Ann Purcell credits the inspiration of this series to her days in Provincetown. In its landscape and light she found the “mystical, paradoxical space” that her work, at that moment, required. One of her early shows in Provincetown consisted of large acrylic paintings, some overlaid with pieces of canvas, and a series of works on paper, all identified as “Caravans.” The word “caravan,” then and now, evokes exotic travel and the wanderlust that led her to actual adventures up the Amazon and on the high seas. That summer, however, it fit her personal journey as an expressive painter. She was gathering, manipulating and packaging disparate elements as if she were a trader hauling goods along the Silk Road.
Before the 1982 Provincetown sojourn, Purcell had focused on tapestry-like “Playgrounds.” For that series, she scissored “leftovers” of earlier paintings and push-pinned the scraps, fresh “abstractions,” to her studio wall in a revelatory expanse of options. Each fragment, considered a work in its own right, suggested a shape or gesture that could be glued onto grand-scale gessoed and stained canvases. At first, she refused the term “collage” for her “Playgrounds.” She wanted the series taken as “paintings within paintings,” because they used no out-sourced material, only canvas in fragments. Critic Benjamin Forgey rightly credited the pieces’ placement to intuition, seeing the “playgrounds” as both her “process and effect.”
