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.

Trident Gallery is pleased to present a series of new paintings by Patti Sullivan, one of Gloucester’s great expressionist and colorist landscape artists. Sullivan’s series of paintings of cormorants along Gloucester’s Back Shore in 2013 represented a significant development in her work. Influenced by recent travel in Alaska, she endowed the familiar scene with a haunting remoteness. The paintings show a rugged, elemental landscape at the boundary of our world, where land meets sea and humans meet animals as foreigners.

During the past year, Sullivan has continued her exploration of this coastline with a series of paintings of a particular large rock not far offshore. Though continuity with the earlier series is evident, especially in the large painting Solstice (2013), and in the enchantment of Sullivan’s rich colors and varied surface textures, the differences are striking.

The powerful, eclipsed, and angular compositions of 2013 have given way to symmetries. Ruggedness has softened into simpler, more abstract forms. The cormorants have receded, and with them the sense of an alien world. Bold gestures in the paint which belonged to the rocks, sea, and sky in 2013 now seem to belong to the artist. Earth tones have become shining bright colors which recall Sullivan’s paintings of Cuba and the Dominican Republic, showing a human and social world of city architecture and people. The new series celebrates personal encounters with landscape and joy in nature’s many-splendored variation.

This exhibition will show the 2013 series together with the 2015 series, each vitalizing and contextualizing the other and suggesting new directions of visual discovery to the imaginative viewer.

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.

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.