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Right Here on Paper
Gloucester MA and environs
August 6, 2022 – November 30, 2022
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Matthew Swift Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of works on paper depicting Gloucester, Massachusetts, and environs.
While our focus at Matthew Swift Gallery is not explicitly regional, the physical place of Gloucester MA and its remarkable legacy in the arts has in one way or another influenced the work of most of the gallery’s artists. Many have lived in or adjacent to Gloucester, and others have a significant connection to the place — a friend, a family member, a father’s place of work.
Gloucester’s influence does not always lead an artist to represent the place, but often it does, and with this exhibition, Matthew Swift Gallery is taking time to acknowledge and celebrate the city and region of Gloucester MA and its heritage, past and present, in all the arts — visual, literary, and more. As you would expect if you follow Matthew Swift Gallery, we have curated this exhibition like our others, requiring more than excellence of craft, valuing the revelations of perspectives one step or several away from the most beaten paths, choosing voices uniquely individual even as they describe a communal landscape and continue the communal conversation that is the living history of art, and seeking works of art which shows us something new and something deeper than the superficial beauty of our shared world that we can see for ourselves, unaided.
— an expression of joy without sentimentality, an insight into the meaning, not just the beauty, of our shared world. and These are high standards expressed in words that may be highfalutin; but art which extends into these dimensions at all, even in a modest or subtle way, is a league apart from art which doesn’t, or never aimed to.
past generations: in works in this exhibition and its companion exhibition, Zygmund Jankowski tips his hat to Edward Hopper, several gallery artists at some point in their careers have reprsented Gloucester and its environs while engaged with and practicing Gloucester’s specific stylistic traditions in the visual arts as well as its
the cultural legacies of the region, the United STates, and the within shared on the landscape and its people,with the landscape and its people and with the history of with some clearly within the Modernist traditions of the region, others with voices outside these traditions, but the strongest lines of historical influence in the region.
and sometimes with self-conscious awareness of other artists who have worked in Gloucester recently or long ago.
the influences are primarily the Modernist thread of the regional heritage, which I distinguish from the Continental / Impressionist : Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley, Mark Rothko, Nell Blaine. Gloucester’s literary heritage T. S. Eliot, Charles Olson — is more unequivocally Modernist.
the perspectives of outsiders, valuing the insights of artists who are perpetual outsiders even in their own back yards,
Right Here on Paper features work by Zygmund Jankowski, Erma Wheeler, Albert Alcalay, Winston Boyer, Gabrielle Barzaghi, Charlie Carroll, and Jeffrey Marshall. The Gallery is also very pleased to introduce watercolors by Howard Kline, an artist who resided in Rockport for many years and now resides in Arizona.
Opening one week later on August 13, a companion exhibition Vault Room titled Right Here Not on Paper will include works not on paper depicting Gloucester, Massachusetts, and environs.
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.