Returning to P-town

I was walking down 23rd street one recent afternoon when someone called out my name. Coming unexpectedly it took me a moment to recognize her. She was a painter from Provincetown, Massachusetts who I had met at my brother’s art gallery. She had spoken to my mother the day before.

A month earlier, I was waiting for the E train and I ran into another painter, John Clayton. We ended up having a smoothie and posting a selfie on Facebook. We met 20 years ago at Herring Cove beach in Provincetown, where I was helping my parents teach their color class.

Provincetown, or P-town as everyone calls it, is a little fishing village on the tip of Cape Cod that turns into a complete carnival during the summer. It’s famous for chic boutiques, art galleries and cross-dressing cabaret shows. In the summer the population swells to 60,000 from 3,000.

It’s also the birthplace of American Impressionism. Artists and writers have been flocking there for almost 100 years. Charles Hawthorne founded the Cape School of Color in 1899. George Bellows, Norman Rockwell, and Edward Hopper all studied at the school.

There is a good reason so many artists are drawn to the place: the light in P-town magically clear, with blue skies above and golden sand below. The simplicity of the setting makes it incredibly straightforward to learn to paint colors. I’ve written about painting on the beach before.

Studying color means visually breaking your perception into planes of color. The top planes reflect the blue sky and the underneath planes the orange of the sand or the grass. Painting outdoors you learn to see in three dimensional space like a sculpture. This is how you learn to paint the symphony of color in nature, or what we call Impressionism.

My parents made Provincetown their summer residence when I was a teenager. They were riveted by the power of color to create atmosphere. Like so many other artists before them, they had been taught drawing and painting in the indoor studios of the Art Students League in New York City.

I studied with the legendary artist Henry Hensche when I was 18 years old. Hensche had moved to P-town in 1919 and studied under Hawthorne. After Hawthorne died, Hensche opened his own school which came to be known as the Cape School of Art.

I had known Hensche for years (he painted my portrait when I was 13), but when I started studying with him I didn’t understand what I was learning. I just tried to get through each day without being yelled at. Students crumbled around me daily. Now, I’m incredibly grateful for the gifts he and others bestowed on me.

I was reminded of Hensche’s lessons during my first West Chelsea open studio a few weeks ago. One visitor told me the technique in my sketches looked familiar. He pulled out his phone to show me some of the pictures he had taken earlier that day at the Whitney. They were photos of work by Edward Hopper.

I was unbelievably flattered and proud. I explained that we had both studied the same method in Provincetown. I told him the history of the Cape School of Color. The light hasn’t changed in the last 116 years and the Cape still draws artists from everywhere in pursuit of those luminous colors.

Next week I will return to P-town to teach my workshop at the Cape School of Art on the beach in Provincetown.

Contributing to the continuing story of this magical place continues to inspire me.