“Quinnipiac River Oyster Boats,” oil on canvas.
Westville’s very first artist-in-residence did right by New York City’s Lower East Side, Hoboken, New Jersey, downtown New Haven and Yale University, and especially Fair Haven’s bridges, boats, and beautiful riverine settings.
Yet Angeles Martinez, who lived in Westville and painted in a studio in Westville for six weeks, didn’t paint any scenes of Westville.
No matter.
Martinez with one of her Lower East Side compositions.
By doing so right by all the other locations, she fulfilled the ambition of Gabriel DaSilva, of DaSilva Gallery in Westville, who brought fellow Uruguayan Martinez over for a month and a half of study and composition.
The resulting show of the work she did in our town and the Tri-State Area comprises 20 warm and intimate images, all small-sized oils on canvas or board, now on view in an exhibition called “Original Contrapunto.”
The show, which will run at the 899 Whalley Ave. gallery through July 11, is the first in an artist-in-residence program that DaSilva is calling “New Haven/New York Through Foreign Eyes.”
Gallery owner and painter in conversation.
In an interview with DaSilva and Martinez (he translated for Martinez, who was visiting at the gallery on her last day in New Haven), DaSilva said he hopes to bring an artist “from abroad” on a regular basis to see what their different eye brings to views of New Haven and the surrounding area.
He said Martinez did not disappoint in showing the difference that a change of location can make. “My personal opinion is if you have been painting Puerto Montevideo [in Uruguay] many years” — as Martinez, a well established and highly trained Uruguyan artist, has — “you pick particular elements. When you come to a place like New Haven, it’s hard to eliminate elements.”
“From Hoboken.”
Which is why DaSilva and this reporter both noticed that Martinez’s views of Hoboken harbor or the fishing boats on the Quinnipiac are much more detailed than her views of Puerto Montevideo, Cabo Polonio, and other locations near San Jose, the town on the Uruguayan coast where Martinez grew up.
“Sunset in Cabo Polonio”
Martinez averred that “I paint New Haven and New York the same as Montevideo and Cabo Polonio. With the same eye.” But she acknowledged some real differences, which have clearly gotten into her compositions. “The major difference is the exuberance of vegetation in the Northeast,” she said.
She pointed to all the trees in her Q River scenes, as opposed to the starkness of the beach settings in the Uruguayan paintings.
The Q River and Tri-State harbor settings also presented Martinez with a lot more detail to get in, all the elements that DaSilva referred to, than she normally copes with at home.
After Martinez arrived, DaSilva said he drove her around to settings that he thought might interest her, based on his prior knowledge of her work. He took her to Fair Haven, Stony Creek, and other nearby watery settings, as well as letting her loose in New York City.
Her technique was to take a point-and-shoot camera, select a landscape, capture it digitally, and then bring it home to the house and studio in Westville that DaSilva had arranged for Martinez in the home of Vanilia Majoros.
There Martinez set to work doing what she described as creating “a painterly translation” of the digital image to the canvas. If people happened to be in the image she was working with, as they were in “Brunch NYC” and “NY Street, Lower East Side,” Martinez regularly eliminated or edited out any facial detail; instead she applied a uniform smudge of paint.
“I’m not interested in the face, but the movement of the person,” she said.
She said she was especially taken with the Quinnipiac River scenes, with their boats and trees and vegetation lines. She could not refrain from the siren call that the Grand Avenue Bridge exercises on, it seems, all artists who see it.
“I like to paint intimate and poetic places,” she said. “A small place that contains everything I need for a painting.”
Yet nobody’s ever done a Grand Avenue Bridge quite like Martinez’s. Small, intimate, and poetic it is, but the bridge is also elevated, rising from the lower left to the upper right of the picture’s frame.
Informed that the bridge does not rise, but swivels, Martinez reminded a reporter of the artist’s job of “translating,” making decisions that are demanded not by the actuality or reality of the view, but of the painting’s requirements.
She shared a story of recently visiting the Museum of Modern Art in New York and noticing in one of the compositions of Matisse — clearly one of her influences for color, along with Cezanne for her volumetric shapes — that the Matisse hands were “manchitas.”
“Paint strokes, only color, smudges,” DaSilva translated.
In the case of “Grand Avenue Bridge,” the bridge line had to rise because of the visual pressure being brought from below by the railing of the promenade, to create, in effect a triangle. The camera gives the document of reality, but I take the photo and change it to what the painting needs.”
“Es una pintura,” she said. “It’s a painting.”