While many artists of earlier generations came to Provincetown to capture its unique light, Ann Purcell arrived 40 years ago with more experiential interests. What she found, it seems, was in some ways as much spiritual as it was physical.
“I see it in the boats in the bay,” Purcell told the Provincetown Advocate in a 1984 interview. “They are suspended in the endless and mystical space.” It was her way of describing one of those hazy, foggy days when the sky and water blend together.
Among Purcell’s paintings on view now at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the metaphysical charge she encountered in this landscape comes through most explicitly in Balthazar’s Gifts. It is one of her “Caravan” series — 10 large abstract works painted here between 1982 and 1985 that make up the current show. Big fleshy crosshatch marks, tinged in a soft glow, fill the canvas behind a gray quarter-circle void at its center. A stick-like cutout, a paintbrush, stands out against this background as does a box, outlined in blue and alive with gold squiggles.
— , The Provincetown Independant
