school of art in the seminal Gallery-on-the-Moors in East Gloucester, built in 1916. During a career of teaching at universities in Minnesota, Goetemann would return to Gloucester each summer, and he settled here permanently in 1998. An intellectual and spiritual artist, an admired teacher, and an influential advocate for the arts in Gloucester, he became a figurehead of the Rocky Neck Art Colony, residing with his wife, artist Judith Steele Goetemann, above their adjacent galleries.

His paintings and drawings of the scenery of Cape Ann capture a sense of mystery and wonder, and suggest a transcendent, spiritual dimension to the experience of landscape.

Simultaneously in the Vault Room, Trident Gallery is very pleased to present four new paintings by Eileen Mueller, who in the tradition of Romano and Goetemann avidly and intelligently pursues a visual language for evolving responses to our natural environment.

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.

Mueller has lived and painted on Cape Ann for more than twenty-five years: she has inhabited its places of beauty, discovered its enclaves, studied its legendary light, and found creative sustenance as a devoted and valued member of its cultural institutions. The native muses of stone and sea, the landscape and its people, provide her subject matter; and native muses inspire her painting style.

The exhibition Muses reveals the consequences of a turning point in Mueller’s work when, five years ago, restless, she began to shed the prevailing idioms of Cape Ann painting, liberating passion and talent for expressiveness and abstraction. Her recent work enlarges the legacies of the region’s modernist stars: in her new paintings are the monumental forms of Marsden Hartley, the abstract energy of Nell Blaine, the astonishing freedom of Zygmund Jankowski’s brush, and the glowing details of contemporary impressionism, all expounded with a balanced intimacy of contact between perceiving subject and perceived object which is uniquely her own.

Mueller has studied at deCordova Museum, Montserrat College of Art, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her paintings have been shown widely in New England and New York and have been collected by the Cape Ann Museum and other prestigious institutions. She is a Copley Artist in the Copley Society of Art and a member of the North Shore Arts Association.

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.

“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.